Some BT clients will seek out local peers, which helps people who are quite near eachother (in the same building, say) while reducing server and inter-building network load.
For free, more or less.
"Hey, boss! I might be able to reduce the load on our server-box by maybe 40% on install day, and keep things from grinding to a halt!"
"Oh, really -- using that BitTorrent crap? Forget it, lackey - we'll just use HTTP like everyone else. After all, the server is on the backbone, so it's not like it matters. The students can just wait if things get bogged down."
"But boss, with BitTorrent, things get faster as more people use it, and it can't grind to a halt."
When the software is EOL'd before the hardware fails, the lifespan is too short. New versions of MS tools have a habit of breaking everything they touch. This stands in stark contrast to the *NIX variants where software tends to work across all versions of the OS, and often across different variants as well.
Please tell this to my home Samba server-box running Gentoo, which will soon need a reinstall because portage has gone too far while I haven't: At this point, either it is horribly confused or I am, or both.
Not that the machine does much: It's just serves files, and does NTP, and every now and then I have some heinous *NIX-y task for it to perform.
That occasional *NIX-y task has meant that I've reinstalled the OS for my home server about 5 times in the past decade, because it was easier to reinstall than fix the dependency (and sometimes architectural and/or hierarchical) hell.
XP? Not a problem. 12 years hence (13 at EOL), the upgrade/maintenance cycle looks like this (worst case): Run Windows Update. Click GUI prompts. Reboot. Rinse, repeat (sometimes quite a few times), done: stuff still works.
And software that works across all versions? Allegedly I can't run 16-bit apps anymore directly on my 64-bit Win7 desktop, but allegedly I can in a (free! supported!) VM, but in actuality I haven't cared because I haven't run a proper 16-bit app in a coon's age: This "problem" has never occurred for me.
Everything else tends to just work, no matter how old it is.
I like Linux (and the *BSDs) quite a lot, and I use them extensively wherever I can. But if the argument is about future-proof compatibility, I've just got to say that they're all losers compared to the current state of Windows culture even if one important element of that culture is dying.
You're wrong: Nobody claims (except you) that stations sell for "cost plus."
That said, in most cases (in the US, at least) gasoline is sold in a very competitive market. Raise prices, and people tend to go to the station down the block instead.
Another direct result of this competition is that gas prices fluctuate on an Edgeworth price cycle.
Overall, we'd be better off getting rid of corn subsidies, period: We (in the US) are quite far from starving, and our farmers generally aren't broke.
After the undeniable fallout from that (which will take a few years to settle), then we can start talking about switchgrass, biodiesel, and/or reducing tariffs on importer sugar cane and derivatives.
When I was a kid, there was a downtown bake shop a half dozen blocks from my house. It had a rear entrance that was open to the public, and one got to walk through the shop area of the bakery as one made their way to the counter and storefront. It was awesome.
One morning, I wandered through there (more as a curious kid than as a paying customer) and asked the guy running the mixer why there were huge sacks of cane sugar on pallets, when we had our very own local refinery that processed beets into sugar less than two miles away.
His response: Cane sugar worked better and tasted better, even if it cost a bit more.
Nowadays, if the place was still around (it has burned twice and did not recover the second time), I'd half-expect to see tubs of HFCS instead.
This was perhaps 25 years ago, a time when a kid could wander into a bake shop and be inquisitive and score a free donut or two just for being friendly, before either Pepsi or Coke listed HFCS on their ingredient list at all.
And the point of this long-winded, get-off-my-lawn anecdote? Cane sugar, AFAICT, rocks. Beet sugar -might- rock. Corn syrup? Fuck corn syrup. And fuck corn-based ethanol.
Corn is useful enough just being corn: It is yummy. And without subsidies, it might even still be primarily a food crop instead of being mostly a chemical base-stock.
Basically you right click the toolbar, select customize, then drag the stop button to the left of the reload button, and viola... separate buttons (yes it's retarded).
More retarded: I've now spent enough time customizing Firefox to simply act more like it used to that there is no conceivable way that I will ever be able to rebuild it from scratch.
Since I got an OG Droid in November of 2009, I've purposefully observed 132,205 non-unique access points just in the course of normal short traveling for work and pleasure, exclusively by car.
Come to think of it, you saw metal next to an appliance where exposed conductors are all over the place inside?????
So? Gravity's pretty good about keeping metal dust from flying around the room. And the grounded metal enclosure is pretty good about dissipating any static charge on such conductive dust.
What's wrong with MBOX? I've been using it with gigabyte-sized folders for over a decade and nothing bad has ---@@@ From MAILER-DAEMON Fri Jul 8 12:08:34 2011
Seriously, though. Even when mbox gets trashed due to disk corruption, it is still every bit as useable as a trashed maildir: Messages get lost, not whole folders...and even then, that's what backups are for (right?).
Or at least, that was my experience over the past many moons. As a static archive (Sent-mail-2012), I can't think of a single thing wrong with mbox. And it's easier to cat to tape than maildir.
Yes, but it's analog. You can drive a CRT at a resolution rather far beyond the maximum physical resolution of the display, and still get more actual detail. (Unless you're going to tell me that a cell of phosphor always illuminates evenly and perfectly, in which case I'll simply call you a liar and we'll have nothing more to discuss.)
For awhile I had a black-and-white SVGA monitor (yes, this is a thing that existed) that I used as second display (yes, back when this was difficult and mostly unheard of) that had no such limitation at all.
More recently, I used to run something ridiculous on a 19" CRT (2550*something with a carefully-tweaked modeline).
My preference, if I am able to achieve it, is for it to be impossible to discern individual pixels: When I look at a computer display I don't want to look at a grid of pixels, I want to look at smoothly-rendered words. A CRT at ridiculous resolution with appropriate font sizes does this nicely.
So you want them to prepare for a thing that they may choose to simply never do.
Have you ever been in a grocery store with the lights off? It's dark. Turn off the HVAC, and it gets mighty uncomfortable in a hurry.
Running compressors and keeping enough lights and climate control going to even make it safe for the public to enter is a huge proposition.
That said: There are stores that make these plans, and have sufficient generating capacity to run and conduct business safely off-grid.
We've got a couple here in my small town that more-or-less just kept running when the power was off last summer for a week after a wind storm, and that was good. And the gas station on the corner brought in a huge genset, and was running in a couple of days, which was convenient.
Meanwhile, it is my direct experience with such disasters that local governments and the Red Cross move very quickly to open shelters where people can stay or get medical care or just get some good food (it's usually awesome food), something yummy to drink, and refresh for a bit.
Having been through some shit before on a few occasions (mostly massive flooding), I can honestly say that I was overwhelmed by the resources that immediately became available to everyone. It was fine.
But who am I to tell people (yes, businesses are owned by people) to make these plans? It seems that the market is working just fine at keeping things running in the face of adversity with profit alone being sufficient incentive: If the store is closed, money stops happening.
Let's just legislate convenience and free ponies while we're at it. After all, more laws always fixes stuff.
There is a sandwich shop downtown that closes for two weeks every summer, just to allow every person there to have some time off. I suppose you'd like to legislate away their ability to do this, too: How dare they stop operating just because they feel like it!
Down here in Ohio, I've also seen incandescent stop lights clogged with snow.
*shrug*
It depends on the snow and the wind and the temperature and the duty-cycle of that particular light bulb.
Meanwhile, contrary to what everyone seems to assume: LEDs can get pretty toasty. This is why pre-packaged bulbs and fixtures tend to be mostly heatsink.
IIRC, they're only still about 40% efficient. This is more than an order of magnitude better than an incandescent, but it still means that substantial heat can be generated with use.
Because, obviously, it's impossible to quickly try different variations of "spin the phone!" vibratory commands, and make sense of them automatically, because there's no way the app would know exactly how the phone is spinning...and then remember the results for the next time. Right?
Except it can, because it's also analyzing the output from camera! It can see where the phone is pointing in response to its commands! And it has a set of accelerometers, a compass, and maybe even a gyroscope to help narrow things down if the feedback from camera itself is somehow insufficient! (Doh.)
Saying it can't work with an Android phone (as long as it can stand on end, which is indeed apparently a rare function) is the same as saying that it can only work with an iPhone 5 on a granite countertop as shown in TFV, and that any other surface must require specific recalibration.... while also saying that it can't work when hand-held (which it does, for many models, as shown in TFV).
The truth is that it is simply far squishier than that: The assumption is, at its very basis, that the direction that the camera is facing is somewhat random. That you can't imagine how it might work does not mean that others haven't already figured it out.
I mean, FFS: It's not like iOS has a specific API call that says "Rotate left, seventy-three degrees." It's just a pocket computer with a vibrator and a camera.
(Google "autostitch" for early incarnations of the technique, with zero feedback, and platform independence, and amazingly good results...considering.)
Fidelity will be crap, both for outside sounds and line-in sounds, compared to any good set of headphones. They will be uncomfortable for long periods, because they need to clamp hard enough to seal out gunfire (else they'd be ineffective).
And don't think too hard about how it might work: Instead, it's more like one microphone per ear. Simple and effective for voice communication on all levels, but not necessarily an audiophile approach. And yes, your spacial perception will be ruined.
That said, I'm not trying to knock the concept: It might do what you want with acceptable tradeoffs.
Myself: I find that when I have distracting noise, playing music (or something on TV that is not stimulating at all) in another room helps. If that's impossible, putting the audio source across the room either beside me or behind me works OK. Headphones, in my experience, don't cut it: They're either too isolated (even the "open air" varieties), or unsuitable to me for music (see above).
This preserves or even enhances my spacial perception (I can hear when someone walks by, even unseen in the next room because the music changes -- the brain is very good at that), while giving me something nonchalant and under my own control to be hearing instead of the seemingly random noise that other people sometimes make.
It doesn't have to be loud.
I also have a very good stereo in front of me at my computer that I use when actively listening to music, or doing editing or whatever, but I can't get any non-musical work done when I've got music playing from those speakers: They make the music entirely too interesting.
It's kind of like the difference between amateur hammering (thwap, tap, thwap, THWAP, thap thap......thwap, crunch, twap. thap. BANG. thwap thap.), and a crew skilled professionals doing the same work with rhythm. The first is very distracting and almost impossible to evade, while the latter can become relaxing because of the regularity and purposefulness of the noise.
A skilled neighbor building a wall from 2x4s for the first time? A harrowingly distractful cacophony of random noise. A bunch of guys putting a roof on next door, just as they've done together a few hundred times before? Almost musical, and anything but distracting (unless I'm trying to sleep and they're trying to work, but that is a different problem).
I don't know about "the right registry settings," but:
All I do is just put the name of my local NTP server into the clock settings in Windows 7, and it seems to work.
AFAICT, it only updates periodically (like running ntpdate from cron). If there is clock drift, I do not notice it, but I'm not exactly looking for it -- at least, not for my own stuff, on my own time.
Local *nix boxes run ntpd, because it's the most trivial way to get it done.
For the few time-critical machines that I have scattered about elsewhere, I run ntpd.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Per the description, it's still in Florida.
Or amazon.com.com, but they'd hate the cnet affiliation.
Based on your description, it sounds like something Apple should pay people to attend instead of the gross opposite.
A better question is: Why not?
Some BT clients will seek out local peers, which helps people who are quite near eachother (in the same building, say) while reducing server and inter-building network load.
For free, more or less.
"Hey, boss! I might be able to reduce the load on our server-box by maybe 40% on install day, and keep things from grinding to a halt!"
"Oh, really -- using that BitTorrent crap? Forget it, lackey - we'll just use HTTP like everyone else. After all, the server is on the backbone, so it's not like it matters. The students can just wait if things get bogged down."
"But boss, with BitTorrent, things get faster as more people use it, and it can't grind to a halt."
"HTTP. We're done here."
Stupid? Yeah, what you said was pretty stupid.
Please tell this to my home Samba server-box running Gentoo, which will soon need a reinstall because portage has gone too far while I haven't: At this point, either it is horribly confused or I am, or both.
Not that the machine does much: It's just serves files, and does NTP, and every now and then I have some heinous *NIX-y task for it to perform.
That occasional *NIX-y task has meant that I've reinstalled the OS for my home server about 5 times in the past decade, because it was easier to reinstall than fix the dependency (and sometimes architectural and/or hierarchical) hell.
XP? Not a problem. 12 years hence (13 at EOL), the upgrade/maintenance cycle looks like this (worst case): Run Windows Update. Click GUI prompts. Reboot. Rinse, repeat (sometimes quite a few times), done: stuff still works.
And software that works across all versions? Allegedly I can't run 16-bit apps anymore directly on my 64-bit Win7 desktop, but allegedly I can in a (free! supported!) VM, but in actuality I haven't cared because I haven't run a proper 16-bit app in a coon's age: This "problem" has never occurred for me.
Everything else tends to just work, no matter how old it is.
I like Linux (and the *BSDs) quite a lot, and I use them extensively wherever I can. But if the argument is about future-proof compatibility, I've just got to say that they're all losers compared to the current state of Windows culture even if one important element of that culture is dying.
You're wrong: Nobody claims (except you) that stations sell for "cost plus."
That said, in most cases (in the US, at least) gasoline is sold in a very competitive market. Raise prices, and people tend to go to the station down the block instead.
Another direct result of this competition is that gas prices fluctuate on an Edgeworth price cycle.
I'm pretty sure that the corn chips in my pantry are not made with sweet corn.
Indeed, I'm pretty sure that I seldom eat sweet corn, except whole.
So I'm pretty sure that I find other kinds of corn to be yummy.
Baby steps.
Overall, we'd be better off getting rid of corn subsidies, period: We (in the US) are quite far from starving, and our farmers generally aren't broke.
After the undeniable fallout from that (which will take a few years to settle), then we can start talking about switchgrass, biodiesel, and/or reducing tariffs on importer sugar cane and derivatives.
When I was a kid, there was a downtown bake shop a half dozen blocks from my house. It had a rear entrance that was open to the public, and one got to walk through the shop area of the bakery as one made their way to the counter and storefront. It was awesome.
One morning, I wandered through there (more as a curious kid than as a paying customer) and asked the guy running the mixer why there were huge sacks of cane sugar on pallets, when we had our very own local refinery that processed beets into sugar less than two miles away.
His response: Cane sugar worked better and tasted better, even if it cost a bit more.
Nowadays, if the place was still around (it has burned twice and did not recover the second time), I'd half-expect to see tubs of HFCS instead.
This was perhaps 25 years ago, a time when a kid could wander into a bake shop and be inquisitive and score a free donut or two just for being friendly, before either Pepsi or Coke listed HFCS on their ingredient list at all.
And the point of this long-winded, get-off-my-lawn anecdote? Cane sugar, AFAICT, rocks. Beet sugar -might- rock. Corn syrup? Fuck corn syrup. And fuck corn-based ethanol.
Corn is useful enough just being corn: It is yummy. And without subsidies, it might even still be primarily a food crop instead of being mostly a chemical base-stock.
Hey AC, nobody cares what you have to say.
Or at least I don't care. And only I know the one, true way to read /..
More retarded: I've now spent enough time customizing Firefox to simply act more like it used to that there is no conceivable way that I will ever be able to rebuild it from scratch.
Fun.
And 93,077 unique access points, over the same period.
Since I got an OG Droid in November of 2009, I've purposefully observed 132,205 non-unique access points just in the course of normal short traveling for work and pleasure, exclusively by car.
I am unsurprised by any of these figures.
What URL can I get this free trial at?
So? Gravity's pretty good about keeping metal dust from flying around the room. And the grounded metal enclosure is pretty good about dissipating any static charge on such conductive dust.
?????, etc.
What's wrong with MBOX? I've been using it with gigabyte-sized folders for over a decade and nothing bad has ---@@@ From MAILER-DAEMON Fri Jul 8 12:08:34 2011
Seriously, though. Even when mbox gets trashed due to disk corruption, it is still every bit as useable as a trashed maildir: Messages get lost, not whole folders...and even then, that's what backups are for (right?).
Or at least, that was my experience over the past many moons. As a static archive (Sent-mail-2012), I can't think of a single thing wrong with mbox. And it's easier to cat to tape than maildir.
It did? I thought it turned out to be largely relying on advertising revenue.
What this has to do with either open source or patents is not at all clear.
Yes, but it's analog. You can drive a CRT at a resolution rather far beyond the maximum physical resolution of the display, and still get more actual detail. (Unless you're going to tell me that a cell of phosphor always illuminates evenly and perfectly, in which case I'll simply call you a liar and we'll have nothing more to discuss.)
For awhile I had a black-and-white SVGA monitor (yes, this is a thing that existed) that I used as second display (yes, back when this was difficult and mostly unheard of) that had no such limitation at all.
More recently, I used to run something ridiculous on a 19" CRT (2550*something with a carefully-tweaked modeline).
My preference, if I am able to achieve it, is for it to be impossible to discern individual pixels: When I look at a computer display I don't want to look at a grid of pixels, I want to look at smoothly-rendered words. A CRT at ridiculous resolution with appropriate font sizes does this nicely.
You still install Windows updates on a new install the old fashioned way?
http://download.wsusoffline.net/ and don't look back: Push the button, come back later. It self-reboots and just sorta gets it done.
Perhaps you live in a different world than I do, but grocery stores here do not have windows that open.
And I think OSHA might have a thing or two to say about employees running amok in a darkened building, moving stock and fetching orders.
So you want them to prepare for a thing that they may choose to simply never do.
Have you ever been in a grocery store with the lights off? It's dark. Turn off the HVAC, and it gets mighty uncomfortable in a hurry.
Running compressors and keeping enough lights and climate control going to even make it safe for the public to enter is a huge proposition.
That said: There are stores that make these plans, and have sufficient generating capacity to run and conduct business safely off-grid.
We've got a couple here in my small town that more-or-less just kept running when the power was off last summer for a week after a wind storm, and that was good. And the gas station on the corner brought in a huge genset, and was running in a couple of days, which was convenient.
Meanwhile, it is my direct experience with such disasters that local governments and the Red Cross move very quickly to open shelters where people can stay or get medical care or just get some good food (it's usually awesome food), something yummy to drink, and refresh for a bit.
Having been through some shit before on a few occasions (mostly massive flooding), I can honestly say that I was overwhelmed by the resources that immediately became available to everyone. It was fine.
But who am I to tell people (yes, businesses are owned by people) to make these plans? It seems that the market is working just fine at keeping things running in the face of adversity with profit alone being sufficient incentive: If the store is closed, money stops happening.
*shrug*
Let's just legislate convenience and free ponies while we're at it. After all, more laws always fixes stuff.
There is a sandwich shop downtown that closes for two weeks every summer, just to allow every person there to have some time off. I suppose you'd like to legislate away their ability to do this, too: How dare they stop operating just because they feel like it!
Down here in Ohio, I've also seen incandescent stop lights clogged with snow.
*shrug*
It depends on the snow and the wind and the temperature and the duty-cycle of that particular light bulb.
Meanwhile, contrary to what everyone seems to assume: LEDs can get pretty toasty. This is why pre-packaged bulbs and fixtures tend to be mostly heatsink.
IIRC, they're only still about 40% efficient. This is more than an order of magnitude better than an incandescent, but it still means that substantial heat can be generated with use.
Because, obviously, it's impossible to quickly try different variations of "spin the phone!" vibratory commands, and make sense of them automatically, because there's no way the app would know exactly how the phone is spinning...and then remember the results for the next time. Right?
Except it can, because it's also analyzing the output from camera! It can see where the phone is pointing in response to its commands! And it has a set of accelerometers, a compass, and maybe even a gyroscope to help narrow things down if the feedback from camera itself is somehow insufficient! (Doh.)
Saying it can't work with an Android phone (as long as it can stand on end, which is indeed apparently a rare function) is the same as saying that it can only work with an iPhone 5 on a granite countertop as shown in TFV, and that any other surface must require specific recalibration.... while also saying that it can't work when hand-held (which it does, for many models, as shown in TFV).
The truth is that it is simply far squishier than that: The assumption is, at its very basis, that the direction that the camera is facing is somewhat random. That you can't imagine how it might work does not mean that others haven't already figured it out.
I mean, FFS: It's not like iOS has a specific API call that says "Rotate left, seventy-three degrees." It's just a pocket computer with a vibrator and a camera.
(Google "autostitch" for early incarnations of the technique, with zero feedback, and platform independence, and amazingly good results...considering.)
Think electronic shooting muffs, with an extra audio input.
It's kind of like this:
Fidelity will be crap, both for outside sounds and line-in sounds, compared to any good set of headphones. They will be uncomfortable for long periods, because they need to clamp hard enough to seal out gunfire (else they'd be ineffective).
And don't think too hard about how it might work: Instead, it's more like one microphone per ear. Simple and effective for voice communication on all levels, but not necessarily an audiophile approach. And yes, your spacial perception will be ruined.
That said, I'm not trying to knock the concept: It might do what you want with acceptable tradeoffs.
Myself: I find that when I have distracting noise, playing music (or something on TV that is not stimulating at all) in another room helps. If that's impossible, putting the audio source across the room either beside me or behind me works OK. Headphones, in my experience, don't cut it: They're either too isolated (even the "open air" varieties), or unsuitable to me for music (see above).
This preserves or even enhances my spacial perception (I can hear when someone walks by, even unseen in the next room because the music changes -- the brain is very good at that), while giving me something nonchalant and under my own control to be hearing instead of the seemingly random noise that other people sometimes make.
It doesn't have to be loud.
I also have a very good stereo in front of me at my computer that I use when actively listening to music, or doing editing or whatever, but I can't get any non-musical work done when I've got music playing from those speakers: They make the music entirely too interesting.
It's kind of like the difference between amateur hammering (thwap, tap, thwap, THWAP, thap thap......thwap, crunch, twap. thap. BANG. thwap thap.), and a crew skilled professionals doing the same work with rhythm. The first is very distracting and almost impossible to evade, while the latter can become relaxing because of the regularity and purposefulness of the noise.
A skilled neighbor building a wall from 2x4s for the first time? A harrowingly distractful cacophony of random noise. A bunch of guys putting a roof on next door, just as they've done together a few hundred times before? Almost musical, and anything but distracting (unless I'm trying to sleep and they're trying to work, but that is a different problem).
*shrug*
I don't know about "the right registry settings," but:
All I do is just put the name of my local NTP server into the clock settings in Windows 7, and it seems to work.
AFAICT, it only updates periodically (like running ntpdate from cron). If there is clock drift, I do not notice it, but I'm not exactly looking for it -- at least, not for my own stuff, on my own time.
Local *nix boxes run ntpd, because it's the most trivial way to get it done.
For the few time-critical machines that I have scattered about elsewhere, I run ntpd.