That could work. I remember seeing a speaker design on/. a while ago that had a similar system.
Each speaker had a small mic that tried to adjust delay and EQ settings. A one time config, done by positioning a mic at each head location in the room would be better but more difficult.
I just wish some of the simpler features on pro audio equipment would work it's way down to consumer level stuff. Companies have no real incentive to clean up the sound since they can sell snake oil fixes for audio quality problems *cough*monster cable*cough*. Simply using balanced audio connections on all pre-amp connections would reduce a lot of noise coming from the usual mess of cables behind most peoples home theater systems. Moving the power supplies for the components away from any audio proccessing circutry and shielding them, Further reducing noise. Many suround sound systems would also benifit GREATLY from a simple user adjustable delay on each channel to help compensate for an odd speaker placement.
Home and car audio has to be the biggest snake oil industry today. I know I'm glad I've worked with pro level equipment running concerts and such. Really opens your eyes to what needs to be there for a good clear sound.
My thoughts EXACTLY. I know quite a few teachers and they are NOT exactly the best paid people for the amount of work they do and the responsibility they have to make sure we are going to have good kids coming out of the school system. Our local districts are having to make choices about cutting extra-curriculars, sports, music programs. All because money is very tight. If the funds are available they could be put to much better use by the individual districts.
Um... so I think I'm missing somthing. Whats stopping someone from using a diagnostic tool (since DivX is multipass now) from finding points where the compression goes to crap and just cutting out the bad frame? Yeah it's a LITTLE more work but as most compressing jobs take on the order of several hours I don't see why the pirating groups wouldn't do it to save the output quality.
An ISP wide implementation wouldn't work though. Bayesian Filtering is a very personal system. Each person's spam and non-spam emails contain very different words. An ISP wide system would maybe catch the very extream spam but without a high false positive rate it wouldn't be very effective.
Web based systems like hotmail could implement a Bayesian system on a per user basis. Each email teaches the filter. Have the strictness of the filter get slowly more restrictive as it sees more email. All the user would have to do is flag any spam that comes through as such and the system would update it's rules. The user would check the junk mail box every once in a while for false negitives. After using the account for a month or so I bet very little spam would ever get through to any one user. It would take little space as the word database for my last 12,000 emails is about 500K (words expire after not being seen for ~ 2 weeks).
In another article it is specified that HIS collection was only about 1100 songs. The 650,000 number comes from the number of songs in the FlatLan index he was running... so he is getting sued for pretty much ALL the MP3s at MTU.
"rich" colleges? As a student @ mtu (not on the campus network or using file sharing) I know we aren't rich. Michigan is probably going to cut higher education funding ~ 10%... tution is probably going up ~ 20% and there are MAJOR cuts across the board all through the school... not to be mean but I hope I read this right and it's aimed at a student not MTU... I don't think MTU can handle it.
There are a lot of people saying that encryption wouldn't be the answer but I beg to differ a bit.
If each file transfer between two clients was handled encrypted in the following manner: - When you log on the network your client generates the equivilent of a PGP public/private key set. - When a file is transfered from person A to person B person A encrypts it with person B's public key.
Now, no man in the middle can figure out what you are sending to anyone or what you are recieving from anyone
Yes they could just create their own client and do a search on the network and see what you have shared on your client but that is possible now.
The method described in the article doesn't do that though. It is a passive system that just monitors the data passing through each router. Encrypting all transfers and query responces would stop this kind of filtering as nothing will ever have the same signature twice.
That probably didn't make any sence but I've beeing diagraming crap for class for the past 12 hours and nothing makes sence any more!
As an "aspiring" software developer I've run into quite a few applications that have seemed very poorly written.
One of my pet peeves is a system the Pro A/V Company I work for uses to track rentals and equipment inventory. Not to be mean but the thing looks and acts like it was written by someone who had an intro VB5 class and decided they were a professionally programmer. The real big downside is we have not been able to find anything that functions any better than our current setup.
I get the feeling a lot of the time that the.com boom screwed the computer industry in many ways. One of the biggest was the shortage of programmers who have actually had a degree and know all the important theory behind software development that the "Teach yourself X in 30 days" book will never cover.
Right now the employment trend is showing this. I have quite a few friends who decided to for-go College to teach them selves a bit of C++, VB or web development and go get hired by some company. It worked out well for a few years but now almost all of them are having problems. Talking with a few people, they and other they know who have similar experience are finding themselves being fired in favor of a college educated developer who also has some experience from doing student work somewhere.
The other advantage to the employer is a small team of developers who know how to write well documented extendable code can be much more efficient than a whole room full of people who can just get stuff done fast but maybe not right.
Another side of it is no matter what we want to think computing is still a very young industry. How many years have the majority of businesses in the US had computers? What experience as a developer can someone really pull on when we really don't have more than two generations of people who have done this type of work? Ignoring the obvious differences in complexities with many other industries they didn't get off to the greatest start either. The automobile took many years of experience with simple engines to get something that "worked" and to get to where we are today has taken even longer.
Time and experience are the only real answer to the problem. I don't see much of a way around that.
I have been using WinRar for years, it's been the easiest to use and most versatile archiving program for windows I have ever used. (yes this is a shameless plug but I think the product is that good) It completely supports the.rar and.zip formats along with being able to extract and/or decompress the following formats CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, ACE, UUE, BZ2, JAR, ISO.
The integration into the shell and the multitude of options for RAR archives like solid archives (treating the data as one big file to get better compression), recovery data (allows a good portion of a damaged archive to be reconstructed with little space overhead).
Overall I wish that rar would become the de facto standard (it's not completely free but 90% of the functionality is). The compression gain over zip is incredible and it's A LOT easier to use.
Um, actually as of a year or two ago Valve owns all the rights to counter-strike and are putting lots of $$ into it's continuing development. (The exact date of aquisition was just before CS hit version 1.0)
Valve knows that the only reason they are still selling half-life is CS and other such MODS. Half-Life was a great game but it says a lot about the engine if it is this flexible to still be in use for a continual mod making community.
True, but he made no claims of the LegWay being able to manuever in 3-space. The demo videos are quite impressive. It have very good control of it's movement in two dimensions. I don't imagine it would be too terribly difficult for him to add a third sensor and the code to handle inclines. Some kind of sensor to check for level based off gravity should be sufficient to adjust for an incline/decline.
SubSection b.A states that only the file containing the copyrighted works can be affected. Any legitimate files must still be fully accessible and unaffected.
So following those lines share some random txt file you wrote. If they DDOS you sue them since the legitimate file was affected by their attack. You could probably even tip toe around the fact that you illegally had copyrighted works on your PC.
Of follow subsection b.C which states the file trader cannot sustain more than a $50.00 loss for any reason because of an attack.
They also have to notify the DOJ each time they want to do it. Now I'm going to be writing my representative tonight on this but realize that this is not an unrestricted license to hack by any means.
Serv-U http://www.serv-u.com/ has completely re-worked there FTP server and has SFTP options avalable. FlashFXP http://www.flashfxp.com has V2RC1 of their FTP client out which supports SFTP. I've played with both and they work very well and offer 128 bit SSL encryption for both data and control connections.
That is a good point. As is said in other posts a hybred chip would probably be the most success full. You will need a clock for anything that is time based. You may just be able to get by on a clock with say a 1ms resolution for timing things and controling program execution speed.
Currently a program doesn't send extra instructions to run at "normal speed" though it bases it's execution speed off the time kept by the OS. So even with an async chip you would still need a very accurate way to keep track of time.
Looking at the progression of programming languages it makes sense that the rest of the computer would follow. I don't know as much about older languages as I really need to make a strong argument but it seems that they are for the most part procedural and very few have any means for events or being driven by input or other actions. New incarnations of languages such as Java, C#, VB.net and even C++ (form my limited experience) are completely event driven or moving in that direction.
From a programmer's standpoint the code is generally easier to write and there is less of it with an event driven system. The other bonus is you aren't wasting cycles by waiting in a programmer created loop (I know there is a loop in there some where). With an asynchronous chip (and hopefully whole PC) one could design a truly event driven system. It would use very little in the way of resources when nothing was going on, instructions would only take as long as they need instead of having to wait for the clock in many cases and the logical design seems like it would be much simpler.
I hope asynchronous computing technologies become more available. The biggest obvious bonus is reduced energy consumption & heat output but I think and entirely asynchronous computer would be a marvelous piece of equipment and be extremely powerful for it's complexity.
The article and the company's site went into some depth on how this problem (over-loading of the users link) is prevented. The next major router above the target IP(s) would have to have client software of some sort installed which would allow the router with the larger link to filter the bad packets before they ever flood your link. Now I realize there is still the problem of what if the attack is large enough to take down the router above you? I imagine if (when) a system like this is deployed for a large corperation or government it would be deployed as far up the router path they could go to kill the flood as far away from the target IP as possible.
On another note it would be kinda cool if a system was ever developed that was close to fool-proof as far as dection of attacking IPs is concerned. It could be deployed intenet wide, made standard on routers and such. Then when someone tried to DDoS the routers, starting from the victim IP would block the attacking IPs back to their source. It would suck for those people with compromised PCs as their net connection was killed by their ISPs router but it would stop a lot of problems with this crap.
Now the problem with that kind of system is how do you tell what is good & what is bad traffic? Well, my guess is that problem is why a system like that doesn't already exist.
Actually a noise gate would be very effective. I am involved in our colleges technincal sound & lighting organization. We run pro level audio systems for concerts and such here. As was suggested a gate would cut the mic channel once the signal went below a certain level. Your worry about the sound comming from the confrence room speakers triggering the gate is semi valid. You would have to do a bit of trial and error in each room to set the db level to cut off the signal at. I figure if we use gates on a drum set at a concert with house speakers putting out 120+ db and them still only have the gates allow signal when the set is being played.
So I know the original post may not want to use hardware but gates are your best bet. If there could be any way to have each person's mic on it's own channel into the computer you may be able to write some simple audio proccessing software to mute a channel after the signal is below a certain level.
Actually I'm pretty sure this worm only affects un-patched versions of Outlook Express. Here is a bit of proof.
The worm exploits a vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express in an attempt to execute itself when you open or even preview the message. Information and a patch for the vulnerability can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bullet in / S01-020.asp. W32.Klez.gen@mm attempts to copy itself to all network shared drives that it finds.
This is an excerpt from http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc / ata/w32.klez.gen@mm.html#technicaldetails. Now honestly I don't love MS either but XP has one feature which saved my parents and a few un-knowing friends. Within a day of the patch coming out their PCs had updated themselves and fixed the whole. Although I do agree that deleting pound upon pound of that damned virus for a week straight was very annoying.
Many schools around the countries have similar policies. As a 3rd year CS student at Michigan Technological University our CS department has a similar policy. We are not allowed to discuss our programs with anyone other than professors and the lab instructors. Some professors allow students to discuss their code but it's still very strict. There are usually one or two cases a year of students getting caught discussing work and are put on probation. There has been a lot of dissension among students on the points of making it very difficult to learn and not being very realistic to what people will be doing at a job. Many off the professors have now ok'd collaboration as long as no code is exchanged and you wait a while after discussion before you being coding.
There seems to be a lot of people who really haven't read the site or understand how the technology works. Yes all those P2P filesharing utilities allow you to download the same file from multiple people at once, it's not all that impressive and many of the problems such as validating matching files and such have been worked out.
This solution is different in a few very large aspects. It allows a company to keep track of who is currently downloading a file from their webserver. This information is then sent to the clients who can start the P2P poriton of the process and download segments of the file from other users, releaving the load on the companies server. In contrast to those other P2P FILE SHARING programs which share all your files not just ones you are currently downloading. A system like this makes the file server not only the original source for that file but the P2P server to find other people to download that ONE file from.
I can see where people may not want their upload bandwidth being used by others. For this reason any site implementing this feature would probably end up having to provide the file for normal download. The selling point would be a possibly faster download for users of the technology.
I would personally love to see huge sites like FilePlanet put this to use. Granted it would only be truely usefull for sites that have a constant stream of concurrent downloads for a file at any point in time but it would be much better than having to wait 2 hours in line to download a file:-P
Right.... actually congress.ORG is a valid and extreamly usefull site. You can monitor current congresional activity. Send letters to representitives. Watch for upcoming issues and see how people vote. I currently am subscribed to a free service there that emails me with a weekly summary of congressional activity, upcoming items and how my representitives voted. I would highly recomend congress.org to anyone who cares what our government and their representitives are up to on a daily basis.
I know I just replied to a troll but hey, it was a good oportunity for me to get my opinion of congress.org out there.:-)
I encourage you all to go to Boucher's congress.org page and write him with your support for these issues. He seems to be a big advocate for consumer rights and fair use policies. I for one am also writing my state representatives with a link to the Wired story and encouragement to support Boucher on this issue. We really need to get the SlashDot community to use their numbers, opinions and large voice. When you see issues like this jump on the web or sit down with a good old pen and paper and write your state reps. The only way we are ever going to see a change that we like is to push for it!
Slashdot Mirror
That could work. I remember seeing a speaker design on /. a while ago that had a similar system.
Each speaker had a small mic that tried to adjust delay and EQ settings. A one time config, done by positioning a mic at each head location in the room would be better but more difficult.
I just wish some of the simpler features on pro audio equipment would work it's way down to consumer level stuff. Companies have no real incentive to clean up the sound since they can sell snake oil fixes for audio quality problems *cough*monster cable*cough*. Simply using balanced audio connections on all pre-amp connections would reduce a lot of noise coming from the usual mess of cables behind most peoples home theater systems. Moving the power supplies for the components away from any audio proccessing circutry and shielding them, Further reducing noise. Many suround sound systems would also benifit GREATLY from a simple user adjustable delay on each channel to help compensate for an odd speaker placement. Home and car audio has to be the biggest snake oil industry today. I know I'm glad I've worked with pro level equipment running concerts and such. Really opens your eyes to what needs to be there for a good clear sound.
My thoughts EXACTLY. I know quite a few teachers and they are NOT exactly the best paid people for the amount of work they do and the responsibility they have to make sure we are going to have good kids coming out of the school system. Our local districts are having to make choices about cutting extra-curriculars, sports, music programs. All because money is very tight. If the funds are available they could be put to much better use by the individual districts.
Um ... so I think I'm missing somthing. Whats stopping someone from using a diagnostic tool (since DivX is multipass now) from finding points where the compression goes to crap and just cutting out the bad frame? Yeah it's a LITTLE more work but as most compressing jobs take on the order of several hours I don't see why the pirating groups wouldn't do it to save the output quality.
If your on a windows machine there is an easy fix for PART of the problem. Just go into your hosts file:
I NNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
or
C:\W
and add the line
0.0.0.0 sitefinder.verisign.com
Now this won't fix the DNS resolution problems but it will at least stop your browser from hitting the sitefinder page.
An ISP wide implementation wouldn't work though. Bayesian Filtering is a very personal system. Each person's spam and non-spam emails contain very different words. An ISP wide system would maybe catch the very extream spam but without a high false positive rate it wouldn't be very effective.
Web based systems like hotmail could implement a Bayesian system on a per user basis. Each email teaches the filter. Have the strictness of the filter get slowly more restrictive as it sees more email. All the user would have to do is flag any spam that comes through as such and the system would update it's rules. The user would check the junk mail box every once in a while for false negitives. After using the account for a month or so I bet very little spam would ever get through to any one user. It would take little space as the word database for my last 12,000 emails is about 500K (words expire after not being seen for ~ 2 weeks).
In another article it is specified that HIS collection was only about 1100 songs. The 650,000 number comes from the number of songs in the FlatLan index he was running ... so he is getting sued for pretty much ALL the MP3s at MTU.
"rich" colleges? As a student @ mtu (not on the campus network or using file sharing) I know we aren't rich. Michigan is probably going to cut higher education funding ~ 10% ... tution is probably going up ~ 20% and there are MAJOR cuts across the board all through the school ... not to be mean but I hope I read this right and it's aimed at a student not MTU ... I don't think MTU can handle it.
There are a lot of people saying that encryption wouldn't be the answer but I beg to differ a bit.
If each file transfer between two clients was handled encrypted in the following manner:
- When you log on the network your client generates the equivilent of a PGP public/private key set.
- When a file is transfered from person A to person B person A encrypts it with person B's public key.
Now, no man in the middle can figure out what you are sending to anyone or what you are recieving from anyone
Yes they could just create their own client and do a search on the network and see what you have shared on your client but that is possible now.
The method described in the article doesn't do that though. It is a passive system that just monitors the data passing through each router. Encrypting all transfers and query responces would stop this kind of filtering as nothing will ever have the same signature twice.
That probably didn't make any sence but I've beeing diagraming crap for class for the past 12 hours and nothing makes sence any more!
As an "aspiring" software developer I've run into quite a few applications that have seemed very poorly written.
.com boom screwed the computer industry in many ways. One of the biggest was the shortage of programmers who have actually had a degree and know all the important theory behind software development that the "Teach yourself X in 30 days" book will never cover.
One of my pet peeves is a system the Pro A/V Company I work for uses to track rentals and equipment inventory. Not to be mean but the thing looks and acts like it was written by someone who had an intro VB5 class and decided they were a professionally programmer. The real big downside is we have not been able to find anything that functions any better than our current setup.
I get the feeling a lot of the time that the
Right now the employment trend is showing this. I have quite a few friends who decided to for-go College to teach them selves a bit of C++, VB or web development and go get hired by some company. It worked out well for a few years but now almost all of them are having problems. Talking with a few people, they and other they know who have similar experience are finding themselves being fired in favor of a college educated developer who also has some experience from doing student work somewhere.
The other advantage to the employer is a small team of developers who know how to write well documented extendable code can be much more efficient than a whole room full of people who can just get stuff done fast but maybe not right.
Another side of it is no matter what we want to think computing is still a very young industry. How many years have the majority of businesses in the US had computers? What experience as a developer can someone really pull on when we really don't have more than two generations of people who have done this type of work? Ignoring the obvious differences in complexities with many other industries they didn't get off to the greatest start either. The automobile took many years of experience with simple engines to get something that "worked" and to get to where we are today has taken even longer.
Time and experience are the only real answer to the problem. I don't see much of a way around that.
I have been using WinRar for years, it's been the easiest to use and most versatile archiving program for windows I have ever used. (yes this is a shameless plug but I think the product is that good) It completely supports the .rar and .zip formats along with being able to extract and/or decompress the following formats CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, ACE, UUE, BZ2, JAR, ISO.
The integration into the shell and the multitude of options for RAR archives like solid archives (treating the data as one big file to get better compression), recovery data (allows a good portion of a damaged archive to be reconstructed with little space overhead).
Overall I wish that rar would become the de facto standard (it's not completely free but 90% of the functionality is). The compression gain over zip is incredible and it's A LOT easier to use.
Um, actually as of a year or two ago Valve owns all the rights to counter-strike and are putting lots of $$ into it's continuing development. (The exact date of aquisition was just before CS hit version 1.0)
Valve knows that the only reason they are still selling half-life is CS and other such MODS. Half-Life was a great game but it says a lot about the engine if it is this flexible to still be in use for a continual mod making community.
True, but he made no claims of the LegWay being able to manuever in 3-space. The demo videos are quite impressive. It have very good control of it's movement in two dimensions. I don't imagine it would be too terribly difficult for him to add a third sensor and the code to handle inclines. Some kind of sensor to check for level based off gravity should be sufficient to adjust for an incline/decline.
http://www.filemirrors.com/
:-)
Pages upon pages of UT mirrors.
SubSection b.A states that only the file containing the copyrighted works can be affected. Any legitimate files must still be fully accessible and unaffected.
So following those lines share some random txt file you wrote. If they DDOS you sue them since the legitimate file was affected by their attack. You could probably even tip toe around the fact that you illegally had copyrighted works on your PC.
Of follow subsection b.C which states the file trader cannot sustain more than a $50.00 loss for any reason because of an attack.
They also have to notify the DOJ each time they want to do it. Now I'm going to be writing my representative tonight on this but realize that this is not an unrestricted license to hack by any means.
Serv-U http://www.serv-u.com/ has completely re-worked there FTP server and has SFTP options avalable. FlashFXP http://www.flashfxp.com has V2RC1 of their FTP client out which supports SFTP. I've played with both and they work very well and offer 128 bit SSL encryption for both data and control connections.
That is a good point. As is said in other posts a hybred chip would probably be the most success full. You will need a clock for anything that is time based. You may just be able to get by on a clock with say a 1ms resolution for timing things and controling program execution speed.
Currently a program doesn't send extra instructions to run at "normal speed" though it bases it's execution speed off the time kept by the OS. So even with an async chip you would still need a very accurate way to keep track of time.
-Eric Dalquist
Looking at the progression of programming languages it makes sense that the rest of the computer would follow. I don't know as much about older languages as I really need to make a strong argument but it seems that they are for the most part procedural and very few have any means for events or being driven by input or other actions. New incarnations of languages such as Java, C#, VB.net and even C++ (form my limited experience) are completely event driven or moving in that direction.
From a programmer's standpoint the code is generally easier to write and there is less of it with an event driven system. The other bonus is you aren't wasting cycles by waiting in a programmer created loop (I know there is a loop in there some where). With an asynchronous chip (and hopefully whole PC) one could design a truly event driven system. It would use very little in the way of resources when nothing was going on, instructions would only take as long as they need instead of having to wait for the clock in many cases and the logical design seems like it would be much simpler.
I hope asynchronous computing technologies become more available. The biggest obvious bonus is reduced energy consumption & heat output but I think and entirely asynchronous computer would be a marvelous piece of equipment and be extremely powerful for it's complexity.
The article and the company's site went into some depth on how this problem (over-loading of the users link) is prevented. The next major router above the target IP(s) would have to have client software of some sort installed which would allow the router with the larger link to filter the bad packets before they ever flood your link. Now I realize there is still the problem of what if the attack is large enough to take down the router above you? I imagine if (when) a system like this is deployed for a large corperation or government it would be deployed as far up the router path they could go to kill the flood as far away from the target IP as possible.
On another note it would be kinda cool if a system was ever developed that was close to fool-proof as far as dection of attacking IPs is concerned. It could be deployed intenet wide, made standard on routers and such. Then when someone tried to DDoS the routers, starting from the victim IP would block the attacking IPs back to their source. It would suck for those people with compromised PCs as their net connection was killed by their ISPs router but it would stop a lot of problems with this crap.
Now the problem with that kind of system is how do you tell what is good & what is bad traffic? Well, my guess is that problem is why a system like that doesn't already exist.
Actually a noise gate would be very effective. I am involved in our colleges technincal sound & lighting organization. We run pro level audio systems for concerts and such here. As was suggested a gate would cut the mic channel once the signal went below a certain level. Your worry about the sound comming from the confrence room speakers triggering the gate is semi valid. You would have to do a bit of trial and error in each room to set the db level to cut off the signal at. I figure if we use gates on a drum set at a concert with house speakers putting out 120+ db and them still only have the gates allow signal when the set is being played.
So I know the original post may not want to use hardware but gates are your best bet. If there could be any way to have each person's mic on it's own channel into the computer you may be able to write some simple audio proccessing software to mute a channel after the signal is below a certain level.
Actually I'm pretty sure this worm only affects un-patched versions of Outlook Express. Here is a bit of proof.
t in / S01-020.asp.
c / ata/w32.klez.gen@mm.html#technicaldetails. Now honestly I don't love MS either but XP has one feature which saved my parents and a few un-knowing friends. Within a day of the patch coming out their PCs had updated themselves and fixed the whole. Although I do agree that deleting pound upon pound of that damned virus for a week straight was very annoying.
The worm exploits a vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express in an attempt to execute itself when you open or even preview the message. Information and a patch for the vulnerability can be found at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulle
W32.Klez.gen@mm attempts to copy itself to all network shared drives that it finds.
This is an excerpt from http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/ven
Many schools around the countries have similar policies. As a 3rd year CS student at Michigan Technological University our CS department has a similar policy. We are not allowed to discuss our programs with anyone other than professors and the lab instructors. Some professors allow students to discuss their code but it's still very strict. There are usually one or two cases a year of students getting caught discussing work and are put on probation. There has been a lot of dissension among students on the points of making it very difficult to learn and not being very realistic to what people will be doing at a job. Many off the professors have now ok'd collaboration as long as no code is exchanged and you wait a while after discussion before you being coding.
-Eric Dalquist
There seems to be a lot of people who really haven't read the site or understand how the technology works. Yes all those P2P filesharing utilities allow you to download the same file from multiple people at once, it's not all that impressive and many of the problems such as validating matching files and such have been worked out.
:-P
This solution is different in a few very large aspects. It allows a company to keep track of who is currently downloading a file from their webserver. This information is then sent to the clients who can start the P2P poriton of the process and download segments of the file from other users, releaving the load on the companies server. In contrast to those other P2P FILE SHARING programs which share all your files not just ones you are currently downloading. A system like this makes the file server not only the original source for that file but the P2P server to find other people to download that ONE file from.
I can see where people may not want their upload bandwidth being used by others. For this reason any site implementing this feature would probably end up having to provide the file for normal download. The selling point would be a possibly faster download for users of the technology.
I would personally love to see huge sites like FilePlanet put this to use. Granted it would only be truely usefull for sites that have a constant stream of concurrent downloads for a file at any point in time but it would be much better than having to wait 2 hours in line to download a file
Right .... actually congress.ORG is a valid and extreamly usefull site. You can monitor current congresional activity. Send letters to representitives. Watch for upcoming issues and see how people vote. I currently am subscribed to a free service there that emails me with a weekly summary of congressional activity, upcoming items and how my representitives voted. I would highly recomend congress.org to anyone who cares what our government and their representitives are up to on a daily basis.
:-)
I know I just replied to a troll but hey, it was a good oportunity for me to get my opinion of congress.org out there.
I encourage you all to go to Boucher's congress.org page and write him with your support for these issues. He seems to be a big advocate for consumer rights and fair use policies. I for one am also writing my state representatives with a link to the Wired story and encouragement to support Boucher on this issue. We really need to get the SlashDot community to use their numbers, opinions and large voice. When you see issues like this jump on the web or sit down with a good old pen and paper and write your state reps. The only way we are ever going to see a change that we like is to push for it!