Could Time Warner Cable block sites that are critical of AOL?
Sure, I'd support their legal right to do so, say, come up with a web page saying "this site is blocked by AOL/Time Warner".
Of course, if they redirected requests to a apparently legitimate false (their own) website, I'd consider that illegal, since you're claiming to be www.wehateaol.com or similar. Probably fraud.
I'd also support the right of the media to do a nasty series of articles about this, and the right of the consumer to switch away from AOL after hearing that AOL does this.
Censorship isn't inherently wrong. If all the members of a church don't want porn on their public access computers, that's their right. People should be able to voluntarily engage in censorship. The problem with censorship is when something like the government starts doing it -- then you're screwed, because you can't ever escape it.
Entertaining considering my.sig, eh?
Should Universities acknowledge the RIAA letter and continue their P2P crackdowns?
This has nothing to do with whether netadmins should listen to the letter or not -- it only relates to whether, if they do decide to take action based on said letter, they have the righ to do so. Sure, I'd also support the right of a network admin to bandwidth cap or port-block ports on their own network. Of course, such things might factor into my decision to attend that university...
Ok, and what about Gator installing its ad/spyware without users noticing it? What about it opening endless of popup/popunder windows? What about it monitoring users browsing/shopping habits?
Ah, yes. More Internet legal crap being built to slightly alleviate Windows users' ridiculous spyware problems. Not an issue, except for the fact that then there's stupid case law that comes and slaps the rest of us in the face. Why should there be legal grounds for blocking or not blocking anything? Why should it be illegal for something like "smart tags (or whatever MS called its failed link-adding code)", or a Javascript-filtering proxy, or a text-based web browser to be used? The entire fucking point of HTML and the Web was that *anyone* could view the content however they wanted. Use whatever browser, whatever platform. Dumb terminal attached to a VAX/VMS system? No problem.
And now, thanks to *stupid* squabbles over ever-shrinking ad-revenue among dying dot coms, we're going to end up with a massive amount of legal baggage.
Let me put down my feelings. Anyone and anything should be able to process someone's web pages before the user views them, if the user so desires. If I want to have squid+sleezeball eat my ads, then I should be darn well allowed to do so. If I have a fetish with the color blue, I should be able to make my text always blue, and I should have the right to have user-defined !important CSS elements locally.
Now, some people are complaining that Gator does things behind a user's back. Okay, fair enough. Make a law about deceptive claims that software packages make. If you really want regulation over software, do something with a European flavor and require that any software sending personal information (as defined by law) give, in plain English and a standardized format, an enumeration of what information is being transmitted. Via a *standard API*, so that companies can log, filter, and deal with the software being run on their networks, and users can keep a log, etc.
But as for companies complaining about who has the right to slap the next flashing ad banner across some Windows user's screen...who really wants to give company A legal protection from company B?
Nothing would suck more than to have a bunch of "quick-fix" laws slapped on the Internet and software in general. SYN flooding is a federal crime now because for a while, people were pissed off and scared about a hole that was difficult to patch over in TCP. Of course, syncookies came out quickly, but now we have this stupid law on the books that's going to be there forever and ever. Let's not have another mess like that, please.
I think the arrogant jerks that violate the rules of internet RFCs should be outed or blacklisted.
Okay, maybe my feelings are a little less strong, but I feel frusteration about this as well. However...
Boo to arrogant linux-bsd-oriented self appointed security experts.
What in God's name does this have to do with Linux or BSD? If anything, I find overzealous network admins to be more frequently Windows-oriented (let's block random attachments because they might contain executables that are easy to execute with our company's default mailer!).
Actually, I'd like to see more network admins handle ECN. It's been around in Linux for a while now, and it helps everyone, and network admins are doing jack and shit about it.
What we need is MS to put out a new OS with ECN support so that network admins fix their routers/firewalls.
I wish people wouldn't do this. You don't "have Adobe" any more than you "have the Internet" or something similar.
I'd guess from the context that you're talking about Acrobat Reader. Unfortunately, people also use the term "I've got Adobe" to refer to Photoshop.
Granted, the origin of all this was companies, not consumers, with people like Microsoft and Netscape putting their company names into their product name, but it's confusing, and it's consumers that are keeping it going.
It's because of Altavista's lame syntax. Back in the day, Altavista used to bill their huge index (which now is dwarfed by Google's). They'd spit back this useless, gigantic number showing you how many possible hits you got. Back then, this was a measure of quality.
One huge way they increased mindshare was by making all searches "OR" by default. So if you search for "macintosh computer", you find all pages containing either word. You need "+macintosh +computer" if you want to do an AND search. Yup -- every word (well, or phrase) must be prefixed by a plus. Since Google's more honest and has removed us from these idiocies, I say good riddance.
Their documentation covers this. They do this randomly once every hundred searches or so. The idea is that this way they can't very well "track" people and people don't have to go through the delay-inducing redirect every time. However, they do like gathering statistics (mmm...Google people like data) and determining which sites are the most popular. It's the easiest way for them to tell whether they're giving out the right sites at the top of their hits.
Hotbot was a lot better before Wired bought it and made the interface suck.
I still find it useful (very rarely) for the single unique feature it has -- the ability to search for pages containing a link to a file of a specified extension.
Google hit the point where they decided that not losing money would be wise, and they've started to fill up on advertisements. For all we know Google might be 2MB of Flashvertisements in a years time.
Google is profitable. They also have a roughly even division between profit from their consumer-level ads market, and their indexing/searching services sold to businesses, which gives them the ability to jump into either market if one goes south.
Also, Google is hardly "filling up on advertisements".
Didn't get your ranking?
on
Altavista Renewed
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Complaints of bogus Google rankings are, I think, quite entertaining. What, AltaVista ranked your site higher than Google?
See, Google is a really unique entity. Most successful companies are driven by business types, suits. Google is a big collection of computer scientists doing research, and taking a no-compromises approach to product quality. They decided to go for long-term value -- having happy, well-served customers, instead of the many sites that went with pop-up ads, corporate tie-ins, sponsored portal links and the like during the dot-com era to boost short-term profit.
As a result, Google is on top. And they got on top by doing the Right Thing, unlike almost everyone else in the industry. It's an excellent example of the quality-through-competition-and-enormous-market that Internet visionary types have been trumpeting since the dawn of the Internet.
Of course, not everyone is happy about this. Competing search engines, the ones that frequently have far more money backing them, yet still can't keep up, complain bitterly. The marketing types that used to be able to trick the simple algorithms the old search engines used, or buy positioning in the searches, can no longer do that. I constantly hear bitter complaining about that as well.
But you know what? Despite all the mudslinging I've seen from these types, I've yet to see Google blow up yet. They consistently provide near-magical search accuracy, finding what I'm looking for. They have a simple interface that is built around what the Web was intended to look like (i.e. not pixel-positioned, invisible-table-laden crap). They cost me nothing, other than a few simple text based ads (which are small and have helped me occasionally). Google is absolutely incredible. They happened to be in the right position at the right time, and as consumers flock happily to using Google rather than remembering DNS entries for websites, a lot of companies feel unsettled. In their traditional world, they could *buy* a DNS name for a load of money. They could sue anyone with a competing name. All of a sudden, they're thrown into a world where *they may have to compete for recognition with their smaller competitors*. It's what the Internet had promised for ages -- the ability of the little business to compete with the large one, where incumbents have no inherent advantage. A lot of companies dislike this intensely, hence all the bogus lawsuites and claims of falsifying search results that Google has made.
Google has always claimed that they wouldn't muck with search result ordering because it would cause customers to move away from their then-inferior product. I think that they're true to that, but it doesn't matter -- if they aren't, eventually people will migrate to whatever better search engine pops up. The sort of folks at Google understand trends and systemwide numerical movements based on small factors -- I doubt they'd make an argument like this without it being reasonable.
Google has even put out a whitepaper describing how their search engine works.
So we have a free service that has lesser ads than almost any commercial website, has uncanny accuracy, does *not* (unlike rivals who openly sell them) sell page rankings, has a science/engineering culture (instead of a business one), and is fantastically successful.
Finally, Google is under no onus to do anything. They are not a meaningful monopoly. The entire point of a monopoly is that you can erect barriers to competition by using your clout. You can always easily go to another website, and Google even published a fair bit of the foundational technology in their engine. You can't really go much further than they did to be open, free, and competitive. The point is that they have a superior product, and they are unwilling to screw their customers over to gain short-term bucks.
Contrast this to Microsoft, where you have a vast array of monopolies, compatibility and technical information issues that are visciously used to guard their markets, secrecy, inferior products, and a willingness to gouge the customer and do everything possible to keep them in line. And yet, Microsoft gets a slap on the wrist. If that's acceptable, Google sure as hell is.
When I search for "Altavista" on Google, I get Altavista. When I get something else, *then* I'll start being suspicious.
Finally, you claim that Google returns poor search results. I disagree. I have found that Google consistently returns the most useful results of any search engine I've used, and does a fantastic job of shoving "junk" results well after the "useful" results.
In fact, the bible can be shown to be very derivative if you really get down to it.
I'm dubious. The Bible was a rather early written work. I'm not saying that it *isn't* derivative (heck, I strongly suspect that it is), but as for actually showing it....I doubt it.
If a mail server is "trashed" or "crashes" (I've also seen complained about) simply because it was sent a large email, then the server is, frankly, buggy. Instead of trying to run with a flaky server and put policy requirements on users to work around the problems in the server, use a non-broken server.
The problem with sending the files through email is that the file size increase by 1/3
No 8-bit MIME?
and it generally seems slower.
[shrug] Unless the server is poorly designed and is the bottleneck, that shouldn't be the case. A TCP connection is a TCP connection is a TCP connection.
But even aside from that, a lot of widely-used C APIs are not reentrant, and can't be made so because of the use of static data, which makes it hard to add support via libraries. gethostbyname() is particularly annoying (for some reason, up until recently, gethostbyname_r() wasn't even in the man pages on my Linux box, and the parameters to the damn thing vary between Solaris and Linux...). errno doesn't lend itself well to multithreading. strtok() isn't either...
And while I'm talking about C/C++ issues with threads, I'm not much of an SML fan, but the speed of spawning and destroying threads in CML (the concurrent extensions) makes the C-based pthreads look pathetic.:-(
That would be almost completely useless. The whole point is to fade into the background noise of network traffic. Your suggestion is one of the absolutely stupidest things you could do in terms of attracting attention. It would set off port scan detectors, anything measuring bandwidth used by an arbitrary protocol (which has logged no traffic for the thing for months, probably) would go off, any programs looking for corrupted packets of a particular type would set off warnings...
What the hell does Big Brother have to do with ISPs? 1984 probably has more misused ideas than any other book of all time. You're comparing a private company that has decided to discontinue offering a particular unprofitable service to save themselves money...to a state-controlled regime.
The power company does care, to some degree, what' you're doing with your power. If you use juice in massive surges, i.e. causing brownouts in your neighborhood, then letting it go back to normal, they will be on your ass.
One reason that companies that use huge amounts of electricity over short spans of time (like electric arc furnaces or something) generally have to have made special arrangements with the power company...and sometimes they're simply restricted from using said electricity.
They don't *need* to, because they can just say that you're exceeding your upload limits. They don't care about *what* is generating the upwards traffic -- they just want users not saturating it.
If you were going to do what you're suggesting, you'd want something that's SSL-tunneled and runs on 443. They can't possibly monitor that, particularly if the remote P2P client also responds to HTTPS requests (their probes) with a valid response code (like 503 or something).
I have never understood the hostility of mail admins to large emails. Simply because a number of mail servers have piss-poor performance with large emails is not a reason to go crazy over them. Fix the mail server.
Oh, and the fact that some people still use POP3, and their life is made miserable when they're working with large files over a modem. People should use IMAP.
There are quite legitimate uses for file transfer via email. Most people (i.e. not UNIX geeks) do not want to maintain a file server and keep their system up 24/7. The other person may not be at the computer...this puts it in their "queue of things to deal with".
If you mean "why don't people use ftp to transfer files to a third, intermediary system that acts as a drop box"...well, that's doing exactly what you're doing with SMTP. Why *not* do it with SMTP?
Finally, from a user perspective, mail is much more convenient to use than dedicated file transfer protocols. Most people constantly use a mail program and know how to use it reasonably well. Everyone has an email address (a more useful mapping to users than an IP address that FTP would require), and there are no worries about different companies having different places to drop files. Email lets users sort and date emails, and tag files as being from some user. It makes it accessable from anywhere they can get at their email.
Another thing that mail admins should live with is large mailboxes -- not just a single mail, but people leaving mail on the server, or keeping old mail around on the server. This is one of the *best* things to happen to IT. It's been the holy grail of NC designers for years. Centralize data storage to reduce costs, allow reuse of hardware, and facilitate backup.
Frankly, if anything, mail should be extended to have *better* support for this (like resumable transfers, etc). The FTP model -- where you have machines that are always up 24/7, users that associate well with "computers" rather than "other people", users that are familiar with a larger number of programs, and a network that has no firewall or other restrictions -- simply doesn't fit the reality of what's going on at businesses today. It's fantastic for techies who want to work with their own systems, but less good for your average end users.
While Java is not the end-all be-all, it has multithreading support that is far better than C/C++. This is quite convenient for use in the lightweight networking tasks that Java excels at.
While it's great that Linux has excellent multithreading support, it's a shame, however, that many programmers do not take advantage of multi-threading in their programs.
Multi-threading is an easy way to cut down response latency in programs and produce a responsive UI. Unfortunately, it also has many drawbacks -- it can actually be slower (due to having to maintain a bunch of locks...you're usually only better off with threads if you have a very few), and it's one of the very best ways to introduce very hard to debug bugs.
I do think that a lot of GTK programmers, at least, block the UI when they'd be better off creating a single thread to handle UI issues and hand this data off to the core program. Also, when doing I/O that doesn't affect the rest of the program heavily, it can be more straightforward to use threads -- if you have multiple TCP connections running, it can be worthwhile to use a thread for each.
There are a not insignificant number of libraries that are non-reentrant, and have issues with threads. Xlib, gtk+1 (dunno about 2), etc.
Threading is just a paradigm. Just about anything you can manage to pull off with threading you can pull off without threading. The question is just which is cleaner in your case -- worrying about the interactions of multiple threads, or having more complex event handlers in a single-threaded program.
The other problem is that UNIX has a good fork() multi-process model, so a lot of times when a Windows programmer would have to use threads, a UNIX programmer can get away with fork().
So you only really want to use threads when: * you have a number of tasks, each of which operates mostly independently * when these tasks *do* need to affect each other, they do so with *large* amounts of data (so the traditional process model doesn't get as good performance). * You have more CPU-bound "tasks" than CPUs, so you derive a benefit from avoiding context switching that characterizes the fork() model. * you are using reentrant libraries in everything that the threads must use.
Also, you claim this Half-Life (never heard of it) was more popular than Quake? I doubt that. You'd see it in stores or see it mentioned on Usenet if it was.
Where do you *live*?
Half-Life has been the foundation for the most popular FPS (unless UT took it away for a bit) for years. The original Half-Life was perhaps the first popular FPS to have a decent story (ignoring, of course, the elderly and much-revered Marathon (I challenge *anyone* to find a game that has developed a fan base as fanatical as the one that has developed the site at the other end of this link -- look at the "Facts and Puzzling things about..." sections)). Half-Life vastly changed the face of the FPS industry, and brought in much more scripting and plot work to FPSes, leading to impressive newer games like Max Payne.
Half-Life spawned two short sequels from Valve (Opposing Forces and Blue Shift). It is the game that the phenomonally popular Counterstrike mod was made for.
Half-Life is also notable for its very quick software renderer, its introduction of the newer "multiple weapons per slot" weapon inventory system, and popularizing manually-triggerable reloading.
You poor Unix guys are struggling through something we all went through years ago -- learning how to think more sophisticated than a single thread of control correctly.
What the heck does altering the structure of a thread *library* have to do with application-level thread programming? What are you talking about?
It's because of Solaris's inability to do 1:1 decently that we had Sun pushing for POSIX being M:N and consequently making the entire Linux world miserable.
Most of the good stuff MS sells is not made by them. They did not design the Intellimouse mechanisms (I believe that HP did the work for them). They do not write the *good* games that they publish (like Close Combat). They did not make their excellent fonts in-house -- those were contracted out for.
Microsoft is one of the *least* "innovative" companies I can think of, though they do *distribute* a few nice items.
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Could Time Warner Cable block sites that are critical of AOL?
.sig, eh?
Sure, I'd support their legal right to do so, say, come up with a web page saying "this site is blocked by AOL/Time Warner".
Of course, if they redirected requests to a apparently legitimate false (their own) website, I'd consider that illegal, since you're claiming to be www.wehateaol.com or similar. Probably fraud.
I'd also support the right of the media to do a nasty series of articles about this, and the right of the consumer to switch away from AOL after hearing that AOL does this.
Censorship isn't inherently wrong. If all the members of a church don't want porn on their public access computers, that's their right. People should be able to voluntarily engage in censorship. The problem with censorship is when something like the government starts doing it -- then you're screwed, because you can't ever escape it.
Entertaining considering my
Should Universities acknowledge the RIAA letter and continue their P2P crackdowns?
This has nothing to do with whether netadmins should listen to the letter or not -- it only relates to whether, if they do decide to take action based on said letter, they have the righ to do so. Sure, I'd also support the right of a network admin to bandwidth cap or port-block ports on their own network. Of course, such things might factor into my decision to attend that university...
Ok, and what about Gator installing its ad/spyware without users noticing it? What about it opening endless of popup/popunder windows? What about it monitoring users browsing/shopping habits?
Ah, yes. More Internet legal crap being built to slightly alleviate Windows users' ridiculous spyware problems. Not an issue, except for the fact that then there's stupid case law that comes and slaps the rest of us in the face. Why should there be legal grounds for blocking or not blocking anything? Why should it be illegal for something like "smart tags (or whatever MS called its failed link-adding code)", or a Javascript-filtering proxy, or a text-based web browser to be used? The entire fucking point of HTML and the Web was that *anyone* could view the content however they wanted. Use whatever browser, whatever platform. Dumb terminal attached to a VAX/VMS system? No problem.
And now, thanks to *stupid* squabbles over ever-shrinking ad-revenue among dying dot coms, we're going to end up with a massive amount of legal baggage.
Let me put down my feelings. Anyone and anything should be able to process someone's web pages before the user views them, if the user so desires. If I want to have squid+sleezeball eat my ads, then I should be darn well allowed to do so. If I have a fetish with the color blue, I should be able to make my text always blue, and I should have the right to have user-defined !important CSS elements locally.
Now, some people are complaining that Gator does things behind a user's back. Okay, fair enough. Make a law about deceptive claims that software packages make. If you really want regulation over software, do something with a European flavor and require that any software sending personal information (as defined by law) give, in plain English and a standardized format, an enumeration of what information is being transmitted. Via a *standard API*, so that companies can log, filter, and deal with the software being run on their networks, and users can keep a log, etc.
But as for companies complaining about who has the right to slap the next flashing ad banner across some Windows user's screen...who really wants to give company A legal protection from company B?
Nothing would suck more than to have a bunch of "quick-fix" laws slapped on the Internet and software in general. SYN flooding is a federal crime now because for a while, people were pissed off and scared about a hole that was difficult to patch over in TCP. Of course, syncookies came out quickly, but now we have this stupid law on the books that's going to be there forever and ever. Let's not have another mess like that, please.
Thanks. Coments are, as always, welcome.
I think the arrogant jerks that violate the rules of internet RFCs should be outed or blacklisted.
Okay, maybe my feelings are a little less strong, but I feel frusteration about this as well. However...
Boo to arrogant linux-bsd-oriented self appointed security experts.
What in God's name does this have to do with Linux or BSD? If anything, I find overzealous network admins to be more frequently Windows-oriented (let's block random attachments because they might contain executables that are easy to execute with our company's default mailer!).
Actually, I'd like to see more network admins handle ECN. It's been around in Linux for a while now, and it helps everyone, and network admins are doing jack and shit about it.
What we need is MS to put out a new OS with ECN support so that network admins fix their routers/firewalls.
Got the latest M$ XP Pro, and Adobe...
I wish people wouldn't do this. You don't "have Adobe" any more than you "have the Internet" or something similar.
I'd guess from the context that you're talking about Acrobat Reader. Unfortunately, people also use the term "I've got Adobe" to refer to Photoshop.
Granted, the origin of all this was companies, not consumers, with people like Microsoft and Netscape putting their company names into their product name, but it's confusing, and it's consumers that are keeping it going.
Encoding binary files for transfer via SMTP makes them 25% larger.
Use 8-bit MIME.
It's because of Altavista's lame syntax. Back in the day, Altavista used to bill their huge index (which now is dwarfed by Google's). They'd spit back this useless, gigantic number showing you how many possible hits you got. Back then, this was a measure of quality.
One huge way they increased mindshare was by making all searches "OR" by default. So if you search for "macintosh computer", you find all pages containing either word. You need "+macintosh +computer" if you want to do an AND search. Yup -- every word (well, or phrase) must be prefixed by a plus. Since Google's more honest and has removed us from these idiocies, I say good riddance.
Their documentation covers this. They do this randomly once every hundred searches or so. The idea is that this way they can't very well "track" people and people don't have to go through the delay-inducing redirect every time. However, they do like gathering statistics (mmm...Google people like data) and determining which sites are the most popular. It's the easiest way for them to tell whether they're giving out the right sites at the top of their hits.
Hotbot was a lot better before Wired bought it and made the interface suck.
I still find it useful (very rarely) for the single unique feature it has -- the ability to search for pages containing a link to a file of a specified extension.
Google hit the point where they decided that not losing money would be wise, and they've started to fill up on advertisements. For all we know Google might be 2MB of Flashvertisements in a years time.
Google is profitable. They also have a roughly even division between profit from their consumer-level ads market, and their indexing/searching services sold to businesses, which gives them the ability to jump into either market if one goes south.
Also, Google is hardly "filling up on advertisements".
Complaints of bogus Google rankings are, I think, quite entertaining. What, AltaVista ranked your site higher than Google?
See, Google is a really unique entity. Most successful companies are driven by business types, suits. Google is a big collection of computer scientists doing research, and taking a no-compromises approach to product quality. They decided to go for long-term value -- having happy, well-served customers, instead of the many sites that went with pop-up ads, corporate tie-ins, sponsored portal links and the like during the dot-com era to boost short-term profit.
As a result, Google is on top. And they got on top by doing the Right Thing, unlike almost everyone else in the industry. It's an excellent example of the quality-through-competition-and-enormous-market that Internet visionary types have been trumpeting since the dawn of the Internet.
Of course, not everyone is happy about this. Competing search engines, the ones that frequently have far more money backing them, yet still can't keep up, complain bitterly. The marketing types that used to be able to trick the simple algorithms the old search engines used, or buy positioning in the searches, can no longer do that. I constantly hear bitter complaining about that as well.
But you know what? Despite all the mudslinging I've seen from these types, I've yet to see Google blow up yet. They consistently provide near-magical search accuracy, finding what I'm looking for. They have a simple interface that is built around what the Web was intended to look like (i.e. not pixel-positioned, invisible-table-laden crap). They cost me nothing, other than a few simple text based ads (which are small and have helped me occasionally). Google is absolutely incredible. They happened to be in the right position at the right time, and as consumers flock happily to using Google rather than remembering DNS entries for websites, a lot of companies feel unsettled. In their traditional world, they could *buy* a DNS name for a load of money. They could sue anyone with a competing name. All of a sudden, they're thrown into a world where *they may have to compete for recognition with their smaller competitors*. It's what the Internet had promised for ages -- the ability of the little business to compete with the large one, where incumbents have no inherent advantage. A lot of companies dislike this intensely, hence all the bogus lawsuites and claims of falsifying search results that Google has made.
Google has always claimed that they wouldn't muck with search result ordering because it would cause customers to move away from their then-inferior product. I think that they're true to that, but it doesn't matter -- if they aren't, eventually people will migrate to whatever better search engine pops up. The sort of folks at Google understand trends and systemwide numerical movements based on small factors -- I doubt they'd make an argument like this without it being reasonable.
Google has even put out a whitepaper describing how their search engine works.
So we have a free service that has lesser ads than almost any commercial website, has uncanny accuracy, does *not* (unlike rivals who openly sell them) sell page rankings, has a science/engineering culture (instead of a business one), and is fantastically successful.
Finally, Google is under no onus to do anything. They are not a meaningful monopoly. The entire point of a monopoly is that you can erect barriers to competition by using your clout. You can always easily go to another website, and Google even published a fair bit of the foundational technology in their engine. You can't really go much further than they did to be open, free, and competitive. The point is that they have a superior product, and they are unwilling to screw their customers over to gain short-term bucks.
Contrast this to Microsoft, where you have a vast array of monopolies, compatibility and technical information issues that are visciously used to guard their markets, secrecy, inferior products, and a willingness to gouge the customer and do everything possible to keep them in line. And yet, Microsoft gets a slap on the wrist. If that's acceptable, Google sure as hell is.
When I search for "Altavista" on Google, I get Altavista. When I get something else, *then* I'll start being suspicious.
Finally, you claim that Google returns poor search results. I disagree. I have found that Google consistently returns the most useful results of any search engine I've used, and does a fantastic job of shoving "junk" results well after the "useful" results.
In fact, the bible can be shown to be very derivative if you really get down to it.
I'm dubious. The Bible was a rather early written work. I'm not saying that it *isn't* derivative (heck, I strongly suspect that it is), but as for actually showing it....I doubt it.
If a mail server is "trashed" or "crashes" (I've also seen complained about) simply because it was sent a large email, then the server is, frankly, buggy. Instead of trying to run with a flaky server and put policy requirements on users to work around the problems in the server, use a non-broken server.
The problem with sending the files through email is that the file size increase by 1/3
No 8-bit MIME?
and it generally seems slower.
[shrug] Unless the server is poorly designed and is the bottleneck, that shouldn't be the case. A TCP connection is a TCP connection is a TCP connection.
Yup. :-)
:-(
But even aside from that, a lot of widely-used C APIs are not reentrant, and can't be made so because of the use of static data, which makes it hard to add support via libraries. gethostbyname() is particularly annoying (for some reason, up until recently, gethostbyname_r() wasn't even in the man pages on my Linux box, and the parameters to the damn thing vary between Solaris and Linux...). errno doesn't lend itself well to multithreading. strtok() isn't either...
And while I'm talking about C/C++ issues with threads, I'm not much of an SML fan, but the speed of spawning and destroying threads in CML (the concurrent extensions) makes the C-based pthreads look pathetic.
That would be almost completely useless. The whole point is to fade into the background noise of network traffic. Your suggestion is one of the absolutely stupidest things you could do in terms of attracting attention. It would set off port scan detectors, anything measuring bandwidth used by an arbitrary protocol (which has logged no traffic for the thing for months, probably) would go off, any programs looking for corrupted packets of a particular type would set off warnings...
What the hell does Big Brother have to do with ISPs? 1984 probably has more misused ideas than any other book of all time. You're comparing a private company that has decided to discontinue offering a particular unprofitable service to save themselves money...to a state-controlled regime.
The power company does care, to some degree, what' you're doing with your power. If you use juice in massive surges, i.e. causing brownouts in your neighborhood, then letting it go back to normal, they will be on your ass.
One reason that companies that use huge amounts of electricity over short spans of time (like electric arc furnaces or something) generally have to have made special arrangements with the power company...and sometimes they're simply restricted from using said electricity.
They don't *need* to, because they can just say that you're exceeding your upload limits. They don't care about *what* is generating the upwards traffic -- they just want users not saturating it.
If you were going to do what you're suggesting, you'd want something that's SSL-tunneled and runs on 443. They can't possibly monitor that, particularly if the remote P2P client also responds to HTTPS requests (their probes) with a valid response code (like 503 or something).
I have never understood the hostility of mail admins to large emails. Simply because a number of mail servers have piss-poor performance with large emails is not a reason to go crazy over them. Fix the mail server.
Oh, and the fact that some people still use POP3, and their life is made miserable when they're working with large files over a modem. People should use IMAP.
There are quite legitimate uses for file transfer via email. Most people (i.e. not UNIX geeks) do not want to maintain a file server and keep their system up 24/7. The other person may not be at the computer...this puts it in their "queue of things to deal with".
If you mean "why don't people use ftp to transfer files to a third, intermediary system that acts as a drop box"...well, that's doing exactly what you're doing with SMTP. Why *not* do it with SMTP?
Finally, from a user perspective, mail is much more convenient to use than dedicated file transfer protocols. Most people constantly use a mail program and know how to use it reasonably well. Everyone has an email address (a more useful mapping to users than an IP address that FTP would require), and there are no worries about different companies having different places to drop files. Email lets users sort and date emails, and tag files as being from some user. It makes it accessable from anywhere they can get at their email.
Another thing that mail admins should live with is large mailboxes -- not just a single mail, but people leaving mail on the server, or keeping old mail around on the server. This is one of the *best* things to happen to IT. It's been the holy grail of NC designers for years. Centralize data storage to reduce costs, allow reuse of hardware, and facilitate backup.
Frankly, if anything, mail should be extended to have *better* support for this (like resumable transfers, etc). The FTP model -- where you have machines that are always up 24/7, users that associate well with "computers" rather than "other people", users that are familiar with a larger number of programs, and a network that has no firewall or other restrictions -- simply doesn't fit the reality of what's going on at businesses today. It's fantastic for techies who want to work with their own systems, but less good for your average end users.
While Java is not the end-all be-all, it has multithreading support that is far better than C/C++. This is quite convenient for use in the lightweight networking tasks that Java excels at.
While it's great that Linux has excellent multithreading support, it's a shame, however, that many programmers do not take advantage of multi-threading in their programs.
Multi-threading is an easy way to cut down response latency in programs and produce a responsive UI. Unfortunately, it also has many drawbacks -- it can actually be slower (due to having to maintain a bunch of locks...you're usually only better off with threads if you have a very few), and it's one of the very best ways to introduce very hard to debug bugs.
I do think that a lot of GTK programmers, at least, block the UI when they'd be better off creating a single thread to handle UI issues and hand this data off to the core program. Also, when doing I/O that doesn't affect the rest of the program heavily, it can be more straightforward to use threads -- if you have multiple TCP connections running, it can be worthwhile to use a thread for each.
There are a not insignificant number of libraries that are non-reentrant, and have issues with threads. Xlib, gtk+1 (dunno about 2), etc.
Threading is just a paradigm. Just about anything you can manage to pull off with threading you can pull off without threading. The question is just which is cleaner in your case -- worrying about the interactions of multiple threads, or having more complex event handlers in a single-threaded program.
The other problem is that UNIX has a good fork() multi-process model, so a lot of times when a Windows programmer would have to use threads, a UNIX programmer can get away with fork().
So you only really want to use threads when:
* you have a number of tasks, each of which operates mostly independently
* when these tasks *do* need to affect each other, they do so with *large* amounts of data (so the traditional process model doesn't get as good performance).
* You have more CPU-bound "tasks" than CPUs, so you derive a benefit from avoiding context switching that characterizes the fork() model.
* you are using reentrant libraries in everything that the threads must use.
Also, you claim this Half-Life (never heard of it) was more popular than Quake? I doubt that. You'd see it in stores or see it mentioned on Usenet if it was.
Where do you *live*?
Half-Life has been the foundation for the most popular FPS (unless UT took it away for a bit) for years. The original Half-Life was perhaps the first popular FPS to have a decent story (ignoring, of course, the elderly and much-revered Marathon (I challenge *anyone* to find a game that has developed a fan base as fanatical as the one that has developed the site at the other end of this link -- look at the "Facts and Puzzling things about..." sections)). Half-Life vastly changed the face of the FPS industry, and brought in much more scripting and plot work to FPSes, leading to impressive newer games like Max Payne.
Half-Life spawned two short sequels from Valve (Opposing Forces and Blue Shift). It is the game that the phenomonally popular Counterstrike mod was made for.
Half-Life is also notable for its very quick software renderer, its introduction of the newer "multiple weapons per slot" weapon inventory system, and popularizing manually-triggerable reloading.
You poor Unix guys are struggling through something we all went through years ago -- learning how to think more sophisticated than a single thread of control correctly.
What the heck does altering the structure of a thread *library* have to do with application-level thread programming? What are you talking about?
It's because of Solaris's inability to do 1:1 decently that we had Sun pushing for POSIX being M:N and consequently making the entire Linux world miserable.
1:1 is a cleaner, simpler model.
Most of the good stuff MS sells is not made by them. They did not design the Intellimouse mechanisms (I believe that HP did the work for them). They do not write the *good* games that they publish (like Close Combat). They did not make their excellent fonts in-house -- those were contracted out for.
Microsoft is one of the *least* "innovative" companies I can think of, though they do *distribute* a few nice items.