I'm not *arguing* that it's attractive to the company providing the service. P2P is great for them. The problem I have is why on earth the *consumer* would want to pay *and* pitch in time, effort, and bandwidth.
This derived work is under the copyright of the original author of the magazine.
No, it is not. He can use his copyright on the *original* work to prevent you from distributing your derived work. He certainly does not have copyright over your derived work.
I do not accept the terms of the GPL
This is semantics. The GPL is designed to work hand in hand with copyright. It uses copyright to enforce what it does. Arguing whether copyright or the GPL is the element causing your punishment is silly.
Look...copyright law is a fundamental building block of the GPL, just as atoms are of biological viruses. That doesn't make copyright law viral any more than atoms are viral.
No, I mean where's the incentive for the customer in using P2P at *all* if they aren't saving money by not paying for the item (or paying less)?
I would imagine that once the feeling of a "community" working together, where everyone pitches in some bandwidth and everyone saves money, goes away, people are just going to want to buy the product directly from the company (possibly electronically) or from bricks and mortar.
MS is not going to get hit by antitrust people during the Bush administration, no matter what they do.
Archie! Live!
on
Gnutella2?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I want archie back. Current web-based FTP search engines suck. I like the command line search...pop in the name of a software package like openoffice, and it spits back several sites.
After a lot of work, six months ago I got an archie client compiling. Took some work on the source, but got it up. Then I took another two weeks to find a working archie server. It was the last public one, I'm fairly certain.
Two months after that, it went down. I was probably the only person that used it in ages, and probably the admins were wondering what was going on.
WTF would any users donate their disk/bandwidth to a DRM-using legal media distribution system?
That might get IPO dollars, but it's not going to work.
A *real* anti-leech/anti attacker system proposal
on
Gnutella2?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
no leeching is far better than Kazaa
I seriously doubt that. Any current "no leeching" mechanisms I've seen are severely flawed and rely on trusted remote code.
People who whine and bitch that people are bypassing them are ignoring the fact that the design is fundamentally wrong. You cannot trust code on another computer. Period. It *will* be broken.
It is possible to build a trust web (where you have metered trust, instead of just a binary "trusted" or "not trusted" a la PGP). Have each user generate a public/private key pair. Have each person maintain a list of trusted users. These users are identified by their public keys. "Trust values" are assigned to each user in the list-holding user's trust list. The scale is arbitrary -- maybe "100" means trust a lot and "1" means trust a little, and "0" means no trust. Trust is generally positive (more on that later).
When you want to determine "absolute trust" of a user, you run out and download the trust lists of all the users from them in your trust list (this spans only two hops out on the web of trust...you could go further, though I think this is sufficient). Person can grant absolute trust to person B as following: (points of trust A gives B in A's local trust list)/(total points of trust A gives A's local trust list)* (points of trust A has in our local trust list).
Then, attackers like the RIAA will be excluded from the network of trust, having low or no trust values, as they hand out corrupted files.
Trust lists can be redownloaded whenever. Cache 'em for weeks if you want.
Clients could automatically add a point of trust per data unit downloaded succesfully from a remote client...then, if it's a bad download, the local user could strip all trust away.
Trust could be used for ranking priorities to let people download from you, determining which copy of a file is "authentic" and which is bogus, etc.
Other possibilities: the reason we don't allow negative trust or blacklists -- only whitelists -- is because it's usually fairly easy to regenerate a new IP, and this results in bloating attacks against users maintaing blacklists. If a user can present something that "costs" them something to obtain, like a VeriSign cert or other "expensive" (i.e. can't regenerate on your computer easily) proof of identity (doesn't have to be your RL name -- could be a signed cert endorsing a 'nym from Zero Knowledge), then give them automatically a certain number of points of trust (client configurable). Why? Because it's much less likely that they're running out and buying a new Verisign cert for each attack. They're opening themselves up to blacklisting.
You could purge year-old entries from your local trust list to stay up to date...oh, there's tons of possible tweaks.
The trust network simply sits on top of another P2P network. It does not require that users not download from users with zero trust -- it simply provides some extremely useful information which is essential to implementing strong antileech/anti network attack protections, or what have you. It is also very difficult to attack. PGP is much more vulnerable, since you just need one stupid person in your web of trust to okay someone, their binary trust bit flips to 1, and they're in your web. If you don't trust someone much, and they give someone else a little tiny bit of trust...that person is only very slightly trusted.
Drawbacks: My analysis of this approach has found only two drawbacks. First, there is some disk and memory overhead to store cached trust information locally. Gnutella clients already store IPs for much of the network, so it shouldn't be prohibitive, though -- we don't have to handle the whole network, just *trusted* users. The second one is that letting people download your trust list -- crucial to the functioning of the system -- can leak some information. It means that you "trust" some user on the network. If that user provides nothing but, say, child porn, anyone on the trust network has circumstantial evidence that you have downloaded child porn. Of course, you could have granted the person trust for any number of other reasons, but it is a small amount of information leakage, and worth mentioning.
You know, this "not a CD player" and "not a CD" spiel came off as propoganda at first, but it's pretty legitimate.
I've never purchased an audio CD in my life -- I don't own a single one (well, except for a hybrid CD, Marathon I, that also has the game music in Red Book).
I was thinking, recently, about possibly purchasing one, though I'd lose my reputation, but the rapid elimination of CDs has solved this at two levels -- I have far less interest in a CD-like device with no error correction, and even in the unlikely case I did purchase one, it wouldn't be a CD.
It's a shame that all the Windows P2P clients use things that look like their UI designer is an ex-web designer.
UNIX P2P clients don't suffer from this problem.
Re:Gnutella2 - The real story!
on
Gnutella2?
·
· Score: 2
Sharezilla is more than welcome to use their "G2" protocol. They can communicate with the other "Sharezilla" users out there. Woohoo!
Re:Gnutella2 - The real story!
on
Gnutella2?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
At first I saw you worked for LimeWire, and felt a small amount of respect - then I remember the bullshit hoops I had to go through to clean my system of the utter crap it installed through my system directories and the registry.
I hate to say it, but I'm starting to get a pretty good chuckle every time I see some poor Windows user griping about the amount of pain they go through to get "good downloadz". I hear whining about "pop up" or "pop under" ads. I hear complaining about "spyware". I hear complaining about "mandatory sharing" in P2P apps. I hear people frantic that newer P2P apps can "fake" shares (like on Direct Connect) because of piss-poorly designed architectures involving trusted remote code.
It's all really funny to those of us who have been using open source P2P clients and Mozilla on Linux. *We* haven't seen a single one of these problems, and *we* aren't suffering.
But, you know what? I encourage pop-ups. And intrusive advertising, spyware, and everything else. Why? It doesn't affect me in the least, and it means that *you* are subsidizing the good life for me. Each pop-up you see funds another good, clean pop-up free page for me.
Of course, someday you people are going to catch on. You're going to use Mozilla, use Linux. You're going to use better P2P clients. But until that day, the rest of us are going to enjoy the good life.
This guy is a troll. He's pushing IE, closed source, propriatary standards, and the domination of MS over the W3C and standards committees. He's saying that product "foo" is better than your product to try to sting you a bit, and then bashing the GDF, which *developed* the stuff he's lauding.
Don't bite.
Re:Crossing fingers
on
Gnutella2?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Yup. Raphael Manfreti (of gtk-gnutella fame) and the Limewire team (also major GDF developers), get no credit, and these "Sharezilla" wankers get a Slashdot link.
Gnutella started out as an "interesting project". It is now one of the most heavily developed an analyzed projects -- somewhat less centralized than the Freenet project, but far more skill (and variety of clients) on this than, say, FastTrack and the much-lauded Kazaa.
I'm a little more disturbed by the fact that the CIA is carrying out robotic assassinations. If we really knew where the guy is, why the hell couldn't we have arrested him? Gas his, come in, and give him his day in court.
You can *not* destroy a nuclear ICBM in flight and "not reduce its destructive power". How in the hell do you expect it to detonate when it reaches the target?
You're right about large nations overwhelming ABM.
I'm a little annoyed that some of the policies involved in determining the recount were under the sway of the candidate's *brother*, the governor of Florida.
The Bush clan is far, far too powerful. Bush Sr. was a US president. Dubya is a US president. We have governors of Texas and a governor of Florida.
And anyone who claims that Dubya has qualifications to be president other than being his father's son is going to have a tough time arguing their case.
I'm not American, and after seeing the results of the last election, I have serious doubts about Americas system of checks and balances
I *am* American, and I have serious doubts about America's system of checks and balances.
The really frusterating thing is that the executive branch (and specficially the President) has consistently taken power away from the legislative branch for two hundred years. The recent introduction of the massively powerful and almost unrestricted Office of Homeland Security and USA-PATRIOT is uncomfortably close to the point where it would be easy to pull a transition to a dictatorial-like government, a la the Nazis. The way the Nazis worked:
* Economy was slumping, people were worried and looking to anyone with a solution (not there yet...our "recession" is actually pretty minor). * Physical intimidation of opposition politicians (again, not there yet). * National security issues (the Reichstag Fire) that was "dealt with" (immediately taken advantage of) by suspending many civil rights and granting unprescedented power to the government. USA-PATRIOT isn't as strong as this -- it isn't full martial law -- but most people are willingly allowing the elimination of many once-strongly held civil rights to "stop terrorism". Search and seizure, free speech... * The establishment of powerful organizations like the SA and the SS that operated with few restrictions. This is where the Office of Homeland Security comes in -- it has more funding than even the FBI. It has zero of the restrictions that were placed on the FBI (like inability to pull things overseas, spy on overseas nations, etc), none of the restrictions on the CIA (can't spy on domestic citizens), has many of the powers of the INS. It's quite similar in name to the KGB, and essentially forms a "domestic monitoring and early response" organization. The integrity of something like that is very fragile, and could be used to pull off too many unpleasant things. It is not subject to an amount of oversight anywhere near proportional to its powers. It is, in essence, a "secret police".
Other interesting bits was government-induced imperialism and expansion (not necessarily supported by everyone involved). As we wipe out Afghanistan's government and set up our own puppet government, and start actively threatening more governments than we had for a long, long time (Iraq. North Korea. Indonesia.), we're trying to exert a significantly increased control over other countries (though not occupy them).
Also, America would make an awful world cop. America does what's in her own interests, which is at least somewhat her responsibility to her people. However, America (unlike most other countries) has been *firmly* opposed to a world court or global police system, because it would be a challenge to her own power.
I don't see overwhelming strength, used at will against other nations, as a long term path to world peace
Yes, but conflict does work well for rallying and unifying your people behind you. Hitler knew it. 1984 knew about it. If Bush didn't know it before, he does now from his massive ratings spikes (from his earlier pathetic ones). Nationalism was at its strongest during the World Wars. Nothing like a good war to secure your position.
America has little interest in world peace. At the very least, maintaining a divided, weakened Arab region (at least until the oil is gone) is very much in her interests.
I don't understand why Intel even tries to make money from their compiler. Their big cash cow, by far, is their chips, not their compilers sold to some tiny dev market. It seems like it'd do them more good to have fast support for new features in their chips in gcc *quickly* in terms of getting people saying "Wow, the P5 is really fast".
Say Motorola or IBM runs out and puts a compiler guy or maybe two full time on the gcc PPC backend. It makes their chips look a hell of a lot better...
It must be awful to be a chip designer and design this perfectly good system that a compiler could take advantage of to make code that runs really quickly...and then have most people use compilers that take their time about getting around to supporting these new, performance adding features on the chip.
We have little information to work with. I'm not sure of MS's goals in doing.NET (the language part, that is).
Given the amount of money they put into it, I'd be very surprised if they didn't expect to get a healthy return on it. And given their infamous past record, I doubt that they're playing nice.
I'm a little dubious that MS is planning to play legal games, crying patent infringement. They haven't tried "legal attacks" as a comprehensive strategy before, and I doubt they're going to start. They're interested in using market leverage and compatibility to lever them into new markets.
It could be as innocent as MS wanting a language that is easy (even strongly pushes you to, perhaps) use Windows-specific extensions. Remember that adding Windows-only extensions was what they were working hard to do with Java, and got in hot water over. If they get a lot of people using C# (which, from what I've heard, is a reasonably well designed applications language), and they essentially control the language and a significant number of programmers use their Windows extensions, -- and.NET becomes the standard application platform, Linux becomes little more than a less reliable, less effective.NET platform.
The problem here is that there are a lot of variables involved.
* The fullness of the partition is an issue. * Whether the OS is using write caching is an issue * Whether the drive is using write caching is an issue. * The speed of the drive is an issue * The location of the partition on the drive is an issue.
I haven't tried timed deletes, but FAT in general seems significantly slower than ext2/3. Could be just the fact that I usually use FAT on 9x, which has a lousy I/O subsystem. I don't really have any comparable boxes that have Windows and Linux on them to compare, though.
Oh, one other question -- are you mounting noatime? I always mount noatime (the constant bloddy disk accesses drive me mad otherwise...)
Developer features have indirect but very far-reaching trickle-down effect. If we were all still using 1980s-vintage dev tools, software would suck much, much more than it does.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not *arguing* that it's attractive to the company providing the service. P2P is great for them. The problem I have is why on earth the *consumer* would want to pay *and* pitch in time, effort, and bandwidth.
This derived work is under the copyright of the original author of the magazine.
No, it is not. He can use his copyright on the *original* work to prevent you from distributing your derived work. He certainly does not have copyright over your derived work.
I do not accept the terms of the GPL
This is semantics. The GPL is designed to work hand in hand with copyright. It uses copyright to enforce what it does. Arguing whether copyright or the GPL is the element causing your punishment is silly.
Look...copyright law is a fundamental building block of the GPL, just as atoms are of biological viruses. That doesn't make copyright law viral any more than atoms are viral.
No, I mean where's the incentive for the customer in using P2P at *all* if they aren't saving money by not paying for the item (or paying less)?
I would imagine that once the feeling of a "community" working together, where everyone pitches in some bandwidth and everyone saves money, goes away, people are just going to want to buy the product directly from the company (possibly electronically) or from bricks and mortar.
Witness Napster trying to charge for access...
I've run this by one of the gtk-gnutella developers, who's said that this seems like a good idea.
That's why the company would want to do it. Where's the incentive for the user?
MS is not going to get hit by antitrust people during the Bush administration, no matter what they do.
I want archie back. Current web-based FTP search engines suck. I like the command line search...pop in the name of a software package like openoffice, and it spits back several sites.
After a lot of work, six months ago I got an archie client compiling. Took some work on the source, but got it up. Then I took another two weeks to find a working archie server. It was the last public one, I'm fairly certain.
Two months after that, it went down. I was probably the only person that used it in ages, and probably the admins were wondering what was going on.
WTF would any users donate their disk/bandwidth to a DRM-using legal media distribution system?
That might get IPO dollars, but it's not going to work.
no leeching is far better than Kazaa
I seriously doubt that. Any current "no leeching" mechanisms I've seen are severely flawed and rely on trusted remote code.
People who whine and bitch that people are bypassing them are ignoring the fact that the design is fundamentally wrong. You cannot trust code on another computer. Period. It *will* be broken.
It is possible to build a trust web (where you have metered trust, instead of just a binary "trusted" or "not trusted" a la PGP). Have each user generate a public/private key pair. Have each person maintain a list of trusted users. These users are identified by their public keys. "Trust values" are assigned to each user in the list-holding user's trust list. The scale is arbitrary -- maybe "100" means trust a lot and "1" means trust a little, and "0" means no trust. Trust is generally positive (more on that later).
When you want to determine "absolute trust" of a user, you run out and download the trust lists of all the users from them in your trust list (this spans only two hops out on the web of trust...you could go further, though I think this is sufficient). Person can grant absolute trust to person B as following: (points of trust A gives B in A's local trust list)/(total points of trust A gives A's local trust list)* (points of trust A has in our local trust list).
Then, attackers like the RIAA will be excluded from the network of trust, having low or no trust values, as they hand out corrupted files.
Trust lists can be redownloaded whenever. Cache 'em for weeks if you want.
Clients could automatically add a point of trust per data unit downloaded succesfully from a remote client...then, if it's a bad download, the local user could strip all trust away.
Trust could be used for ranking priorities to let people download from you, determining which copy of a file is "authentic" and which is bogus, etc.
Other possibilities: the reason we don't allow negative trust or blacklists -- only whitelists -- is because it's usually fairly easy to regenerate a new IP, and this results in bloating attacks against users maintaing blacklists. If a user can present something that "costs" them something to obtain, like a VeriSign cert or other "expensive" (i.e. can't regenerate on your computer easily) proof of identity (doesn't have to be your RL name -- could be a signed cert endorsing a 'nym from Zero Knowledge), then give them automatically a certain number of points of trust (client configurable). Why? Because it's much less likely that they're running out and buying a new Verisign cert for each attack. They're opening themselves up to blacklisting.
You could purge year-old entries from your local trust list to stay up to date...oh, there's tons of possible tweaks.
The trust network simply sits on top of another P2P network. It does not require that users not download from users with zero trust -- it simply provides some extremely useful information which is essential to implementing strong antileech/anti network attack protections, or what have you. It is also very difficult to attack. PGP is much more vulnerable, since you just need one stupid person in your web of trust to okay someone, their binary trust bit flips to 1, and they're in your web. If you don't trust someone much, and they give someone else a little tiny bit of trust...that person is only very slightly trusted.
Drawbacks:
My analysis of this approach has found only two drawbacks. First, there is some disk and memory overhead to store cached trust information locally. Gnutella clients already store IPs for much of the network, so it shouldn't be prohibitive, though -- we don't have to handle the whole network, just *trusted* users.
The second one is that letting people download your trust list -- crucial to the functioning of the system -- can leak some information. It means that you "trust" some user on the network. If that user provides nothing but, say, child porn, anyone on the trust network has circumstantial evidence that you have downloaded child porn. Of course, you could have granted the person trust for any number of other reasons, but it is a small amount of information leakage, and worth mentioning.
I welcome comments.
And you capitalized "Editors" and "Users" for what reason?
You know, this "not a CD player" and "not a CD" spiel came off as propoganda at first, but it's pretty legitimate.
I've never purchased an audio CD in my life -- I don't own a single one (well, except for a hybrid CD, Marathon I, that also has the game music in Red Book).
I was thinking, recently, about possibly purchasing one, though I'd lose my reputation, but the rapid elimination of CDs has solved this at two levels -- I have far less interest in a CD-like device with no error correction, and even in the unlikely case I did purchase one, it wouldn't be a CD.
It's a shame that all the Windows P2P clients use things that look like their UI designer is an ex-web designer.
UNIX P2P clients don't suffer from this problem.
Sharezilla is more than welcome to use their "G2" protocol. They can communicate with the other "Sharezilla" users out there. Woohoo!
At first I saw you worked for LimeWire, and felt a small amount of respect - then I remember the bullshit hoops I had to go through to clean my system of the utter crap it installed through my system directories and the registry.
I hate to say it, but I'm starting to get a pretty good chuckle every time I see some poor Windows user griping about the amount of pain they go through to get "good downloadz". I hear whining about "pop up" or "pop under" ads. I hear complaining about "spyware". I hear complaining about "mandatory sharing" in P2P apps. I hear people frantic that newer P2P apps can "fake" shares (like on Direct Connect) because of piss-poorly designed architectures involving trusted remote code.
It's all really funny to those of us who have been using open source P2P clients and Mozilla on Linux. *We* haven't seen a single one of these problems, and *we* aren't suffering.
But, you know what? I encourage pop-ups. And intrusive advertising, spyware, and everything else. Why? It doesn't affect me in the least, and it means that *you* are subsidizing the good life for me. Each pop-up you see funds another good, clean pop-up free page for me.
Of course, someday you people are going to catch on. You're going to use Mozilla, use Linux. You're going to use better P2P clients. But until that day, the rest of us are going to enjoy the good life.
Until then, thanks for everything!
This guy is a troll. He's pushing IE, closed source, propriatary standards, and the domination of MS over the W3C and standards committees. He's saying that product "foo" is better than your product to try to sting you a bit, and then bashing the GDF, which *developed* the stuff he's lauding.
Don't bite.
Yup. Raphael Manfreti (of gtk-gnutella fame) and the Limewire team (also major GDF developers), get no credit, and these "Sharezilla" wankers get a Slashdot link.
Well, *here* is credit where credit's due:
GTK-gnutella
LimeWire
Gnutella started out as an "interesting project". It is now one of the most heavily developed an analyzed projects -- somewhat less centralized than the Freenet project, but far more skill (and variety of clients) on this than, say, FastTrack and the much-lauded Kazaa.
I'm a little more disturbed by the fact that the CIA is carrying out robotic assassinations. If we really knew where the guy is, why the hell couldn't we have arrested him? Gas his, come in, and give him his day in court.
You can *not* destroy a nuclear ICBM in flight and "not reduce its destructive power". How in the hell do you expect it to detonate when it reaches the target?
You're right about large nations overwhelming ABM.
I'm a little annoyed that some of the policies involved in determining the recount were under the sway of the candidate's *brother*, the governor of Florida.
The Bush clan is far, far too powerful. Bush Sr. was a US president. Dubya is a US president. We have governors of Texas and a governor of Florida.
And anyone who claims that Dubya has qualifications to be president other than being his father's son is going to have a tough time arguing their case.
I'm not American, and after seeing the results of the last election, I have serious doubts about Americas system of checks and balances
I *am* American, and I have serious doubts about America's system of checks and balances.
The really frusterating thing is that the executive branch (and specficially the President) has consistently taken power away from the legislative branch for two hundred years. The recent introduction of the massively powerful and almost unrestricted Office of Homeland Security and USA-PATRIOT is uncomfortably close to the point where it would be easy to pull a transition to a dictatorial-like government, a la the Nazis. The way the Nazis worked:
* Economy was slumping, people were worried and looking to anyone with a solution (not there yet...our "recession" is actually pretty minor).
* Physical intimidation of opposition politicians (again, not there yet).
* National security issues (the Reichstag Fire) that was "dealt with" (immediately taken advantage of) by suspending many civil rights and granting unprescedented power to the government. USA-PATRIOT isn't as strong as this -- it isn't full martial law -- but most people are willingly allowing the elimination of many once-strongly held civil rights to "stop terrorism". Search and seizure, free speech...
* The establishment of powerful organizations like the SA and the SS that operated with few restrictions. This is where the Office of Homeland Security comes in -- it has more funding than even the FBI. It has zero of the restrictions that were placed on the FBI (like inability to pull things overseas, spy on overseas nations, etc), none of the restrictions on the CIA (can't spy on domestic citizens), has many of the powers of the INS. It's quite similar in name to the KGB, and essentially forms a "domestic monitoring and early response" organization. The integrity of something like that is very fragile, and could be used to pull off too many unpleasant things. It is not subject to an amount of oversight anywhere near proportional to its powers. It is, in essence, a "secret police".
Other interesting bits was government-induced imperialism and expansion (not necessarily supported by everyone involved). As we wipe out Afghanistan's government and set up our own puppet government, and start actively threatening more governments than we had for a long, long time (Iraq. North Korea. Indonesia.), we're trying to exert a significantly increased control over other countries (though not occupy them).
Also, America would make an awful world cop. America does what's in her own interests, which is at least somewhat her responsibility to her people. However, America (unlike most other countries) has been *firmly* opposed to a world court or global police system, because it would be a challenge to her own power.
I don't see overwhelming strength, used at will against other nations, as a long term path to world peace
Yes, but conflict does work well for rallying and unifying your people behind you. Hitler knew it. 1984 knew about it. If Bush didn't know it before, he does now from his massive ratings spikes (from his earlier pathetic ones). Nationalism was at its strongest during the World Wars. Nothing like a good war to secure your position.
America has little interest in world peace. At the very least, maintaining a divided, weakened Arab region (at least until the oil is gone) is very much in her interests.
I wish the chip manufacturers would get in on it.
I don't understand why Intel even tries to make money from their compiler. Their big cash cow, by far, is their chips, not their compilers sold to some tiny dev market. It seems like it'd do them more good to have fast support for new features in their chips in gcc *quickly* in terms of getting people saying "Wow, the P5 is really fast".
Say Motorola or IBM runs out and puts a compiler guy or maybe two full time on the gcc PPC backend. It makes their chips look a hell of a lot better...
It must be awful to be a chip designer and design this perfectly good system that a compiler could take advantage of to make code that runs really quickly...and then have most people use compilers that take their time about getting around to supporting these new, performance adding features on the chip.
Yes.
.NET (the language part, that is).
.NET becomes the standard application platform, Linux becomes little more than a less reliable, less effective .NET platform.
We have little information to work with. I'm not sure of MS's goals in doing
Given the amount of money they put into it, I'd be very surprised if they didn't expect to get a healthy return on it. And given their infamous past record, I doubt that they're playing nice.
I'm a little dubious that MS is planning to play legal games, crying patent infringement. They haven't tried "legal attacks" as a comprehensive strategy before, and I doubt they're going to start. They're interested in using market leverage and compatibility to lever them into new markets.
It could be as innocent as MS wanting a language that is easy (even strongly pushes you to, perhaps) use Windows-specific extensions. Remember that adding Windows-only extensions was what they were working hard to do with Java, and got in hot water over. If they get a lot of people using C# (which, from what I've heard, is a reasonably well designed applications language), and they essentially control the language and a significant number of programmers use their Windows extensions, -- and
MS already tried to do it with IE and the Web...
Hmm...
The problem here is that there are a lot of variables involved.
* The fullness of the partition is an issue.
* Whether the OS is using write caching is an issue
* Whether the drive is using write caching is an issue.
* The speed of the drive is an issue
* The location of the partition on the drive is an issue.
I haven't tried timed deletes, but FAT in general seems significantly slower than ext2/3. Could be just the fact that I usually use FAT on 9x, which has a lousy I/O subsystem. I don't really have any comparable boxes that have Windows and Linux on them to compare, though.
Oh, one other question -- are you mounting noatime? I always mount noatime (the constant bloddy disk accesses drive me mad otherwise...)
Good link.
Developer features have indirect but very far-reaching trickle-down effect. If we were all still using 1980s-vintage dev tools, software would suck much, much more than it does.