It's still a matter of what you, as a developer, can do with the protocol. Obviously, part of the SDK licensing agreement will be that you can't just publish it for the world to see, or be allowed to incorporate it into an open source project (or probably even a third party closed source project).
Not exactly. The only mention of an SDK on the Bittorrent site is part of a "device certification program", that would undoubtedly involve paying Bittorrent in exchange for licensing their now proprietary information and some offical seal of approval.
There is no mention of open source projects being able to see/use any changes in the protocol. Luckily, I assume that most bittorrent trackers (public or private), will ban any incompatible official client if the protocol does change, rather than adopting the official client and abandoning all of the others.
Actually, while my university has authenticated logins to access the network, the bans for copyright infringement (40 days) and exceeding allocated bandwith are based on MAC addresses. Which, since my school is also very geeky, has the effect of making the ban simply for show, presumably so that it looks like they are doing something about copyright infringement.
The chances of two 16kB chunks from a Ubuntu ISO and a music CD being identical are extremely unlikely, or for that matter, the chances of any two 16kbit chunks from any two non-similar (meaning, in this case, files that are not of/from the same source [the same movie, album, program, whatever]) files being the same are incredibly slim.
That being said, about 90% of the commenters missed the point completly, though it is somewhat understandable given how vague and nontechnical the linked article and summary are. The idea is that by hashing each 16kB chunk, one peer can download a single chunk from another if the chunk is identical but the entire file isn't. The word "similar" in the title does not mean files that somewhat resemble each other, it means files that have identical chunks.
Of course, with such a system, one would have to deal with the overhead traffic of announcing the hashes of every 16kB chunk instead of simply the hash of the entire file. I imagine that in an actual implementation of this system, instead of a peer requesting hashes of every chunk that all of the other peers are sharing, the downloader would only request hashes of files with similar filenames or keywords.
As in, if you search for an Ubuntu ISO, you won't be getting hashes of chunks from someone who is only sharing The Matrix Trilogy DVD-Rs; you would get hashes from people who are sharing ubuntu-6.10-server-amd64.iso, ubuntu-6.10-server-i386.iso, ubuntu-6.06-server-amd64.iso, etc. I would imagine that there would be many shared chunks between those files.
Of course, I can't imagine such a system working on a P2P network like Bittorrent (except maybe with a modified version of DHT), but with a more centralized system, it could work.
The only remaining problem I see is how to deal with byte offsets on chunks. I haven't read the actual paper on the topic yet, but I imagine something was done about it.
It seems to me that this is not actually a hybrid, since it has only one method of propulsion, an electric motor. Perhaps the designer got a little buzzword-happy
PocketPuTTY works quite well on my Windows Mobile 2003 device. It may not have the features that other SSH clients have, but its absurdly quick and easy to use. A combination of a PPC with PocketPuTTY, a bluetooth keyboard, and a screen session on a Linux box somewhere is surprisingly useful.
The purpose of postage on snail mail is not to prevent a deluge of junk mail from filling citizens mailboxes (that happens anyway). It is to subsidize the delivery of mail. A tax on email would be idiotic and unnecessary. The solution is actually pretty simple. Spam filters have gotten widespread and accurate enough that spam is no longer really a problem for the average end user. While it is still a strain on mail servers, bandwidth is getting quicker and cheaper every day.
Oh, oops. Thanks for the fact check. I got my figures confused. 13% is the CO2 level in coal power plant. From a DoE study:
There are quite a number of sources of waste CO2. Every operation that involves
combustion of fuel for energy is a potential source. The program targeted coal and
other fossil fuel-fired power plants as the main sources of CO2. Typical coal-fired
power plants emit flue gas from their stacks containing up to 13% CO2. This high
concentration of CO2 enhances transfer and uptake of CO2 in the ponds. The concept
of coupling a coal-fired power plant with an algae farm provides an elegant approach
to recycle of the CO2 from coal combustion into a useable liquid fuel.
I agree, coal and algae is a far better solution than coal and oil.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I remember reading that to produce a useful amount of algae, the air needs to be at least 13% CO2. Coal plant emissions reach that level. So it would be possible to run the nation's diesel fleet off 15,000 square miles of desert if that desert contained a few dozen coal power plants and a system of pipes to carry exhaust to the algae ponds.
While I agree that we need to rely more upon nuclear energy, it can't (at least yet) replace fossil fuels. The trouble is obviously in getting energy from a nuclear power plant to a car. You can't just stick a reactor on four wheels and call it done. A convenient energy storage medium doesn't yet exist. Hydrogen is difficult to store, and batteries charge slowly and are absurdly expensive.
I believe biodiesel will succeed at least as a stopgap though, as it is already on the market and runs in diesel vehicles with no modification.
The UNH study is based on a ~20 year U.S. DoE study on algae biodiesel.
Anyway, while it is true that there is enough land in the United States to grow enough algae to replace all gasoline and diesel fuel use, it's not the ideal solution. The problem is that the algae requires something around 13% CO2 gas to grow in any useful amount. The level of CO2 naturally occuring in the atmosphere is about 0.035%. The only economical source to generate that much CO2 is burning Coal. So, the entire process still yields tremendoes amounts of CO2, contributing to global warming. Certainly, it is better to harness CO2 from existing Coal power plants for biodiesel instead of releasing it into the atmosphere, but it is not a permanent solution.
They've been allowing animated GIFs and Flash ads for months. They do, however, allow publishers to choose whether or not they want image ads displayed on their sites, and probably will continue to do so. On my site at least, only a fwe percent of the ads shown are image ads, and only a few percent of those are animated.
Your correlation may be right, but your reasoning isn't.
Tabletop roleplaying involves coming up with creative solutions to problems set in a clearly-defined ruleset, involve constant data-tracking and minor mathematical equations, and involve working together with small groups of people toward like-minded goals. Conversely, love of roleplaying can illustrate how important creativity is to good programming. What do you think?
You could say the same about football and roleplaying or coding, but there happens to be no correlation between the two. It is more that the roleplaying person and the coding person are both subsets of the same dork/nerd/geek culture.
I've been using Overclockix for a few months for Folding@Home. It is brilliant in that you can set up a Folding box that needs no HDD, and a keyboard/video/mouse only to configure the Folding client.
Yea, I had a similar start. When I was about six years old (1992), my dad gave me his old IBM PC/2. Interestingly enough, I was subscribed to a children's magazine back then, Contact, that had a BASIC game each issue, filling up one page with code. I went through the magazine each month, typing the code onto the IBM, eventually modifying it, and finally, writing BASIC programs on my own.
You can't force a kid to be a geek. He/she has to be curious and willing to learn by nature. In my opinion, the best solution is to simply give the kid the tools he or she needs to get started, and see what happens from there.
You can go to the average garbage dump and find at least one computer that will run something like Debian without a GUI. If you're lucky, you might find a Pentium II or faster, and be able to run something like DamnSmallLinux. Chances are, you'll be able to find a monitor, keyboard, and mouse there too. That accomplishes the task for $00.00.
Slashdot Mirror
Err, a relaunched version of the Powertop site, that is. The program itself remains unchanged.
It looks to me like it's just a relaunched version of Intel Powertop with better marketing behind it.
Regardless, Powertop actually is a useful tool, and it's helped me get much better battery life out of my T61 running Ubuntu.
So... what are the chances they just browsed Wikipedia for it?
It's still a matter of what you, as a developer, can do with the protocol. Obviously, part of the SDK licensing agreement will be that you can't just publish it for the world to see, or be allowed to incorporate it into an open source project (or probably even a third party closed source project).
Not exactly. The only mention of an SDK on the Bittorrent site is part of a "device certification program", that would undoubtedly involve paying Bittorrent in exchange for licensing their now proprietary information and some offical seal of approval. There is no mention of open source projects being able to see/use any changes in the protocol. Luckily, I assume that most bittorrent trackers (public or private), will ban any incompatible official client if the protocol does change, rather than adopting the official client and abandoning all of the others.
Actually, while my university has authenticated logins to access the network, the bans for copyright infringement (40 days) and exceeding allocated bandwith are based on MAC addresses. Which, since my school is also very geeky, has the effect of making the ban simply for show, presumably so that it looks like they are doing something about copyright infringement.
The chances of two 16kB chunks from a Ubuntu ISO and a music CD being identical are extremely unlikely, or for that matter, the chances of any two 16kbit chunks from any two non-similar (meaning, in this case, files that are not of/from the same source [the same movie, album, program, whatever]) files being the same are incredibly slim.
That being said, about 90% of the commenters missed the point completly, though it is somewhat understandable given how vague and nontechnical the linked article and summary are. The idea is that by hashing each 16kB chunk, one peer can download a single chunk from another if the chunk is identical but the entire file isn't. The word "similar" in the title does not mean files that somewhat resemble each other, it means files that have identical chunks.
Of course, with such a system, one would have to deal with the overhead traffic of announcing the hashes of every 16kB chunk instead of simply the hash of the entire file. I imagine that in an actual implementation of this system, instead of a peer requesting hashes of every chunk that all of the other peers are sharing, the downloader would only request hashes of files with similar filenames or keywords.
As in, if you search for an Ubuntu ISO, you won't be getting hashes of chunks from someone who is only sharing The Matrix Trilogy DVD-Rs; you would get hashes from people who are sharing ubuntu-6.10-server-amd64.iso, ubuntu-6.10-server-i386.iso, ubuntu-6.06-server-amd64.iso, etc. I would imagine that there would be many shared chunks between those files.
Of course, I can't imagine such a system working on a P2P network like Bittorrent (except maybe with a modified version of DHT), but with a more centralized system, it could work.
The only remaining problem I see is how to deal with byte offsets on chunks. I haven't read the actual paper on the topic yet, but I imagine something was done about it.
It seems to me that this is not actually a hybrid, since it has only one method of propulsion, an electric motor. Perhaps the designer got a little buzzword-happy
PocketPuTTY works quite well on my Windows Mobile 2003 device. It may not have the features that other SSH clients have, but its absurdly quick and easy to use. A combination of a PPC with PocketPuTTY, a bluetooth keyboard, and a screen session on a Linux box somewhere is surprisingly useful.
The purpose of postage on snail mail is not to prevent a deluge of junk mail from filling citizens mailboxes (that happens anyway). It is to subsidize the delivery of mail. A tax on email would be idiotic and unnecessary. The solution is actually pretty simple. Spam filters have gotten widespread and accurate enough that spam is no longer really a problem for the average end user. While it is still a strain on mail servers, bandwidth is getting quicker and cheaper every day.
Oh, oops. Thanks for the fact check. I got my figures confused. 13% is the CO2 level in coal power plant. From a DoE study:
There are quite a number of sources of waste CO2. Every operation that involves combustion of fuel for energy is a potential source. The program targeted coal and other fossil fuel-fired power plants as the main sources of CO2. Typical coal-fired power plants emit flue gas from their stacks containing up to 13% CO2. This high concentration of CO2 enhances transfer and uptake of CO2 in the ponds. The concept of coupling a coal-fired power plant with an algae farm provides an elegant approach to recycle of the CO2 from coal combustion into a useable liquid fuel.
I agree, coal and algae is a far better solution than coal and oil.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I remember reading that to produce a useful amount of algae, the air needs to be at least 13% CO2. Coal plant emissions reach that level. So it would be possible to run the nation's diesel fleet off 15,000 square miles of desert if that desert contained a few dozen coal power plants and a system of pipes to carry exhaust to the algae ponds.
While I agree that we need to rely more upon nuclear energy, it can't (at least yet) replace fossil fuels. The trouble is obviously in getting energy from a nuclear power plant to a car. You can't just stick a reactor on four wheels and call it done. A convenient energy storage medium doesn't yet exist. Hydrogen is difficult to store, and batteries charge slowly and are absurdly expensive.
I believe biodiesel will succeed at least as a stopgap though, as it is already on the market and runs in diesel vehicles with no modification.
The UNH study is based on a ~20 year U.S. DoE study on algae biodiesel. Anyway, while it is true that there is enough land in the United States to grow enough algae to replace all gasoline and diesel fuel use, it's not the ideal solution. The problem is that the algae requires something around 13% CO2 gas to grow in any useful amount. The level of CO2 naturally occuring in the atmosphere is about 0.035%. The only economical source to generate that much CO2 is burning Coal. So, the entire process still yields tremendoes amounts of CO2, contributing to global warming. Certainly, it is better to harness CO2 from existing Coal power plants for biodiesel instead of releasing it into the atmosphere, but it is not a permanent solution.
They've been allowing animated GIFs and Flash ads for months. They do, however, allow publishers to choose whether or not they want image ads displayed on their sites, and probably will continue to do so. On my site at least, only a fwe percent of the ads shown are image ads, and only a few percent of those are animated.
"Dr. Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul University."
North Korea doesn't have the money, the technology, or the support necessary for stem cell research.
"Do you want any random web page to have access to your files?" I think the plan is to have all of your files stored on Google's servers instead.
Your correlation may be right, but your reasoning isn't.
Tabletop roleplaying involves coming up with creative solutions to problems set in a clearly-defined ruleset, involve constant data-tracking and minor mathematical equations, and involve working together with small groups of people toward like-minded goals. Conversely, love of roleplaying can illustrate how important creativity is to good programming. What do you think?
You could say the same about football and roleplaying or coding, but there happens to be no correlation between the two. It is more that the roleplaying person and the coding person are both subsets of the same dork/nerd/geek culture.
I've been using Overclockix for a few months for Folding@Home. It is brilliant in that you can set up a Folding box that needs no HDD, and a keyboard/video/mouse only to configure the Folding client.
Yea, I had a similar start. When I was about six years old (1992), my dad gave me his old IBM PC/2. Interestingly enough, I was subscribed to a children's magazine back then, Contact, that had a BASIC game each issue, filling up one page with code. I went through the magazine each month, typing the code onto the IBM, eventually modifying it, and finally, writing BASIC programs on my own. You can't force a kid to be a geek. He/she has to be curious and willing to learn by nature. In my opinion, the best solution is to simply give the kid the tools he or she needs to get started, and see what happens from there.
...Makes the whole world blind. - Gandhi
/me renounces his englishness. I meant to write renounce, not recounce.
/me recounces his geekyness. What I meant was /mode #haxxor +b *!*@*.cia.gov
/mode +b #haxxor *!*@*.cia.gov
You can go to the average garbage dump and find at least one computer that will run something like Debian without a GUI. If you're lucky, you might find a Pentium II or faster, and be able to run something like DamnSmallLinux. Chances are, you'll be able to find a monitor, keyboard, and mouse there too. That accomplishes the task for $00.00.