Feel free to stop using it at anytime. Go use your better solution. I'll be glad to join you when I see it works. But just saying that "SMTP has got to go" isn't helping anyone.
Honestly, there's already a 100% full proof solution to spam that no one wants to use -- sign ALL your email with your PGP (or gpp) key. Once everyone starts doing that, then you can start rejecting email (or assigning it a higher spam rating) that isn't signed. At the very least, it makes spammers spend CPU time signing messages (somewhat like HashCash). It would also severely limit Joe jobs (sending spam using another's email address as the From address). Of course, no one does this -- they'd much rather waste everyone's time bitching about how bad SMTP is (even though it's doing *exactly* what it was meant to do) or otherwise breaking email (blocking whole blocks of IPs, using challenge/response, etc).
but maybe someone will see this and get a laugh...
My physics teacher in high school told of the graffiti in the bathroom in the physics building at his alma mater. While the other bathrooms around the campus had the usual bathroom scrawlings, the physics bathrooms were clean, except for a single limeric:
The once was a lady named Bright, Who could travel faster than light. She went out one day, In her usual way, And returned the previous night!
but maybe someone will see this and get a laugh...
My physics teacher in high school told of the graffiti in the bathroom in the physics building at his alma mater. While the other bathrooms around the campus had the usual bathroom scrawlings, the physics bathrooms were clean, except for a single limeric:
The once was a lady named Bright, Who could travel faster than light. She went out one day, In her usual way, And returned the previous night!
I don't know if it was intentional or not, but I've run into a similar situation at a local Kash 'n' Karry grocery store. The first thing you have to know is that their receipts are exceedingly deceptive. All their prices are sky high, unless you get one of the free tracker cards, and then the prices are more reasonable. However, on the receipt, it always shows the high price next to each item (and on the cash register when it's scanned), and then you see the discounts at the end. It's up to you to make sure you actally got the discount on the item.
Anyway, I was buying some stuff there and found a good price on an item. It wasn't even a card required price. However, when I examined my receipt later, I found that the price seemed to be higher (I think about 20 cents). I figured that I had misread the price or something. However, another time I was shopping there, I saw the same item at the price I thought it was. But when they rang it up, it came out 20 cents higher. When I asked the cashier about it, she said that it would be discounted at the end. Of course, it was not. Of course, for 20 cents, it's not worth me driving back to the store (as I'd spend more than 20 cents in gas). I suppose that's what their counting on.
So, long story short, I haven't shopped there since. If I do go back, I'm going to do a very strict accounting of my receipt (not just glance at it like usual) before leaving the store.
Hmmm... must be a different Windows CE than the one that's on my iPaq. That Windows CE is neither robust (I think I press the resent button more than some of the other buttons), real-time (gotta love when it's doing something in the background and doesn't give you any way to even tell what's going on, let alone stop it), nor embedded (just because it runs on relatively small hardware doesn't mean it's embedded!). Personally, I think that WinCE (pronounced "wince") is the worst version of Windows since the 3.1 days, and I can't understand why anyone would be *proud* that they used it.
Huh... I've had exactly the opposite experience. I don't play games very often, but every once in a while, I like to play a game of Total Annihilation. It works fairly well off my older CVS version of WineX (before Gentoo took it out of portage). It doesn't work in regular wine (a null pointer deference relating to sound). However, it does take all 2.4 GHz on my main computer. And it's still a little jumpy at times. Keep in mind that this is a game that plays just fine on my 350MHz Windows 2000 machine (that is usually off).
It could be something that TA is doing that Wine(X) doesn't handle well, and I'm not running the official WineX (and probably never will after they forced Gentoo to pull the ebuild), but I've definitely not seen a performance increase of games with it.
So, what, the front page of MSN news is going to be sponsored stories that don't identify themselves as such (like the sponsored links on the MSN search page)? Is that really any better?
Undelete in DOS was a consequence of the FAT filesystem. When you deleted a file, it didn't *really* delete it, it just marked it as deleted. I don't know all the gory details, but part of this marking (maybe all of it?) involved putting a NULL character as the first letter of the file's name. If you're familiar with C and C strings, you'll realize that this is will make the file name seem to be empty since all strings in C end with a NULL character.
Undelete worked by looking through the list of files for data *after* that NULL character to see what it could find. If it found valid data, it would present this to the user. The user could then undelete the file by giving the first character of the file name to replace the NULL character (that's why you had to do that to undelete the file).
Unfortunately, this is highly dependent on the filesystem. It was possible in FAT, but I don't know about other filesystems like NTFS or ext2/3, ReiserFS, etc. Someone more familiar with the internals of those more modern filesystems would have to comment on whether such an undelete is possible there.
Though what I'd really like to see is some sort of CVS-like filesystem, where as long as there is still space, different versions are stored. That would be immensely useful for those times when you decide you really don't want the changes you've made to a document (or you've accidently overwritten it with something). AFAIK, there's no FS out there like this, though.
btw, does anyone know if there's any undelete for FAT formatted devices (like floppies) for Linux? Just curious...
Personally, I think the best justice for Microsoft would have been to force them to sell all their products at the same price. No OEM version, no upgrade version, no special-Windows-just-for-Dell version. If Microsoft wants to sell the boxed Windows XP for $100, then the price of XP on new computers is $100. And the price for Windows for OEMs that also sell Linux preinstalled computers is also $100. Preventing the price discrimination alone would have gone a long way to helping competition.
Or buy a Mac.... Stop bitching at the price of Macs and Sparcs.
I appreciate what you're saying, but please don't kid yourself into thinking that if Apple or Sun had the marketshare MS currently has that they'd be some sort of benevelent dictator or something. I suspect that the only reason MacOSX is the way it is today is because Apple saw itself on the way out and had to do something drastic to stay alive. They were able to come through, and they'll probably still have a future because of it.
But make no mistake -- if Macs were as prevelent as Windows , everyone here would be bitching about Steve Jobs the anti-christ and how Bill Gates is trying to save us from the software and hardware lock-in from the evil giant Apple. Personally, I'm glad MS got the monopoly -- at least we're all using a more open hardware platform.
Buy a Mac or a Sparc if you want, after all the hardware is usually quality. But do so knowing that the companies you're locking yourself into are just like your sworn enemy. Give them too much power/marketshare, and they'll abuse it any way they can. The only true way to keep the companies in line is to ensure there is competition. And the best way to do that is through open standards. If your vendor knows he's replacable, he's much less likely to abuse you.
OK, I went and read your post, and I'm not very surprised it didn't generate a whole lot of intelligent discussion. First of all, I'm not exactly sure what you proposed. It seemed like you wanted to put some sort of virtual machine code in the Linux kernel. But to what end? Why would someone need a kernel space VM? What advantages are there?
You mention that "Support apps for kernel functions" have to be written in C or C++. I'm not quite sure why you said that. Maybe it's just easiest to write them there, since the kernel is written in C? Keep in mind that once the applications are compiled, they're all in binary. The high level language people wrote them in is largely irrelevant. Only things like the calling converntion (which is essentially an interface standard) really remain.
You also seem to complain about the choice of window managers, which is irrelevent to any sort of VM in the kernel discussion, and also, frankly, stupid. Oh, so much choice! Whatever am I going to do? I might actually have to think when using the computer!
Finally, your "security guarentee" of virtual machines is also questionable. Unless the VM code itself can be shown without holes, it's no more secure than say a chroot jail, and way more trouble.
But go ahead. Write some fancy kernel level virtual machine. If it really is as good as you say it will be and people want it, it will probably be put into the kernel. That's the beauty of using a relatively democratic system like Linux. And if most people think that idea is stupid, you can always fork the kernel or just maintain your own patchsets for your fancy VM. Again, open source in action. Funny how that doesn't work in closed source environments. There, people have to resort to meaningless "arguments" like yours in your other post. They have to convince the despots in control to make the changes they want. Frankly, I'm going to stick with the democratic system myself.
When things like parasiteware and adblockers move from the desktop (where the user has some control) to routers where businesses control access, things get very scary.
This is the type of thing I find the scarriest of all. The Internet was designed so that all the smarts were on the edge -- the center nodes were just supposed to route traffic. The edge nodes put data into the network, and all the routers had to do was make sure it got to its destination.
Now, we have routers that try to do more. Firewalls were really the first step. They stop packets from getting through based on certain rules. Center nodes on the Internet weren't supposed to do that. But firewalls protected edge nodes that couldn't protect themselves, so firewalls, at least when they are under your (organization's) control. It would be unfortunate, however, should your upstream provider (or their upstream provider) decide to place a firewall blocking, say port 80 or port 25, in the name of security. Unless, of course, you upgrade to their new super, premium service. But you see how firewalls, internal nodes that do more than just route packets, can cause problems for the Internet.
Another problem is NAT. NAT is good when you have more computers than IP addresses. But imagine if your ISP put you behind a NAT. Suddenly, it's not so great.
Both of these technologies are good when deployed at the edge of the network (if you were to think of your internal network as a single, logical edge node), but can wreak havoc if put in the middle. But it's happening already. I've already experienced the firewall shakedown from my ISP. And it was very unfortunate when I had to move my web server to another port.
The question is, how much more can the Internet take? How long until ISPs start doing more blocking or other interfering? Will SiteFinder return? Is there anything we can do? I'm open to suggestions...
If you mean turning in the same copy of the homework, then report it to the prof/dept/university and let them deal with it. Most places take a very dim view of cheating and the consequences can be very harsh.
If you mean turning in homework that has similar answers, then that's, IMO, different. Especially at that high level, you can't honestly expect all the students to work completely alone on all the homework. I know I sure worked with my friends trying to figure out the solutions to harder problems. Now, I always wrote it all up in my own words after I understood the solution. If working with peers to determine and understand the solution to a *homework* problem is cheating, then I guess I was a cheater. Considering that most places encourage students to form study groups, I think it's hypocritical of them to not expect the members of those same groups to help each other. That doesn't mean writing the solution for each other, but to help them understand. Of course, this is highly variable for the type of work for each class, but the senior level algorithms class in this case probably has a lot of thinking and writing/explaining as part of the homework.
As a TA, it's part of your job to distinguish between the two. Yes, it's hard and subjective, but that's part of the job. Fortunately, back in my TA days, I didn't have to worry about that (grading Freshman labs wasn't that hard, though I did have to grade the homework for one sememster)
As for detecting the cheating, the only low tech thing you have is that great pattern matching device sitting on top of your neck. If you think you've seen the same answer before, chances are you probably have. Go back and find the similar paper. Compare the answers -- quality, correctness, writing style, grammar, spelling, etc. Keep in mind that the students may just have been working together, and not copying one another. Use your best judgement. Maybe you just need to talk to the students yourself first. Let them know what you find unacceptable.
Always remember, however, that the point is to get the students to learn. If they can accomplish that through working through the problems together, then why stop that? All you want to stop is one person doing the work and the rest copying (because there's very little learning going on on the copiers' parts).
RPC? why on earth would you make that available? NFS is hardly essential these days.
I use NFS both at work and on my home network every day. At work, there is no data stored on the local machine. I do everything over NFS mounts. And I couldn't imagine not using it.
Of course, if you mean offering NFS over a public network like the Internet, then I wholeheartedly agree. But on a private network, it's invaluable.
Students *not* running any of the p2p apps will be sending REJECTs back when the port scanner tries to connect. A firewall properly set up will also send back REJECTs when the port scanner tries to connect. The port scanner has no way to tell the difference. Your cynicism may be well placed, but I'd bet those admins would get in hot water if they started disconnecting people not running p2p apps.
That's so scary, but the really scary thing is that I can see them doing it, too. After all, most college dorms reserve the right to search your room at any time.
Though, if that did start, then I can't imagine how long it would be until someone came up with a hacked environment for them to ssh in that looks like root, but doesn't actually have any real power -- kind of like a honeypot. It would have to be some sort of hacked ssh server that routed root logins with the given public key to this honeypot. Maybe it would even maintain the state so that future log ins would keep the changes made in previous log ins. If you really made it smart, it would keep a list of IPs that used that account, and make sure that the open ports and services running on that machine were right. Oh, my, this is getting really devious. Almost like making your own little Matrix for the university sysadmins.
The US mirror is gone due to the slashdot effect (that's litereally what it says). But the torrent link still seems to work.
Here are other bt links for the full release (from their download page): BITTORRENT : Normal Quality mpeg (will play on anything): 170 meg BITTORRENT : Normal Quality DivX : 73 meg BITTORRENT : High Quality DivX : 135 meg
True, I was being a little facetious in my post. I was responding to the original poster's (apparant) claim that a $300 iPod is way more money than will be spent buying music at $1/song. I just wanted to point out that even though $1/song seems like not very much, it would still take several thousand dollars to fill that iPod.
Of course, the same is true of other things as well. Jewelry cases are expensive to fill, and even DVD racks come at a hefty price. It amazes me sometimes how much value I have in DVDs that I've bought (it amazes me even more when I see some of my friends' collections).
Frankly, $1/song may be a reasonable price for most people. I can't say if I'd be willing to buy MP3s at that price because no one will let me (iTunes is Apple only, BuyMusic is win32/IE only). So, for me, it's more of an academic argument.
I just went out and looked, and it appears that $300 will get you a 10GB iPod. If an MP3 is approximately 1 MB per minute, and an average song is 5 minutes, then you can store about 2000 songs on that iPod. At $1 per song, that's $2000, which is over 6 times the price of the iPod. So even though $1 per song may not seem very much, it does add up, and quickly.
Also, keep in mind that even though the iPod is still worth $300, the $2000 "worth" of songs you keep on it are actually worthless, since you can never sell them. So, to some people, paying $1 for a bitstream is too much.
Slashdot Mirror
SMTP has got to go.
Feel free to stop using it at anytime. Go use your better solution. I'll be glad to join you when I see it works. But just saying that "SMTP has got to go" isn't helping anyone.
Honestly, there's already a 100% full proof solution to spam that no one wants to use -- sign ALL your email with your PGP (or gpp) key. Once everyone starts doing that, then you can start rejecting email (or assigning it a higher spam rating) that isn't signed. At the very least, it makes spammers spend CPU time signing messages (somewhat like HashCash). It would also severely limit Joe jobs (sending spam using another's email address as the From address). Of course, no one does this -- they'd much rather waste everyone's time bitching about how bad SMTP is (even though it's doing *exactly* what it was meant to do) or otherwise breaking email (blocking whole blocks of IPs, using challenge/response, etc).
Didn't gcc fork a while back (making egcs?) and that fork eventually came back to form most of what is now gcc3?
What about kernel trees with different patchsets? They're kind of forks, and often the patches will be merged back into the main tree.
but maybe someone will see this and get a laugh...
My physics teacher in high school told of the graffiti in the bathroom in the physics building at his alma mater. While the other bathrooms around the campus had the usual bathroom scrawlings, the physics bathrooms were clean, except for a single limeric:
The once was a lady named Bright,
Who could travel faster than light.
She went out one day,
In her usual way,
And returned the previous night!
Oops... this was supposed to be in this story about physics jokes. Sorry for the confusion.
but maybe someone will see this and get a laugh...
My physics teacher in high school told of the graffiti in the bathroom in the physics building at his alma mater. While the other bathrooms around the campus had the usual bathroom scrawlings, the physics bathrooms were clean, except for a single limeric:
The once was a lady named Bright,
Who could travel faster than light.
She went out one day,
In her usual way,
And returned the previous night!
Find out more about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO) here.
I don't know if it was intentional or not, but I've run into a similar situation at a local Kash 'n' Karry grocery store. The first thing you have to know is that their receipts are exceedingly deceptive. All their prices are sky high, unless you get one of the free tracker cards, and then the prices are more reasonable. However, on the receipt, it always shows the high price next to each item (and on the cash register when it's scanned), and then you see the discounts at the end. It's up to you to make sure you actally got the discount on the item.
Anyway, I was buying some stuff there and found a good price on an item. It wasn't even a card required price. However, when I examined my receipt later, I found that the price seemed to be higher (I think about 20 cents). I figured that I had misread the price or something. However, another time I was shopping there, I saw the same item at the price I thought it was. But when they rang it up, it came out 20 cents higher. When I asked the cashier about it, she said that it would be discounted at the end. Of course, it was not. Of course, for 20 cents, it's not worth me driving back to the store (as I'd spend more than 20 cents in gas). I suppose that's what their counting on.
So, long story short, I haven't shopped there since. If I do go back, I'm going to do a very strict accounting of my receipt (not just glance at it like usual) before leaving the store.
...features Microsoft's robust, real-time embedded operating system, Windows(R) CE.
Hmmm... must be a different Windows CE than the one that's on my iPaq. That Windows CE is neither robust (I think I press the resent button more than some of the other buttons), real-time (gotta love when it's doing something in the background and doesn't give you any way to even tell what's going on, let alone stop it), nor embedded (just because it runs on relatively small hardware doesn't mean it's embedded!). Personally, I think that WinCE (pronounced "wince") is the worst version of Windows since the 3.1 days, and I can't understand why anyone would be *proud* that they used it.
</rant>
I take it you've never used gconf-editor? :)
Huh... I've had exactly the opposite experience. I don't play games very often, but every once in a while, I like to play a game of Total Annihilation. It works fairly well off my older CVS version of WineX (before Gentoo took it out of portage). It doesn't work in regular wine (a null pointer deference relating to sound). However, it does take all 2.4 GHz on my main computer. And it's still a little jumpy at times. Keep in mind that this is a game that plays just fine on my 350MHz Windows 2000 machine (that is usually off).
It could be something that TA is doing that Wine(X) doesn't handle well, and I'm not running the official WineX (and probably never will after they forced Gentoo to pull the ebuild), but I've definitely not seen a performance increase of games with it.
So, what, the front page of MSN news is going to be sponsored stories that don't identify themselves as such (like the sponsored links on the MSN search page)? Is that really any better?
Undelete in DOS was a consequence of the FAT filesystem. When you deleted a file, it didn't *really* delete it, it just marked it as deleted. I don't know all the gory details, but part of this marking (maybe all of it?) involved putting a NULL character as the first letter of the file's name. If you're familiar with C and C strings, you'll realize that this is will make the file name seem to be empty since all strings in C end with a NULL character.
Undelete worked by looking through the list of files for data *after* that NULL character to see what it could find. If it found valid data, it would present this to the user. The user could then undelete the file by giving the first character of the file name to replace the NULL character (that's why you had to do that to undelete the file).
Unfortunately, this is highly dependent on the filesystem. It was possible in FAT, but I don't know about other filesystems like NTFS or ext2/3, ReiserFS, etc. Someone more familiar with the internals of those more modern filesystems would have to comment on whether such an undelete is possible there.
Though what I'd really like to see is some sort of CVS-like filesystem, where as long as there is still space, different versions are stored. That would be immensely useful for those times when you decide you really don't want the changes you've made to a document (or you've accidently overwritten it with something). AFAIK, there's no FS out there like this, though.
btw, does anyone know if there's any undelete for FAT formatted devices (like floppies) for Linux? Just curious...
Personally, I think the best justice for Microsoft would have been to force them to sell all their products at the same price. No OEM version, no upgrade version, no special-Windows-just-for-Dell version. If Microsoft wants to sell the boxed Windows XP for $100, then the price of XP on new computers is $100. And the price for Windows for OEMs that also sell Linux preinstalled computers is also $100. Preventing the price discrimination alone would have gone a long way to helping competition.
Or buy a Mac. ... Stop bitching at the price of Macs and Sparcs.
I appreciate what you're saying, but please don't kid yourself into thinking that if Apple or Sun had the marketshare MS currently has that they'd be some sort of benevelent dictator or something. I suspect that the only reason MacOSX is the way it is today is because Apple saw itself on the way out and had to do something drastic to stay alive. They were able to come through, and they'll probably still have a future because of it.
But make no mistake -- if Macs were as prevelent as Windows , everyone here would be bitching about Steve Jobs the anti-christ and how Bill Gates is trying to save us from the software and hardware lock-in from the evil giant Apple. Personally, I'm glad MS got the monopoly -- at least we're all using a more open hardware platform.
Buy a Mac or a Sparc if you want, after all the hardware is usually quality. But do so knowing that the companies you're locking yourself into are just like your sworn enemy. Give them too much power/marketshare, and they'll abuse it any way they can. The only true way to keep the companies in line is to ensure there is competition. And the best way to do that is through open standards. If your vendor knows he's replacable, he's much less likely to abuse you.
OK, I went and read your post, and I'm not very surprised it didn't generate a whole lot of intelligent discussion. First of all, I'm not exactly sure what you proposed. It seemed like you wanted to put some sort of virtual machine code in the Linux kernel. But to what end? Why would someone need a kernel space VM? What advantages are there?
You mention that "Support apps for kernel functions" have to be written in C or C++. I'm not quite sure why you said that. Maybe it's just easiest to write them there, since the kernel is written in C? Keep in mind that once the applications are compiled, they're all in binary. The high level language people wrote them in is largely irrelevant. Only things like the calling converntion (which is essentially an interface standard) really remain.
You also seem to complain about the choice of window managers, which is irrelevent to any sort of VM in the kernel discussion, and also, frankly, stupid. Oh, so much choice! Whatever am I going to do? I might actually have to think when using the computer!
Finally, your "security guarentee" of virtual machines is also questionable. Unless the VM code itself can be shown without holes, it's no more secure than say a chroot jail, and way more trouble.
But go ahead. Write some fancy kernel level virtual machine. If it really is as good as you say it will be and people want it, it will probably be put into the kernel. That's the beauty of using a relatively democratic system like Linux. And if most people think that idea is stupid, you can always fork the kernel or just maintain your own patchsets for your fancy VM. Again, open source in action. Funny how that doesn't work in closed source environments. There, people have to resort to meaningless "arguments" like yours in your other post. They have to convince the despots in control to make the changes they want. Frankly, I'm going to stick with the democratic system myself.
When things like parasiteware and adblockers move from the desktop (where the user has some control) to routers where businesses control access, things get very scary.
This is the type of thing I find the scarriest of all. The Internet was designed so that all the smarts were on the edge -- the center nodes were just supposed to route traffic. The edge nodes put data into the network, and all the routers had to do was make sure it got to its destination.
Now, we have routers that try to do more. Firewalls were really the first step. They stop packets from getting through based on certain rules. Center nodes on the Internet weren't supposed to do that. But firewalls protected edge nodes that couldn't protect themselves, so firewalls, at least when they are under your (organization's) control. It would be unfortunate, however, should your upstream provider (or their upstream provider) decide to place a firewall blocking, say port 80 or port 25, in the name of security. Unless, of course, you upgrade to their new super, premium service. But you see how firewalls, internal nodes that do more than just route packets, can cause problems for the Internet.
Another problem is NAT. NAT is good when you have more computers than IP addresses. But imagine if your ISP put you behind a NAT. Suddenly, it's not so great.
Both of these technologies are good when deployed at the edge of the network (if you were to think of your internal network as a single, logical edge node), but can wreak havoc if put in the middle. But it's happening already. I've already experienced the firewall shakedown from my ISP. And it was very unfortunate when I had to move my web server to another port.
The question is, how much more can the Internet take? How long until ISPs start doing more blocking or other interfering? Will SiteFinder return? Is there anything we can do? I'm open to suggestions...
If you mean turning in the same copy of the homework, then report it to the prof/dept/university and let them deal with it. Most places take a very dim view of cheating and the consequences can be very harsh.
If you mean turning in homework that has similar answers, then that's, IMO, different. Especially at that high level, you can't honestly expect all the students to work completely alone on all the homework. I know I sure worked with my friends trying to figure out the solutions to harder problems. Now, I always wrote it all up in my own words after I understood the solution. If working with peers to determine and understand the solution to a *homework* problem is cheating, then I guess I was a cheater. Considering that most places encourage students to form study groups, I think it's hypocritical of them to not expect the members of those same groups to help each other. That doesn't mean writing the solution for each other, but to help them understand. Of course, this is highly variable for the type of work for each class, but the senior level algorithms class in this case probably has a lot of thinking and writing/explaining as part of the homework.
As a TA, it's part of your job to distinguish between the two. Yes, it's hard and subjective, but that's part of the job. Fortunately, back in my TA days, I didn't have to worry about that (grading Freshman labs wasn't that hard, though I did have to grade the homework for one sememster)
As for detecting the cheating, the only low tech thing you have is that great pattern matching device sitting on top of your neck. If you think you've seen the same answer before, chances are you probably have. Go back and find the similar paper. Compare the answers -- quality, correctness, writing style, grammar, spelling, etc. Keep in mind that the students may just have been working together, and not copying one another. Use your best judgement. Maybe you just need to talk to the students yourself first. Let them know what you find unacceptable.
Always remember, however, that the point is to get the students to learn. If they can accomplish that through working through the problems together, then why stop that? All you want to stop is one person doing the work and the rest copying (because there's very little learning going on on the copiers' parts).
While I agree with most of what you said...
RPC? why on earth would you make that available? NFS is hardly essential these days.
I use NFS both at work and on my home network every day. At work, there is no data stored on the local machine. I do everything over NFS mounts. And I couldn't imagine not using it.
Of course, if you mean offering NFS over a public network like the Internet, then I wholeheartedly agree. But on a private network, it's invaluable.
That should be Mono 0.28, not Mono 2.8.
:)
I almost thought the Mono devs were getting too close to Microsoft and started version inflating. Glad I RTFA
Students *not* running any of the p2p apps will be sending REJECTs back when the port scanner tries to connect. A firewall properly set up will also send back REJECTs when the port scanner tries to connect. The port scanner has no way to tell the difference. Your cynicism may be well placed, but I'd bet those admins would get in hot water if they started disconnecting people not running p2p apps.
That's so scary, but the really scary thing is that I can see them doing it, too. After all, most college dorms reserve the right to search your room at any time.
Though, if that did start, then I can't imagine how long it would be until someone came up with a hacked environment for them to ssh in that looks like root, but doesn't actually have any real power -- kind of like a honeypot. It would have to be some sort of hacked ssh server that routed root logins with the given public key to this honeypot. Maybe it would even maintain the state so that future log ins would keep the changes made in previous log ins. If you really made it smart, it would keep a list of IPs that used that account, and make sure that the open ports and services running on that machine were right. Oh, my, this is getting really devious. Almost like making your own little Matrix for the university sysadmins.
The US mirror is gone due to the slashdot effect (that's litereally what it says). But the torrent link still seems to work.
Here are other bt links for the full release (from their download page):
BITTORRENT : Normal Quality mpeg (will play on anything): 170 meg
BITTORRENT : Normal Quality DivX : 73 meg
BITTORRENT : High Quality DivX : 135 meg
True, I was being a little facetious in my post. I was responding to the original poster's (apparant) claim that a $300 iPod is way more money than will be spent buying music at $1/song. I just wanted to point out that even though $1/song seems like not very much, it would still take several thousand dollars to fill that iPod.
Of course, the same is true of other things as well. Jewelry cases are expensive to fill, and even DVD racks come at a hefty price. It amazes me sometimes how much value I have in DVDs that I've bought (it amazes me even more when I see some of my friends' collections).
Frankly, $1/song may be a reasonable price for most people. I can't say if I'd be willing to buy MP3s at that price because no one will let me (iTunes is Apple only, BuyMusic is win32/IE only). So, for me, it's more of an academic argument.
"I can't afford $1 after buying my $300 iPod!"
I just went out and looked, and it appears that $300 will get you a 10GB iPod. If an MP3 is approximately 1 MB per minute, and an average song is 5 minutes, then you can store about 2000 songs on that iPod. At $1 per song, that's $2000, which is over 6 times the price of the iPod. So even though $1 per song may not seem very much, it does add up, and quickly.
Also, keep in mind that even though the iPod is still worth $300, the $2000 "worth" of songs you keep on it are actually worthless, since you can never sell them. So, to some people, paying $1 for a bitstream is too much.
Will tomatoes and other rotten fruit be made available with the cost of the ticket, or will you have to bring your own? :)