Since the fuel is liquid, wouldn't it stay 'motionless' while the 'outer hull' revolves around it ?
(the outer layers might take some of the whirling around due to friction, but I'm guessing it would take quite some time before it actually gets pushed to the sides... )
I think the reason they use Amiga's is because of the hardware, not the software. (easy to connect to TV-set, smooth 'real-time' images without the need of a xxGHz cpu, etc...)
It actually made your Win9x pc a lot faster as it could hold more stuff in memory. Now you buy 1GB for that price and I'm under the impression that it only helps marginally.
IMHO : relatively spoken, it's just as expensive as it was back then.
(I currently am running on a 1GB RAM WinXP box and the Commit Charge has somehow magically reached 2.5Gb !!)
I was under the presumption (IANAEE, so that might be a 'false presumption' off course!) that these things would last forever as long as you don't put too much load on them, regardless whether it would be while charging or discharging.
From what I seem to remember, "wet" batteries evaporate part of their 'substance', but I would think you can re-add this as needed. Heck, isn't it just plain water that you need to add in the first place ? Might be that finding 'pure' water is a bit more difficult, but still, no rocket science there.
I'm pretty sure I've seen car batteries last longer than that and IMHO these things get abused on a daily basis.
As for my take on the article : regardless the cost of the batteries, I'd still feel a lot more safe with a stack of batteries in everybody's basement than with a couple of tanks of H2. Maybe not the first years, but rather after 50 years when half of them have started rusting away. Sure batteries can explode too, but I doubt it would take the the neighbors along on a ride to the skies... or not ?
Actually, if you already own it on DVD, I think you're fine to have your own copy on video, or laptop, or whatever... Technologies that limit you from that ability are a PITA indeed, and worse of all, they seem to work fine in making your (legal) actions difficult, but fail miserably at what they are meant to do : stop illegal copying
The problem here is that stuff that's being put online probably is going to end up at the harddrive of people that DO NOT OWN a copy it, regardless what medium. Most probably they will neither go watch it on the big screen. Maybe they never were going to fork out any money for given media in the first place, but if they never compensate for the fact that they nevertheless get to see all this material. If this 'thinking' gets accepted by everyone, well, then we'll end up with amateur-media at best. Things like 'Starwreck' on the good side and 'MySpace' on the bad side. Not looking forward to it.
I own quite some DVD's at home myself and I think I bought 25% of them because I like them in the cinema (eg. Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon), 50% because I had watched them on a downloaded copy (not me, someone else off course!) and them enough to get the thing on DVD and offer some 'encouragement' to the producers. And the remaining 25% probably because it was on a sale somewhere and the cover looked interesting =)
IMVHO : media should be like how shareware software works : you download it for free (or a very, VERY minimal price), you watch it in your own time. Liked it ? => send 'contribution' to producers. Didn't like it => too bad, little lost. In a perfect world, things liked by many many people would make enough money to either get 'extended' (eg. Firefly) or get kind of a spin-off in other series/films/etc... (CSI ). Stuff nobody likes would die a silent death.
Ok, maybe "copyright infringement" isn't the same as "stealing", but I think we can all agree that "downloading music/movies/series/etc... for free from the net" has the same negative effect on the 'manufacturer/(ex-)owner', and it's that idea the poster is trying to convey IMHO !
If you think that the first should be legal, then wonder about this : would it be legal go into a garage take a car and leave an amount of money behind that's the equivalent of the monetary bare materials the car is made of (probably only a fraction of the price) ?
I'm sorry I couldn't get closer to the obligatory/.-car-analogy =) Still, I'm dead serious, people indeed go too light over this issue. That is not to be said that I agree with RIAA/MPIAA etc, nor am a fan of the current economical model being pursued by the media-companies... but nor do I think that a 'media wants to be free' system will work either ! Somewhere in the middle would be nice.
It's amazing what can be found in that something typically referred to as 'the article' :... [Overview]... Familiar - BitTyrant is based on modifications to Azureus 2.5, currently the most popular BitTorrent client. All of our changes are under the hood. You'll find the GUI identical to Azureus, with optional additions to display statistics relevant to BitTyrant's operation....
The problem wasn't that the forces due to the acceleration were too hard to handle, but the spinning DOWN made me nauseous because of what was happening in my inner ear(s). I also clearly remember that the 'world' look 'tilted' once the thing had spun up... It was kind of fun as an experience, especially when trying to fight the centri-something force. But I must admit I stay clear from them now... oh well, maybe I'll give it a try sometime later, when the kids grow up and I have to act the cool dad =)
>> The biggest problem would probably be obese people.
Actually, we had a 'well-breasted-lady' (otherwise slim, think Heidi Klum but 20cm smaller, and with black hair, and not as famous, and.. oh well, you get the idea =) on our group and apparently she sort of got her ribs/lungs squashed between the weight of her breasts and the wall she was standing against, which made breathing difficult! Logical if you think about it, but I would never have thought about it upfront.
Not quite sure I understand how this works then =(
If each disk contains a (limited) set of keys, one for each model like you say, what will then happen when a new model comes out next year and I put my 'old' DVD-HD disk in there ? => the model didn't exist yet, hence, there is no key, hence, my 'newest' player can't play my 'oldest' movies anymore ? Or did they just foresee 10.000 keys and assign them to models as they get released ? (plenty of space on these shiny disks after all).
Additionally, wouldn't finding 1 private key (say for example from PowerDVD) allow for a (maybe not so brute as it seems ?) exhaustive search for all the other private keys of all the other players ? They might decide to 'disable' a certain key from a certain model, but I very much doubt they can keep on doing this... I think. (I guess if someone set something up like Distributed.Net for finding these keys, it wouldn't take that long to decrypt them all. After all, if you know the result, it's just a matter of trial & error. Yes it will be HUGE task (not sure how many bits the key holds, didn't watch TFA, nor am very educated on the subject) but the amount of CPU-power allocated to it might be tremendous here... Finally a "good" use for all those botnets =)
(I might be missing something (or even a lot) here... )
The part I'm confused is : why haven't I seen yet a combined system.
I might be wrong here, but PV cells have an efficiency of about 20% (I might be overly optimistic here). So I guess the "other 80%" is lost in 'waste-heat' (those panels get rather hot I'm told, which actually makes them less efficient). Why isn't the remaining 80% used to heat water. The water can be used for either house-hold purposes (heating/showering/etc..) or drive something like a Sterling engine to generate additional energy...
(In winter the PV might still produce some watts, while it wouldn't be able to heat the water sufficiently to keep the Sterling engine going.. although, by design, a Sterling engine should be able to run on even a small delta-T)
Not sure if your sarcasm is all that well thought trough actually...
Think ShareWare. I'm not saying people get whoppingly rich of it (usually when a program 'hits', the author suddenly goes PayWare), but for me it works fine. I like a program, I use it often enough and the price is not exuberant, I do register the software.
I mean, what it would all come down to is that instead of paying for something upfront (buying a CD for instance), you simply get to download the song from some P2P network (no real servers, no real centralised organisation, heck hardly any organisation at all!), listen to it as often as you want, copy it as often as you like etc... BUT! if you really, really like it and kind of want the artist to make more like it, you could 'contribute' to him/her/them somehow (think PayPal) and if plenty of people like it enough to do so, the artist in question might even make it is daytime job.
Sound like a fair system to me. Actually, it should be like that for all media. I would have gladly parted with 25$ after leaving the movie theatre after seeing the first Matrix movie, but man, did I feel cheated after seeing number 2 & 3, knowing that I had just shelved about 8$ for that piece of crap. (my reasoning to go see nr 3 was that it would be impossible for it to be as bad as nr 2, how wrong I was =)
"Some" years back I was temporarily assigned to a 'smallish' company that had around 120 PC's (Pentium 200 MMX, 98MB RAM, NT4) on the network. While talking to the admin about the Distributed.Net project he got interested in it too and after a couple of days of succesfully running the client on a the admins computers, we rolled it out overnight to all pc's on the network.
The local distributed.net proxy we set up reported plenty of activity and we were looking forward to a nice spike in my statistics. Instead we (well, at first only the admin =) were called down the next morning to have a look at some secretary's pc that had started blue-screening and eventually had broken down completely. Same story repeated itself about 5 times and it soon became clear that the affected pc's all were 'killed' by the distributed.net client. After opening up some of them, the reason soon proved to be poor ventilation (read : the box was completely clogged up with dust & hair & yuckness and the little CPU-fan obviously had stopped turning years before...), leaving a charred cpu under the stress of 100% load for hours at a time).
We uninstalled the client soon after that, as the number of 'spare-pc's was quickly running out =)
The 'peak' clearly registered, but sadly didn't last long. Ahh, the days =)
Anyway, what I wanted to say was : although ALL the pc's were identical and more less the same age, some were perfectly capable of running 100% load 24/7, others weren't. In this case it was mainly due to maintenance (or lack thereof). But I'm sure things like ambient temperature, location (eg. hidden in a closed corner under your desk), environment (eg. furry creatures hugging the box all the time) etc... can have a much more serious effect on the hardware than the labratory-tests they do during "QC" when the machine leaves the factory.
BS. I'm running two skype accounts about 8 hours a day, every single day. And there are months where my total usage doesn't reach the 1Gb mark.
I'm not saying that you are (actively) using up all the bandwidth, but if I where you I'd spent a little time to find out who is then (think spy-ware, ad-ware, virus, zombie-ware, etc) because it surely isn't Skype.
As for my little private opinion : maybe Skype doesn't really advertise as P2P and fully explains the 'potential overhead', but they don't hide it either. You just have to look for it and be sufficiently technical to understand how it works (see : http://www.skype.com/products/explained.html as a starter, I'm sure they have some kind of 'protocol-breakdown for dummies' too somewhere, too lazy to look it up right now but I'm sure I've read it in the past).
Personally I consider it a VERY small price to pay for the service that is being offered here, it works straight out of the box, is easy to use, and you surely can't call it a resource hog!
(disclaimer : I have no experience with the SkypeIN/OUT options, but some colleagues use it and seem to be quite happy about it.)
The only two things that might 'annoy' me occasionally is that the Skype homepage tends to address me in French whenever I log on to them (DUHUH, only 40% of Belgium speaks French as their motherlanguage), and (but that's hardly "their" fault I suppose) that about every week or so a 27-year old, aerobicizing girl is trying to become my buddy... As I have put my picture on my profile, I'm pretty sure they are bots and not real girls =)
(I have the privacy option that only people on my contact-list may contact me turned on, so "they" have to revert to this in order to be able to send me spam... First time I accepted such an invitation the conversation went something like this (I was sooo naive =)
Me> Hi there
Me> No offence, but am I supposed to know you ?
She> Hi, my name is Carla
Me> Hi Carla... [in the meanwhile checking her profile... NO YOU PERV, HER SKYPE PROFILE !]
She> yes, I'm from Brazil
She> You should meet me at my homepage, it's http://www.hornysluts.ru/534538743/carla.html
Me> oh, that kind of homepage
She> Hi, I'm Carla
Me> Did you know the moon is made from cheese ?
She> yes, I'm from Brazil
Me> well, well, who would have guessed ?
[Add Carla to ignore-list]
FYI : Belgian ISP's have a 10 (sometimes 15) GB volume limit too, so welcome to the club =P
Although I'm sure one can learn a lot using nothing but (school-)books, it most certainly cannot make up for actual teaching. I'd like to add that there probably is a difference between the type of information you're getting to digest (eg. history vs electronics, law vs applied mechanics, etc), and that some situations might make the 'read-the-book-and-remember' solution more attractive, if it were simply because the fact that one can read a lot faster than most people can speak.
But for courses where 'understanding' is key (in contrast to 'knowing'), interactive classes simply can't be beat ! However, and I'd like to stress this : it requires the will of the student to keep up with the lesson and have an open but critical state of mind at all times. In my (for lack of a better word) school-career I've found 3 errors in the courses being given (2 x math, 1 x ship-construction). I'm pretty sure that if I had simply read it right away from the book I wouldn't have noticed them, and if I might have, I'd probably would not have taken the trouble to find someone willing to discuss it.
A guy in front of a blackboard might not be as fancy as a podcast, but I'm 100% it is more effective because you're given time to digest what is being said and at the same time are able to 'mentally preview' what's going to come, making your brain a much more active part of the process and prepping it for future situations where you'll need to make deductions/conclusions/solutions all by yourself.
Depends on how you look at it. Quite a bit of people seem to agree that filtering is the solution, however, it happens too near to the end-point to really make an impact on the amount of data being send around. (FYI: how much % of the bits flying around being the continents will eventually end up in a filter? What would be the effect if that part of the bandwith would not be there in the first place ?)
Although I'm sure that eg. streaming stuff (VOIP, netradio, tv, MOG,..) is taking up quite a bit of bandwith these days, that doesn't mean yet that whatever resources are being used for spam should be considered as something that's unavoidable IMHO.
And for what it's worth, I'll repeat once again : Blue Frog did NOT DDoS spammers, it had the clients send out 1 'opt-out' request for each spam-mail received. This would in the worst/best case cause a doubling of the bandwith being used by spam (directly + indirectly). Yes, the zombie-armies are way more vast than the frog-armies are, but the spambots have to 'attack' (= "send spam-mail to") millions of targets, the frogs only look at a couple of thousand servers (= "send opt-out request"). Comparing numbers hence makes no sense, we simply need 'sufficient' frogs, regardless of the amount of spam-bots.
I'm sure filtering will work too, but it only masks the problem, doesn't even try to solve it al all.
And it will not work forever either! I've noticed these spam mails getting 'smarter' at avoiding the filters by including text-fragments of existing websites, adding 'adhoc-poetry', etc. If you think about it, the filter-business is much more an arms-race than the Blue Security approach is. (My spamvertizer software is smarter than your filter is !)
By making this stuff more & more complex the only thing that really happens is that these mails will become bigger and bigger, eating up more and more bandwith and disk space. And that the filter-software will become more and more complex too, eating up more and more resources on each line of defence (ISP mail server, your mail cient, AV-programs, etc)... Not sure I wan't to go that road either !
Blue Frog will let you send 1 opt-out request per spammail received. Doesn't sound unfair to me.
All IMHO off course, but as a side note, given the fact this guy was able to bring down one of the bigger players on the net, do you really think he legally owns the infrastructure that was used to stage the attack ? Who's fighting foul here ?
The spammer does not get 'hit' directly, but his "sponsors" (as they were called somewhere) are.
I'm sure the "sponsor" won't be pleased once this system gets enough momentum to actually interfere with his commercial activities, and hopefully he will think twice before giving another "incentive" to the spammers.
Hence, the spammer will see his income diminish and either has to focus on other "sponsors", or find a different means of income.
I'm sure some of these guys are not stupid and will find a way to put their IQ to some other, hopefully a bit less anti-social, means. Those that wish to fight the battle to the bitter end, well, good luck to them but I'm convinced that in the long run they're fighting a losing war...
Actually, I very much doubt that the BS client (aka 'the frog') is causing all the traffic. Most likely it's the spammer's bot-net (aka zombies) that's responsible for all the traffic causing the DDOS. Not quite like it's costing the spammer a lot , but on the other hand he probably would rather have that infrastructure being used for other things.
Don't know why but there seems to be a lot of posts going around pointing at BS as if they're/Modus Operandi/ is to DDOS other sites. I'd like to repeat : IT ISN'T ! Simply put : a user gets a spam mail in his in-box, forwards it to the BS-server and BS finds out which company is being promoted. Next, the user has a client running that downloads the name of the relevant website and a script on how to fill in the opt-out request and executes it. That's it. A simple 1 to 1 relation.
All this could easily be done manually, but it would take quite a lot of time for the user. Automating it like Blue Security did makes it so that more people will end up actually sending the opt-out request (rather than simply letting out a sigh and pressing the delete button) and hence the owners of given websites will hopefully start to understand that they rather should revert to different strategies than spam for making money. Apparantly these websites are usually hosted on low-cost infrastructure that is not happy receiving hundreds, thousands, if not ten-thousands opt-out requests the day after one of there spam-puppets send out a couple of million emails.
My 2 cents
PS: I've been using the BS client for quite some time now and I'm very pleased with it actually. Like on of the posters said : "If the spammers are starting to feel it enough to react, than BS must be doing something right.." Couldn't agree more.
Hmm, database file sizes are generally much bigger than just 2Gb, so I don't think this is an issue (anymore). Biggest I've worked with so far is ca 80Gb, but I guess the 'limit' is much higher.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a big thanks (again) to Wikipedia, didn't have a clue why you guys were raving about a 'rotor inside a tube' =)
For all the others around here who are about to loose there geek-card too : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeller_drive
Since the fuel is liquid, wouldn't it stay 'motionless' while the 'outer hull' revolves around it ?
(the outer layers might take some of the whirling around due to friction, but I'm guessing it would take quite some time before it actually gets pushed to the sides... )
Just wondering...
I think the reason they use Amiga's is because of the hardware, not the software.
(easy to connect to TV-set, smooth 'real-time' images without the need of a xxGHz cpu, etc...)
Yeah, but in 1999, 128Mb was A LOT !
It actually made your Win9x pc a lot faster as it could hold more stuff in memory.
Now you buy 1GB for that price and I'm under the impression that it only helps marginally.
IMHO : relatively spoken, it's just as expensive as it was back then.
(I currently am running on a 1GB RAM WinXP box and the Commit Charge has somehow magically reached 2.5Gb !!)
Yikes, batteries only last 7 years ?
I was under the presumption (IANAEE, so that might be a 'false presumption' off course!) that these things would last forever as long as you don't put too much load on them, regardless whether it would be while charging or discharging.
From what I seem to remember, "wet" batteries evaporate part of their 'substance', but I would think you can re-add this as needed.
Heck, isn't it just plain water that you need to add in the first place ? Might be that finding 'pure' water is a bit more difficult, but still, no rocket science there.
I'm pretty sure I've seen car batteries last longer than that and IMHO these things get abused on a daily basis.
As for my take on the article : regardless the cost of the batteries, I'd still feel a lot more safe with a stack of batteries in everybody's basement than with a couple of tanks of H2. Maybe not the first years, but rather after 50 years when half of them have started rusting away. Sure batteries can explode too, but I doubt it would take the the neighbors along on a ride to the skies... or not ?
Actually, if you already own it on DVD, I think you're fine to have your own copy on video, or laptop, or whatever... Technologies that limit you from that ability are a PITA indeed, and worse of all, they seem to work fine in making your (legal) actions difficult, but fail miserably at what they are meant to do : stop illegal copying
The problem here is that stuff that's being put online probably is going to end up at the harddrive of people that DO NOT OWN a copy it, regardless what medium. Most probably they will neither go watch it on the big screen. Maybe they never were going to fork out any money for given media in the first place, but if they never compensate for the fact that they nevertheless get to see all this material. If this 'thinking' gets accepted by everyone, well, then we'll end up with amateur-media at best. Things like 'Starwreck' on the good side and 'MySpace' on the bad side. Not looking forward to it.
I own quite some DVD's at home myself and I think I bought 25% of them because I like them in the cinema (eg. Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon), 50% because I had watched them on a downloaded copy (not me, someone else off course!) and them enough to get the thing on DVD and offer some 'encouragement' to the producers. And the remaining 25% probably because it was on a sale somewhere and the cover looked interesting =)
IMVHO : media should be like how shareware software works : you download it for free (or a very, VERY minimal price), you watch it in your own time. Liked it ? => send 'contribution' to producers. Didn't like it => too bad, little lost. In a perfect world, things liked by many many people would make enough money to either get 'extended' (eg. Firefly) or get kind of a spin-off in other series/films/etc... (CSI ). Stuff nobody likes would die a silent death.
Semantics !
/.-car-analogy =) Still, I'm dead serious, people indeed go too light over this issue. That is not to be said that I agree with RIAA/MPIAA etc, nor am a fan of the current economical model being pursued by the media-companies... but nor do I think that a 'media wants to be free' system will work either ! Somewhere in the middle would be nice.
Ok, maybe "copyright infringement" isn't the same as "stealing", but I think we can all agree that "downloading music/movies/series/etc... for free from the net" has the same negative effect on the 'manufacturer/(ex-)owner', and it's that idea the poster is trying to convey IMHO !
If you think that the first should be legal, then wonder about this : would it be legal go into a garage take a car and leave an amount of money behind that's the equivalent of the monetary bare materials the car is made of (probably only a fraction of the price) ?
I'm sorry I couldn't get closer to the obligatory
It's amazing what can be found in that something typically referred to as 'the article' : ... ... ...
[Overview]
Familiar - BitTyrant is based on modifications to Azureus 2.5, currently the most popular BitTorrent client. All of our changes are under the hood. You'll find the GUI identical to Azureus, with optional additions to display statistics relevant to BitTyrant's operation.
Been there, done that, got sick afterwards =)
.. oh well, you get the idea =) on our group and apparently she sort of got her ribs/lungs squashed between the weight of her breasts and the wall she was standing against, which made breathing difficult! Logical if you think about it, but I would never have thought about it upfront.
The problem wasn't that the forces due to the acceleration were too hard to handle, but the spinning DOWN made me nauseous because of what was happening in my inner ear(s). I also clearly remember that the 'world' look 'tilted' once the thing had spun up... It was kind of fun as an experience, especially when trying to fight the centri-something force. But I must admit I stay clear from them now... oh well, maybe I'll give it a try sometime later, when the kids grow up and I have to act the cool dad =)
>> The biggest problem would probably be obese people.
Actually, we had a 'well-breasted-lady' (otherwise slim, think Heidi Klum but 20cm smaller, and with black hair, and not as famous, and
Not quite sure I understand how this works then =(
... I think.
... )
If each disk contains a (limited) set of keys, one for each model like you say, what will then happen when a new model comes out next year and I put my 'old' DVD-HD disk in there ?
=> the model didn't exist yet, hence, there is no key, hence, my 'newest' player can't play my 'oldest' movies anymore ? Or did they just foresee 10.000 keys and assign them to models as they get released ? (plenty of space on these shiny disks after all).
Additionally, wouldn't finding 1 private key (say for example from PowerDVD) allow for a (maybe not so brute as it seems ?) exhaustive search for all the other private keys of all the other players ? They might decide to 'disable' a certain key from a certain model, but I very much doubt they can keep on doing this
(I guess if someone set something up like Distributed.Net for finding these keys, it wouldn't take that long to decrypt them all. After all, if you know the result, it's just a matter of trial & error. Yes it will be HUGE task (not sure how many bits the key holds, didn't watch TFA, nor am very educated on the subject) but the amount of CPU-power allocated to it might be tremendous here... Finally a "good" use for all those botnets =)
(I might be missing something (or even a lot) here
A joke in the line of 'measurements' would be more or less like this :
"I don't notice that the prices of fuel go up, I always fill up for $50 anyway!"
(English not being my native language, I'm not quite sure the 'point' comes across in this 'variation', sorry =)
The part I'm confused is : why haven't I seen yet a combined system. I might be wrong here, but PV cells have an efficiency of about 20% (I might be overly optimistic here). So I guess the "other 80%" is lost in 'waste-heat' (those panels get rather hot I'm told, which actually makes them less efficient). Why isn't the remaining 80% used to heat water. The water can be used for either house-hold purposes (heating/showering/etc..) or drive something like a Sterling engine to generate additional energy...
(In winter the PV might still produce some watts, while it wouldn't be able to heat the water sufficiently to keep the Sterling engine going.. although, by design, a Sterling engine should be able to run on even a small delta-T)
Not sure if your sarcasm is all that well thought trough actually... Think ShareWare. I'm not saying people get whoppingly rich of it (usually when a program 'hits', the author suddenly goes PayWare), but for me it works fine. I like a program, I use it often enough and the price is not exuberant, I do register the software. I mean, what it would all come down to is that instead of paying for something upfront (buying a CD for instance), you simply get to download the song from some P2P network (no real servers, no real centralised organisation, heck hardly any organisation at all!), listen to it as often as you want, copy it as often as you like etc... BUT! if you really, really like it and kind of want the artist to make more like it, you could 'contribute' to him/her/them somehow (think PayPal) and if plenty of people like it enough to do so, the artist in question might even make it is daytime job. Sound like a fair system to me. Actually, it should be like that for all media. I would have gladly parted with 25$ after leaving the movie theatre after seeing the first Matrix movie, but man, did I feel cheated after seeing number 2 & 3, knowing that I had just shelved about 8$ for that piece of crap. (my reasoning to go see nr 3 was that it would be impossible for it to be as bad as nr 2, how wrong I was =)
We uninstalled the client soon after that, as the number of 'spare-pc's was quickly running out =)
The 'peak' clearly registered, but sadly didn't last long. Ahh, the days =)
Anyway, what I wanted to say was : although ALL the pc's were identical and more less the same age, some were perfectly capable of running 100% load 24/7, others weren't. In this case it was mainly due to maintenance (or lack thereof). But I'm sure things like ambient temperature, location (eg. hidden in a closed corner under your desk), environment (eg. furry creatures hugging the box all the time) etc... can have a much more serious effect on the hardware than the labratory-tests they do during "QC" when the machine leaves the factory.
As for my little private opinion : maybe Skype doesn't really advertise as P2P and fully explains the 'potential overhead', but they don't hide it either. You just have to look for it and be sufficiently technical to understand how it works (see : http://www.skype.com/products/explained.html as a starter, I'm sure they have some kind of 'protocol-breakdown for dummies' too somewhere, too lazy to look it up right now but I'm sure I've read it in the past).
Personally I consider it a VERY small price to pay for the service that is being offered here, it works straight out of the box, is easy to use, and you surely can't call it a resource hog!
(disclaimer : I have no experience with the SkypeIN/OUT options, but some colleagues use it and seem to be quite happy about it.)
The only two things that might 'annoy' me occasionally is that the Skype homepage tends to address me in French whenever I log on to them (DUHUH, only 40% of Belgium speaks French as their motherlanguage), and (but that's hardly "their" fault I suppose) that about every week or so a 27-year old, aerobicizing girl is trying to become my buddy... As I have put my picture on my profile, I'm pretty sure they are bots and not real girls =)
(I have the privacy option that only people on my contact-list may contact me turned on, so "they" have to revert to this in order to be able to send me spam... First time I accepted such an invitation the conversation went something like this (I was sooo naive =)
Me> Hi there
Me> No offence, but am I supposed to know you ?
She> Hi, my name is Carla
Me> Hi Carla... [in the meanwhile checking her profile... NO YOU PERV, HER SKYPE PROFILE !]
She> yes, I'm from Brazil
She> You should meet me at my homepage, it's http: //www.hornysluts.ru /534538743/carla.html
Me> oh, that kind of homepage
She> Hi, I'm Carla
Me> Did you know the moon is made from cheese ?
She> yes, I'm from Brazil
Me> well, well, who would have guessed ?
[Add Carla to ignore-list]
FYI : Belgian ISP's have a 10 (sometimes 15) GB volume limit too, so welcome to the club =P
Duh, no plot summary ???
Although I'm sure one can learn a lot using nothing but (school-)books, it most certainly cannot make up for actual teaching. I'd like to add that there probably is a difference between the type of information you're getting to digest (eg. history vs electronics, law vs applied mechanics, etc), and that some situations might make the 'read-the-book-and-remember' solution more attractive, if it were simply because the fact that one can read a lot faster than most people can speak.
But for courses where 'understanding' is key (in contrast to ' knowing '), interactive classes simply can't be beat !
However, and I'd like to stress this : it requires the will of the student to keep up with the lesson and have an open but critical state of mind at all times. In my (for lack of a better word) school-career I've found 3 errors in the courses being given (2 x math, 1 x ship-construction). I'm pretty sure that if I had simply read it right away from the book I wouldn't have noticed them, and if I might have, I'd probably would not have taken the trouble to find someone willing to discuss it. A guy in front of a blackboard might not be as fancy as a podcast, but I'm 100% it is more effective because you're given time to digest what is being said and at the same time are able to 'mentally preview' what's going to come, making your brain a much more active part of the process and prepping it for future situations where you'll need to make deductions/conclusions/solutions all by yourself.
Depends on how you look at it. Quite a bit of people seem to agree that filtering is the solution, however, it happens too near to the end-point to really make an impact on the amount of data being send around. (FYI: how much % of the bits flying around being the continents will eventually end up in a filter? What would be the effect if that part of the bandwith would not be there in the first place ?)
..) is taking up quite a bit of bandwith these days, that doesn't mean yet that whatever resources are being used for spam should be considered as something that's unavoidable IMHO.
Although I'm sure that eg. streaming stuff (VOIP, netradio, tv, MOG,
And for what it's worth, I'll repeat once again : Blue Frog did NOT DDoS spammers, it had the clients send out 1 'opt-out' request for each spam-mail received. This would in the worst/best case cause a doubling of the bandwith being used by spam (directly + indirectly). Yes, the zombie-armies are way more vast than the frog-armies are, but the spambots have to 'attack' (= "send spam-mail to") millions of targets, the frogs only look at a couple of thousand servers (= "send opt-out request"). Comparing numbers hence makes no sense, we simply need 'sufficient' frogs, regardless of the amount of spam-bots.
I'm sure filtering will work too, but it only masks the problem, doesn't even try to solve it al all.
And it will not work forever either! I've noticed these spam mails getting 'smarter' at avoiding the filters by including text-fragments of existing websites, adding 'adhoc-poetry', etc. If you think about it, the filter-business is much more an arms-race than the Blue Security approach is. (My spamvertizer software is smarter than your filter is !)
By making this stuff more & more complex the only thing that really happens is that these mails will become bigger and bigger, eating up more and more bandwith and disk space. And that the filter-software will become more and more complex too, eating up more and more resources on each line of defence (ISP mail server, your mail cient, AV-programs, etc)... Not sure I wan't to go that road either !
Blue Frog will let you send 1 opt-out request per spammail received. Doesn't sound unfair to me.
All IMHO off course, but as a side note, given the fact this guy was able to bring down one of the bigger players on the net, do you really think he legally owns the infrastructure that was used to stage the attack ? Who's fighting foul here ?
It's an indirect approach.
The spammer does not get 'hit' directly, but his "sponsors" (as they were called somewhere) are.
I'm sure the "sponsor" won't be pleased once this system gets enough momentum to actually interfere with his commercial activities, and hopefully he will think twice before giving another "incentive" to the spammers.
Hence, the spammer will see his income diminish and either has to focus on other "sponsors", or find a different means of income.
I'm sure some of these guys are not stupid and will find a way to put their IQ to some other, hopefully a bit less anti-social, means. Those that wish to fight the battle to the bitter end, well, good luck to them but I'm convinced that in the long run they're fighting a losing war...
Not even close, and happily staying away from it too =)
Actually, I very much doubt that the BS client (aka 'the frog') is causing all the traffic. Most likely it's the spammer's bot-net (aka zombies) that's responsible for all the traffic causing the DDOS. Not quite like it's costing the spammer a lot , but on the other hand he probably would rather have that infrastructure being used for other things.
/Modus Operandi/ is to DDOS other sites. I'd like to repeat : IT ISN'T ! Simply put : a user gets a spam mail in his in-box, forwards it to the BS-server and BS finds out which company is being promoted. Next, the user has a client running that downloads the name of the relevant website and a script on how to fill in the opt-out request and executes it. That's it. A simple 1 to 1 relation.
Don't know why but there seems to be a lot of posts going around pointing at BS as if they're
All this could easily be done manually, but it would take quite a lot of time for the user. Automating it like Blue Security did makes it so that more people will end up actually sending the opt-out request (rather than simply letting out a sigh and pressing the delete button) and hence the owners of given websites will hopefully start to understand that they rather should revert to different strategies than spam for making money. Apparantly these websites are usually hosted on low-cost infrastructure that is not happy receiving hundreds, thousands, if not ten-thousands opt-out requests the day after one of there spam-puppets send out a couple of million emails.
My 2 cents
PS: I've been using the BS client for quite some time now and I'm very pleased with it actually. Like on of the posters said : "If the spammers are starting to feel it enough to react, than BS must be doing something right.." Couldn't agree more.
OOohhhh, *I* wanted to say that !! =) Hope they make these mirrors freak-storm-resistant =)
Such splendid use of the word "CAPITALism" =)
Hmm, database file sizes are generally much bigger than just 2Gb, so I don't think this is an issue (anymore). Biggest I've worked with so far is ca 80Gb, but I guess the 'limit' is much higher.