When I use bittorrent, I like to squeeze out as much bandwith as possible. However, I don't like when others get annoyed.
To fix the annoyance, I would have to limit my bandwidth usage at some times of the day - and I wouldn't just have to limit my usage according to when the other tenants are awake, and according to when they use how much bandwidth, but also according to how much bandwidth my ISP feels like giving me today (my ISP is seriously bandwidth starved).
If my router had good QoS, I wouldn't have to worry about annoying others, while still being able to use all spare bandwidth. I would definitely prefer this solution.
Yeah... I suppose the post I replied to isn't visible anymore due to being moderated -1, Flamebait. "You" refers to "xpuppykickerx"'s claim that downloading is just as illegal as uploading.
I wouldn't even dream of saying it's a good idea, but it's an example of how downloading something doesn't have to be illegal, just because uploading is, which is what the post I responded to suggested.
Actually, it was legal to download here (in Sweden) up until... I think it was July 1, 2005, as long as you didn't upload.
The music industry around here are talking about that they want to start an experiment with voluntary broadband-tax, starting this autumn, which will allow you to, for a small fee, download all the music you want from Pirate Bay or wherever. Uploading will still be illegal.
You seem to be assuming the rest of the world uses US laws. Stop it.
You know, I recently heard about a project by John Resig (creator of jQuery) called Processing.js. It's a Javascript port of the Processing Visualization Language, which means it could be viewd as a rival to Flash for online graphics content.
This is perhaps true, but seems unlikely frankly. Blacklists in western countries tend to be for hate speech or child pornography, which I find reasonable (though some may not). They are not comparable in scale or subject matter to those in China. The Pirate Bay cannot be accessed through the largest Danish ISP. When the Swedish filter was leaked, it was shown that the sites there almost never contains actual children in sexual situations - there's some clothed child modeling, there's some regular porn, and there's some lolicon. Oh, and http://www.koreabonsai.com/
While preventing race riots is an admirable goal, looking at the deeper causes of this conflict is in order. Tibet has been flooded by Han in the last decade as part of a pacification project by the central government. That has understandably lead to widespread resentment there. We'll probably never know the true story because no journalists are allowed to report from that area, I wonder why? But James Miles was there, could report, and he had a permit. Apparently, openness is increasing!
'Westerners' are not some monolithic block to be denounced as ox ghosts and snake demons, and your treatment of the subject doesn't do it justice. But we treat China that way. How can we say that Myanmar is China's problem?
Hell, a lot of the time, Americans treat Europe that way. I see no reason why the Chinese people wouldn't see us that way.
They've removed lot's of sites from the Great Firewall of China, for instance the English Wikipedia, after western politicians said that a change like that would reflect well upon China. They've let western journalists go to many places they can't normally go to. Today, many European countries (including mine, Sweden) have governmentally blessed internet blocklists that are far longer than the Chinese one.
But after the western media told the world that the Chinese people are pigs for not invading other sovereign countries randomly (Myanmar) or defending it's people from ethnic cleansing by the Tibet people against the Han-Chinese population (link goes to a report by the only western journalist who was actually there - all other reports are just quoting the exile government in India), they are quite a bit suspicious towards us and our so-called free and just media, and rightly so. Us Westeners sabotaging the path of the eternal fire, or not preventing Tibet terrorists from doing so, on it's way to Beijing as a way to get back at them for stopping ethnic cleansing isn't exactly helping matters - especially not when it's done by traveling across the world, just to beat up a girl in a wheelchair - because that's usually the best way to get sympathies.
To make matters worse, I know the largest Swedish newspapers publish Photoshop jobs (publishing photos of a large group of Chinese polices - but failing to include the even larger group of angry activists next to them) and pure lies (pictures of Nepalese officials treating activists badly, and claiming that they're Chinese) as proof of how evil the Chinese government is.
After this, I have no problems seeing why one would try to limit the access for one's people to these lies - the only thing it would result in is civil war, something that is never good, and would hurt the Chinese process towards giving the people a decent standard of living, freedom of speech, and, eventually, democracy.
Adding all graves will make it so much easier to visit the graves of your relatives. It's already possible to visit the cemetery through Google Earth/Maps, but it can be hard to locate your passed loved ones.
However, I feel there's a need for an additional service to be developed: put flowers and candles on the grave. As soon as that's implemented, you'll never have to go to the cemetery again!
In many mays, I believe Freebase is a better platform for different kinds of trivia. Not only do they not delete data that isn't "important", they also organize the data semantically, and have fancy API:s to get the actual information, not just the text, from the database. This makes it easy to write applications on top of that data. The semantic data seems to be incomplete quite often (there is also a plain text description imported from Wikipedia that of course is quite complete), but that isn't something that couldn't relatively easy be fixed with a few more users.
I'm not saying Freebase is The Best platform, just that if Wikipedia doesn't want the content, give it to someone who actually do want it. And you get some extra benefits in the process.
Trackers only use HTTP. If you can browse the web, you can connect to the tracker. I'm sure some of those 1337, moronic private trackers refuse to connect you, but we're talking about real, non-crippled bittorrent here. The tracker is not a problem.
If you allow outgoing connections, you can connect to other clients. If you can connect, you can transfer. At any speed. Transfer speeds from other clients is not a problem.
The problem you're describing is a result of the fact that if there's a seed somewhere that has a few hundred kbps of spare bandwidth (for instance, the Amazon seed), it cannot connect to you and ask you if you want some. So until you decide to randomly connect to that exact peer, you won't get any data from that exact peer. However, most clients connect to a few hundred other clients if you just give it time. If they combined can't give you more than 5 kbps, then that torrent isn't very healthy.
In short: trackers work, transfer speeds work, but it could take some time if the swarm has the wrong properties.
That's an interface problem - not a technical problem.
You could probably write a bittorrent client as a flash applet. You press the big, shiny download button that covers half of your screen, and the flash applet connects to peers and starts to download, all with a pretty progress bar. Even my grandfather could figure that out (one of my grandmas can't even use a mouse, the other is paranoid and believes that "They" are spying on her if she use a computer, so she got rid of it).
Or, you could let people download an exe file, that when clicked will automatically launch a simple bittorrent client that automatically opens the torrent file for Nordkalotten 365 and starts to download.
They have thousands of extra dollars that they no longer need to pay Amazon, that they could now throw at the problem. I'm sure they can figure something out.
Digital Versatile Disc is a backronym - DVD originally meant Digital Video Disc, until they realized how stupid the name actually was ("Yeah, this game is distributed on a video disc. But it's not really a video..."), at which point they just redefined the abbreviation. When I think about it, I realize that HD-DVD's name is just as stupid: you can have just as High Definition audio/video or interactive media on HD discs as you can on "SD discs", just not as much.
By not having a meaning, blu-ray avoids that problem - a blu-ray disc is a disc that uses blue rays.
I do think that CD is a good name - it tells me what it is (a disc that's quite small, compared to LP's), not what they developed it to contain. But CDSDWEMRFDTDVD (Compact Disc-sized Disc With Even More Room For Data Than Digital Versatile Discs) doesn't have such a nice ring to it... Of course, today it's more of a Big Disc, compared to Minidisc or mini-DVD, which again shows that neutral names are better.
To finish off, let me just counter your "glory days" argument by saying "BetaMax" and "Video2000".
I usually say that it is a Good Thing that hardware usually doesn't support Linux. Hardware supports Windows, Linux supports hardware. This means that I can plug in a new wifi dongle, and not having to install this brand new networking management software, which comes on the driver disk, and happens to also include a driver somewhere that you can't really get without that whole new disgusting application.
After having to touch my mothers new Vaio laptop with Vista for a while, I realized that the biggest problem with Windows isn't Windows, it's that every application in the world that isn't a part of the original installation is fucking annoying. There were about a gazillion applications labeled Vaio, mostly duplicating already existing functionality (you know how every newly installed Windows OS has a pop up that welcomes you, and offers to show you some documentation? Her laptop had two - one from Windows, and one from Sony, with at least 50% the same content, and the other 50% being lot's of annoying "we have a Club Vaio we want you to be in - it doesn't do anything, but it at least has a cheesy name!" buttons). However, if you remove the annoying Vaio apps, suddenly the Fn+F#-keys stop working (you know, to change volume, brightness, monitor, etc), because that driver was apparently part of one of the most annoying applications. Which, of course, can't be downloaded and reinstalled from Sonys website, because the binary they have is broken.
You know when you come home to someone because "their computer is a bit slow", and you realize it's because it has Bonzai Buddy, Gator, 1 000 hits in Ad-Aware, and 50 or so viruses? You know the feeling? That's what I was feeling as I was booting the computer. For the first time.
So please, computer vendors: don't ever, ever sell computers with preinstalled Linux. I'll do it myself, thankyouverymuch, so that I will not have to be exposed to your "user friendlyness". Give me an plain, unmodified Ubuntu CD or something if you want, and a clean hard drive.
Hardware vendors: don't ever, ever release Linux drivers - I don't want to install a pop up blocker for my web browser to be able to change resolution on my monitor. Give me the specs and/or source code, and I'll let someone who's not an idiot write drivers.
Software vendors: don't ever, ever release fancy one-click Linux binaries - I don't want to get a million fancy, themed (not system themed - your own theme engine you developed, just to annoy me) pop ups and toolbar icons, just because I was stupid enough to actually wanting to use your product - I'm sorry, I will never do it again, now leave me alone! Give me the source code, and I'll let someone who isn't an idiot create a deb package that can actually be removed, and/or fork your product and make it non-horrible.
That's nonsense; regardless of the legalities and the moral rights and wrongs of the matter (on both sides), TPB know full well and are open about what they're doing, and what their site is intended to be used for. Even the name gives a slight clue to this! The name gives a hint of their origins, The Pirate Bureau, who they were originally a part of. The Pirate Bureau's name is a pun of The Anti-pirate Bureau, the Swedish anti-piracy agency that represents the movie and game industries.
Self-confessed pirates, which is what the The Pirate Bureau is an organization of, are people who believe in privacy, freedom of cultural expression, and is against the current laws regarding immaterial property, among other things. I was a pirate for years without having any pirated material on any of my disks (it wasn't the pirate part that stopped, though).
It does contain a URL. It also contain a URN (for instance "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"). The point of a URN is that it doesn't have a universal location - you're supposed to find it wherever you can, probably in local cache somewhere.
The URL can be seen as a backup ("in case you don't know the DTD for W3C HTML 4.01, you can create a local copy from this URL" - in the future, when people have forgotten HTML 4.01, that can be useful), or the same way XML namespaces is used - you don't have to send a HTTP request to http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml to know that a document that uses that namespace is a xhtml document - it's just another form of a unique resource identifier (URI), just like a URN or a guid.
What the W3C is having a problem with is applications that decide to fetch the DTD every single request. That's just crazy. Why do you even need to validate it, unless you're a validator? Just try to parse it - it probably won't validate anyway, and you'll have to do either do it in some kind of quirks mode or just break. If you can parse it correctly, does it matter if it validates? If you can't parse it, does it matter if it validates? And if you actually do want to validate it, why make the user wait a few seconds while you fetch the DTD on every page request? The only reasonable way this could happen that I can think of is link crawlers who find the URL - but doesn't link crawlers usually avoid to revisit pages they just visited?
I know I'm being unfair that way - I tried to make it clear what versions I was comparing, but you're right. The comparison is unfair.
But the thing is, I don't think either Epiphany/Gecko 1.9 or Epiphany/Webkit will be That much of a difference to existing Epiphany. It will render more sites better, and with less resource use. I don't feel very excited. I mentioned a bunch of advantages of Firefox 3 in the GP post.
The thing is, Firefox 2 is quite crap, Epiphany 2.20 is mostly great, and Firefox 3 is quite good. Fancy extensions can't turn crap into something great. Fancy extensions can turn something good into something great, though. The only reason I started using Firefox again was because I wrote webpages and needed to access Firebug, and eventually, I just didn't feel like restarting the browser anymore. I could probably code that search engine extension myself - I've played a bit with creating Firefox extensions, and it's quite easy to rewrite the entire UI. On the other hand, I still haven't found a way to make Epiphany's tabs shrink, which annoys the hell out of me.
Firefox 3 is, in my opinion, simply Good Enough to make Epiphany pointless. But I'm probably, and hopefully, wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
When I use bittorrent, I like to squeeze out as much bandwith as possible. However, I don't like when others get annoyed.
To fix the annoyance, I would have to limit my bandwidth usage at some times of the day - and I wouldn't just have to limit my usage according to when the other tenants are awake, and according to when they use how much bandwidth, but also according to how much bandwidth my ISP feels like giving me today (my ISP is seriously bandwidth starved).
If my router had good QoS, I wouldn't have to worry about annoying others, while still being able to use all spare bandwidth. I would definitely prefer this solution.
Yeah... I suppose the post I replied to isn't visible anymore due to being moderated -1, Flamebait. "You" refers to "xpuppykickerx"'s claim that downloading is just as illegal as uploading.
It's STIM's idea, STIM would take the cash.
I wouldn't even dream of saying it's a good idea, but it's an example of how downloading something doesn't have to be illegal, just because uploading is, which is what the post I responded to suggested.
Actually, it was legal to download here (in Sweden) up until... I think it was July 1, 2005, as long as you didn't upload.
The music industry around here are talking about that they want to start an experiment with voluntary broadband-tax, starting this autumn, which will allow you to, for a small fee, download all the music you want from Pirate Bay or wherever. Uploading will still be illegal.
You seem to be assuming the rest of the world uses US laws. Stop it.
90% of everything is crap
I know, and so does everyone else.
You know, I recently heard about a project by John Resig (creator of jQuery) called Processing.js. It's a Javascript port of the Processing Visualization Language, which means it could be viewd as a rival to Flash for online graphics content.
You should check out his blog post
In case the sarcasm wasn't obvious enough: that's one of the most important things that Javascript libraries solve
Hell, a lot of the time, Americans treat Europe that way. I see no reason why the Chinese people wouldn't see us that way.
They do care. They have improved.
They've removed lot's of sites from the Great Firewall of China, for instance the English Wikipedia, after western politicians said that a change like that would reflect well upon China. They've let western journalists go to many places they can't normally go to. Today, many European countries (including mine, Sweden) have governmentally blessed internet blocklists that are far longer than the Chinese one.
But after the western media told the world that the Chinese people are pigs for not invading other sovereign countries randomly (Myanmar) or defending it's people from ethnic cleansing by the Tibet people against the Han-Chinese population (link goes to a report by the only western journalist who was actually there - all other reports are just quoting the exile government in India), they are quite a bit suspicious towards us and our so-called free and just media, and rightly so. Us Westeners sabotaging the path of the eternal fire, or not preventing Tibet terrorists from doing so, on it's way to Beijing as a way to get back at them for stopping ethnic cleansing isn't exactly helping matters - especially not when it's done by traveling across the world, just to beat up a girl in a wheelchair - because that's usually the best way to get sympathies.
To make matters worse, I know the largest Swedish newspapers publish Photoshop jobs (publishing photos of a large group of Chinese polices - but failing to include the even larger group of angry activists next to them) and pure lies (pictures of Nepalese officials treating activists badly, and claiming that they're Chinese) as proof of how evil the Chinese government is.
After this, I have no problems seeing why one would try to limit the access for one's people to these lies - the only thing it would result in is civil war, something that is never good, and would hurt the Chinese process towards giving the people a decent standard of living, freedom of speech, and, eventually, democracy.
So you're saying that the Chinese authorities wants the hotels that operate in China to follow Chinese laws and regulations? Shocking!
Next you're going to tell me that American citizens have their right to bear arms violated when they're in Europe.
SCO dies, Microsoft's revenue is down, and even the weather is nice.
Think of my post as aid for their anger management therapy ;)
I don't understand your problem. It is not about Linux, but one of those Linux clones. BSD, Solaris, that's just marketing anyway...
...right?
If one of these would become sentient and try to kill me, I should still be able to out-walk it, then. I just hope they don't make any better models :(
Crap!
The railroad link is supposed to be http://www.monochrom.at/turingtrainterminal/abstract_eng.htm
My personal favorites are computers built in Game of Life and a model railroad.
Adding all graves will make it so much easier to visit the graves of your relatives. It's already possible to visit the cemetery through Google Earth/Maps, but it can be hard to locate your passed loved ones.
However, I feel there's a need for an additional service to be developed: put flowers and candles on the grave. As soon as that's implemented, you'll never have to go to the cemetery again!
In many mays, I believe Freebase is a better platform for different kinds of trivia. Not only do they not delete data that isn't "important", they also organize the data semantically, and have fancy API:s to get the actual information, not just the text, from the database. This makes it easy to write applications on top of that data. The semantic data seems to be incomplete quite often (there is also a plain text description imported from Wikipedia that of course is quite complete), but that isn't something that couldn't relatively easy be fixed with a few more users.
I'm not saying Freebase is The Best platform, just that if Wikipedia doesn't want the content, give it to someone who actually do want it. And you get some extra benefits in the process.
Trackers only use HTTP. If you can browse the web, you can connect to the tracker. I'm sure some of those 1337, moronic private trackers refuse to connect you, but we're talking about real, non-crippled bittorrent here. The tracker is not a problem.
If you allow outgoing connections, you can connect to other clients. If you can connect, you can transfer. At any speed. Transfer speeds from other clients is not a problem.
The problem you're describing is a result of the fact that if there's a seed somewhere that has a few hundred kbps of spare bandwidth (for instance, the Amazon seed), it cannot connect to you and ask you if you want some. So until you decide to randomly connect to that exact peer, you won't get any data from that exact peer. However, most clients connect to a few hundred other clients if you just give it time. If they combined can't give you more than 5 kbps, then that torrent isn't very healthy.
In short: trackers work, transfer speeds work, but it could take some time if the swarm has the wrong properties.
That's an interface problem - not a technical problem.
You could probably write a bittorrent client as a flash applet. You press the big, shiny download button that covers half of your screen, and the flash applet connects to peers and starts to download, all with a pretty progress bar. Even my grandfather could figure that out (one of my grandmas can't even use a mouse, the other is paranoid and believes that "They" are spying on her if she use a computer, so she got rid of it).
Or, you could let people download an exe file, that when clicked will automatically launch a simple bittorrent client that automatically opens the torrent file for Nordkalotten 365 and starts to download.
They have thousands of extra dollars that they no longer need to pay Amazon, that they could now throw at the problem. I'm sure they can figure something out.
Forever!
Because, you know, This cable is owned by freedom loving Americans instead of those theocratic dictatorships in the middle east!
It's a feature.
Digital Versatile Disc is a backronym - DVD originally meant Digital Video Disc, until they realized how stupid the name actually was ("Yeah, this game is distributed on a video disc. But it's not really a video..."), at which point they just redefined the abbreviation. When I think about it, I realize that HD-DVD's name is just as stupid: you can have just as High Definition audio/video or interactive media on HD discs as you can on "SD discs", just not as much.
By not having a meaning, blu-ray avoids that problem - a blu-ray disc is a disc that uses blue rays.
I do think that CD is a good name - it tells me what it is (a disc that's quite small, compared to LP's), not what they developed it to contain. But CDSDWEMRFDTDVD (Compact Disc-sized Disc With Even More Room For Data Than Digital Versatile Discs) doesn't have such a nice ring to it... Of course, today it's more of a Big Disc, compared to Minidisc or mini-DVD, which again shows that neutral names are better.
To finish off, let me just counter your "glory days" argument by saying "BetaMax" and "Video2000".
Agree.
I usually say that it is a Good Thing that hardware usually doesn't support Linux. Hardware supports Windows, Linux supports hardware. This means that I can plug in a new wifi dongle, and not having to install this brand new networking management software, which comes on the driver disk, and happens to also include a driver somewhere that you can't really get without that whole new disgusting application.
After having to touch my mothers new Vaio laptop with Vista for a while, I realized that the biggest problem with Windows isn't Windows, it's that every application in the world that isn't a part of the original installation is fucking annoying. There were about a gazillion applications labeled Vaio, mostly duplicating already existing functionality (you know how every newly installed Windows OS has a pop up that welcomes you, and offers to show you some documentation? Her laptop had two - one from Windows, and one from Sony, with at least 50% the same content, and the other 50% being lot's of annoying "we have a Club Vaio we want you to be in - it doesn't do anything, but it at least has a cheesy name!" buttons). However, if you remove the annoying Vaio apps, suddenly the Fn+F#-keys stop working (you know, to change volume, brightness, monitor, etc), because that driver was apparently part of one of the most annoying applications. Which, of course, can't be downloaded and reinstalled from Sonys website, because the binary they have is broken.
You know when you come home to someone because "their computer is a bit slow", and you realize it's because it has Bonzai Buddy, Gator, 1 000 hits in Ad-Aware, and 50 or so viruses? You know the feeling? That's what I was feeling as I was booting the computer. For the first time.
So please, computer vendors: don't ever, ever sell computers with preinstalled Linux. I'll do it myself, thankyouverymuch, so that I will not have to be exposed to your "user friendlyness". Give me an plain, unmodified Ubuntu CD or something if you want, and a clean hard drive.
Hardware vendors: don't ever, ever release Linux drivers - I don't want to install a pop up blocker for my web browser to be able to change resolution on my monitor. Give me the specs and/or source code, and I'll let someone who's not an idiot write drivers.
Software vendors: don't ever, ever release fancy one-click Linux binaries - I don't want to get a million fancy, themed (not system themed - your own theme engine you developed, just to annoy me) pop ups and toolbar icons, just because I was stupid enough to actually wanting to use your product - I'm sorry, I will never do it again, now leave me alone! Give me the source code, and I'll let someone who isn't an idiot create a deb package that can actually be removed, and/or fork your product and make it non-horrible.
Self-confessed pirates, which is what the The Pirate Bureau is an organization of, are people who believe in privacy, freedom of cultural expression, and is against the current laws regarding immaterial property, among other things. I was a pirate for years without having any pirated material on any of my disks (it wasn't the pirate part that stopped, though).
It does contain a URL. It also contain a URN (for instance "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"). The point of a URN is that it doesn't have a universal location - you're supposed to find it wherever you can, probably in local cache somewhere.
The URL can be seen as a backup ("in case you don't know the DTD for W3C HTML 4.01, you can create a local copy from this URL" - in the future, when people have forgotten HTML 4.01, that can be useful), or the same way XML namespaces is used - you don't have to send a HTTP request to http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml to know that a document that uses that namespace is a xhtml document - it's just another form of a unique resource identifier (URI), just like a URN or a guid.
What the W3C is having a problem with is applications that decide to fetch the DTD every single request. That's just crazy. Why do you even need to validate it, unless you're a validator? Just try to parse it - it probably won't validate anyway, and you'll have to do either do it in some kind of quirks mode or just break. If you can parse it correctly, does it matter if it validates? If you can't parse it, does it matter if it validates? And if you actually do want to validate it, why make the user wait a few seconds while you fetch the DTD on every page request? The only reasonable way this could happen that I can think of is link crawlers who find the URL - but doesn't link crawlers usually avoid to revisit pages they just visited?
I know I'm being unfair that way - I tried to make it clear what versions I was comparing, but you're right. The comparison is unfair.
But the thing is, I don't think either Epiphany/Gecko 1.9 or Epiphany/Webkit will be That much of a difference to existing Epiphany. It will render more sites better, and with less resource use. I don't feel very excited. I mentioned a bunch of advantages of Firefox 3 in the GP post.
The thing is, Firefox 2 is quite crap, Epiphany 2.20 is mostly great, and Firefox 3 is quite good. Fancy extensions can't turn crap into something great. Fancy extensions can turn something good into something great, though. The only reason I started using Firefox again was because I wrote webpages and needed to access Firebug, and eventually, I just didn't feel like restarting the browser anymore. I could probably code that search engine extension myself - I've played a bit with creating Firefox extensions, and it's quite easy to rewrite the entire UI. On the other hand, I still haven't found a way to make Epiphany's tabs shrink, which annoys the hell out of me.
Firefox 3 is, in my opinion, simply Good Enough to make Epiphany pointless. But I'm probably, and hopefully, wrong.