It is probably faster to get a new IP on cable by changing your MAC address than waiting for a DHCP lease to expire
Probably correct, though it's not always easy to do. Switching cards is easy enough, but it requires shutting down and opening up your computer. Some cards and/or OSs let you change the MAC address of a card on the fly, though it seems to be pretty rare.
Some cable modems will let you `reset' them by various means (holding down the rest button at power up, holding it down for a long time, leaving the modem off for a long time) and in fact may require that before they'll work with another MAC address (because you're limited to one IP address, and it'll think you still have the old one.)
And then you need to make sure your DHCP client doesn't request the same IP address again -- many do this by default.
All in all, getting a new IP address from your cable modem network is often a PITA -- but it's nothing compared to the PITA it is to actually get somebody on the phone at their support organziation who understands what a DoS attack is and can actually help you with it.
Mere portscanning doesn't intentionally clog all bandwidth.
Mod that statement up!
In my expereience, when somebody's saying that `X is using up all my bandwidth', where `X' is things like virii, `hackers', ARP requests or something else, what that really means is that somebody doesn't really understand what's going on.
Most cable modems have a lot of downstream bandwith and not so much upstream bandwidth -- but even the upstream bandwidth is far far more than is used by a standard port scan where somebody hits all your ports to see if they're open.
And even that's unusual -- usually people seem to scan entire networks to see if one port is open, so a single scanner would only send a few packets at your box. It would take several thousand people hitting your box _at once_ like this to make things as bad as you make it sound.
Your box may actually be under attack (a DoS attack.) I get a lot of trouble like this when people want the nick I use on IRC -- they packet my box incessantly. I've got 5 Mb/s downstream on my cable modem, so as long as my packet filtering isn't responding to each packet, it takes a pretty signifigant attack to kick me off of IRC. But if my system does respond to every packet with packets of approximately the same size, an attack of about 0.3 Mb/s is enough to bring everything down to a crawl. It's all a matter of configuring my filters properly...
Ultimately, what you should do is log all the packets being sent at your IP address with a tool like tcpdump, then send those logs to the abuse department of the ISP where they're coming from. If it's a DDoS attack, the odds are that the IPs are spoofed, but if it's really a portscan it's probably not (becuase they need to see the returning packets to see which ports are open.)
You could also contact Comcat and see if they could filter the traffic out, though I'd reserve that option for an attack that lasts days and doesn't give up, because if they're anything like RR, getting to somebody who can actually do that will be very difficult.
Another way of dealing with an attack is to turn off your cable modem long enough for your DHCP lease to expire, and then come back and get a new IP address, one that's hopefully not being attacked.
Funny thing is, the GP was going on about Broadcom, yet I download their drivers (which are regularly updated) to replace the open source ones (which also work fine) included in the Distribution.
It sounds like the GP poster didn't realize that the Broadcom hardware was supported, or that he was talking about some different device than you are. (Dunno -- I don't have any myself, not that I'm aware of.)
But I also give preference to devices that work with stock kernels, rather than things I have to download special drivers for. Less work = good.
For example, I generally only only buy Nvidia cards, because they have the best Linux 3D support. But the support is not there by default -- I have to download it and jump through a few steps to get it going. But once done, it's very nice.
For now, I don't buy ATI graphics cards, because their 3D is not well supported by Linux. But if this changes, especially if the support can be included in XFree86, er, Xorg by default (i.e. it's open source), I may have to consider switching.
I'm sure you already realize this, but you're an insignificant part of their market. Your lost sales don't matter because they're making plenty elsewhere.
Actually, I'm with the grandparent poster. I usually will not buy hardware that I know not to work with Linux, even if I'm buying it for a Windows box, because at some point that box may be re-purposed to run Linux, or *BSD or something else.
I work part-time as a sysadmin for a small company, so the dollar figure of hardware purchases I affect is small, but I do have signifigant input in what they buy, and I suspect I'm not alone in this general policy...
Granted, if the initial purpose of a box is to run Windows (we're mostly a *nix shop, but several people do like Windows, and we let them use it) I won't worry too much about Linux compatibility, but if there's two choices, and one works in Linux but costs more, and the other does not and costs less, I'm likely to spend the extra money to help alleviate problems in the future. This policy has served me/us well, and I see no point in changing it.
So the default configuration out of the box does not work with Windows shares. That's not reasonable!
Security is not always free. Often some functionality needs to be given up to keep a system secure.
In this case, the default firewall either needs to be opened up (or an option given to open it up if you need this functionality), or this functionality needs to be documented as `not working with the default firewall'. It's probably a good candidate for a release note mention in it's current state, but isn't serious enough to prevent the release of FC4 until fixed.
Personally, I think a default configuration of `secure' is better than a default configuration of `everything works'. Things that are broken by the security should be documented, however, with instructions included on how to open things up to get the functionality you need.
This is how Linux gets a reputation for hard to use and hard to configure.
... and the opposite is how Windows gets a reputation for being insecure. If you think Linux (and we're painting with a really wide brush here, as there's dozens of very different Linux distributions out there) is bad in this regard, take a look at OpenBSD...
Not understanding how Bit Torrent works ...
on
Fedora Core 4 Available
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The more people get on the torrents, the faster they will be.
This is not true.
The average download rate of a torrent is pretty much independant of the number of downloaders -- that's what's so neat about it. (Compare to downloading via ftp or http -- double the number of downloaders, and you half the average download rate, assuming that you're out of bandwidth in the first place.)
If you've got a torrent being seeded by some fast sites, then adding new downloaders on cable modems (fast download, slow upload) will generally slow the average download down rather than speed it up. But it won't slow down to almost nothing, which is what happens if thousands of people are hitting a ftp or http server...
Now, if people who are downloading leave their BT clients running after they're done downloading, then the average download rates (of those still downloading, that is) will go up, as there will be more sites seeding at that point.
But in general, merely having more people using BT to download something will not make the average download rates go up. BT is way cool -- don't get me wrong -- I love it. But it's not magic...
It's pretty basic, but it does most of what I need. What it's lacking is somethign to take Outlook/Exchange events and import them automatically -- I need to write something to do that for me.
But for right now, they have no reason to pour work into something that isn't going to function or benefit the software. A waste of time, perhaps?
What are you talking about? Waste of time?
Multiple CPU x86 boxes have been available for a long time -- I recall seeing Sequent boxes with lots of 386 cpus, for example. I'm typing this on a dual p3 700 right now...
The vast majority of server applications will benefit from multiple cpus right now, as long as the box isn't already disk bound.
As for desktop boxes, two or more cpus means you can do two or more things at full speed. One application may not run faster with two cpus unless it's written to support it, but two seperate applications certainly will.
As for games, games could certainly benefit from multiple cpus. Now, most may not seperate different things into different threads that can run in different cpus, but this will change rather quickly if desktop boxes start regularly having more than one cpu...
Part of what was neat about the BeBox was that they offered two cpus. They couldn't make the cpus faster, so they just gave you two of them...
But don't try to tell us it's a waste of time. It most certainly isn't. And we don't need any need to materialize, or special software to be written -- we can use multi-cpu machines NOW.
All spiders are going to ignore your ROBOTS.TXT file. Instead, they look for a file called robots.txt.
I was going to say this (but in a better way, of course!) but suspected that somebody else might beat me to it, and indeed they did...
However, there is a bit more to it. If he has a web server on his Windows or Mac OSX box, the odds are that the filesystem in use is case insensitive, so either robots.txt or ROBOTS.TXT will work, because either would be served up by the web server when one requested/robots.txt...
If you're working purely with techies who can handle most problems themselves, then fine.
It depends on the individuals. Some technies know enough to be dangerous, and while they can solve most problems themselves, the ones they can't are often caused by them trying to solve their own problems. Some users create lots more work for you than others...
However, your boss isn't going to listen to this. So what you do is find a free help-desk package (if you're using Windows then Liberum is pretty good) and get people to funnel all of their support calls through that. That way at the end of the month you can go to your boss and say "Look, this is the amount of work it takes to keep a network up and running.
That is an excellent idea. But I'll add one thing to it...
Funnel all your own sysadmin work through it too. If you find a problem, create a ticket, then solve it.
Why? Because if you're a good sysadmin, you fix many things before anybody else even notices, so tickets won't get created unless you create them. But it'll still take time from what is supposed to be your `real' job...
If the load-average goes above QUEUE_LA, sendmail will stop processing mail.
That's not quite true. If LA > QUEUE_LA, then it 1) won't run the queue, and 2) will start only queuing some emails if they satisfy the queue-only function.
I'd looked up the confQUEUE_LA value before, and it says this --
confQUEUE_LA QueueLA [varies] Load average at which queue-only function kicks in. Default values is (8 * numproc)
And when I looked at sendmail.cf, it said this:
# load average at which we just queue messages O QueueLA=8
Basically, at Queue_LA, it starts queueing only the largest emails, and then as the load average gets higher and higher, smaller emails get queued.
If you set QueueFactor to a very small value, THEN Queue_LA will start working like he says it does.
I personally get a lot of spam. About 3000/day that make it past the filters set in sendmail before it makes it to spamassassin, though now that we've changed how sendmail works quite a bit that's down to about 1000/day (with sendmail rejecting the rest outright before accepting it.) I used to think 3000/day was bad -- and it probably is, especially for a guy with an email address that's not quite so generic -- most of my spam is from posting to Usenet and places like/.... but 1 million/day? wow!
We all come into this world with differing levels of gifts. It is what makes us so interesting.
How very... PC. (I do agree that people are not born equal, but as for it making us so interesting, well, not so much. What generally makes us interesting is what happens after birth...)
And yet political correctness also suggests that we are all born equal. Quite the oxymoron...
A person without the genetic gift of increased intelligence may become more intelligent than the gifted person if they apply themselves and believe they can do it.
Generally, science has shown that the effects of `applying themselves' and `believing they can do it' on intelligence is relatively small, especially as one becomes an adult.
The American Heritage Dictionary uses this definition for intelligence: "The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge."
I suspected that you might try to define it. However, merely going to http://www.answers.com/intelligence comes up with several other definitions --
The faculty of thinking, reasoning, and acquiring and applying knowledge:
The general mental ability involved in calculating, reasoning, perceiving relationships and analogies, learning quickly, storing and retrieving information, using language fluently, classifying, generalizing, and adjusting to new situations.
The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, especially toward a purposeful goal.
The ability to comprehend; to understand and profit from experience
Each one of these is subtly different. Yes, they're all related, but they're all different too. And how do you measure these things, in a way that gives an accurate result for everybody? It's not like you can have people just concentrate and measure it that way, like the aliens used the `brain boost machine' in Forbidden Planet.
Of course, you're right: the brain isn't a muscle, it is technically an organ. But, people often refer to it as a muscle because, like a muscle, they can develop it.
`Musclehead' is generally considered to be an insult. Discuss.
And just because people like to say `the brain is a muscle, it needs to be developed', that doesn't mean it develops like a muscle. I'm of a pretty average build, a bit round. I'm also pretty smart, though not a genius. I'm pretty sure that if I started seriously hitting the gym and running and such, in a six months I'd be `buff', with probably 2-3 times the strength and endurance that I have now. But if I started working on brain-puzzles non-stop, reading books, etc. for the same six months, I still wouldn't be a genius. In fact, I don't think my IQ would go up by any signifigant degree, though I might have a lot more knowledge and be a bit better at doing puzzles.
There is ample evidence of this. In fact, the evidence that we can develop our mental abilities is one of the founding reasons for our educational system.
You're mixing your terms. Mental abilities and IQ are not the same, though a person with a high IQ may have more mental abilities. Being able to list the dates that things happened, or being able to fix a car is a mental ability, but not a sign of high intelligence. Being able to find the pattern in a sequence of images is often a sign of high intelligence (and a mental ability(, though that ability will probably improve with practice. (But does that practice make you more intelligent? That has not been really determined.)
Also, it seems to have been shown that any benefits to intelligence caused by studying and thinking and such are much larger if done as a child. Once you become an adult, your IQ is generally fixed (though of course you can make it low
Seriously, these kind of things disturb me when I read them (what the quote said, not what the poster said). It implies that intelligence cannot be achieved through hard work, which is totally wrong.
For the record, this is not a well established fact. There have been several studies that show that IQ is mostly genetics (and this seems to be the general belief -- that it's mostly (or at least largely), but not completely, genetics), there have been studies that show that things like education and good nutrition as a child help it, that mental exercise helps build it, etc.
The brain is like any other muscle and the brain bearer can develop it, just like any other muscle. They don't need a genetic defect to outdo Einstein, they need courage and the willingness to sweat to build it up.
Of course, what exactly IQ is is something that seems to change slightly depending on who you ask. And as others have said here, it's not easy to accurately measure, especially in a large group of people. In any event, the brain is pretty much obviously NOT like `any other muscle' (it's not even a muscle) and while I do believe that it can be developed to some degree, it certainly can't be developed quite like a muscle can.
When people turn around and then say, "Well, you're smart because you're defective," then it diminishes both the person and the journey to become a more intelligent person.
Well, being rude is being rude. But just how many movies have been made about people who are handicapped in some way, end up overcoming that handicap and end up being the best at what they do? Lots. It's a story that people love to see, a story of people overcoming adversity. But it's generally just a story when somebody goes from having a low IQ (and I don't mean just poorly educated) to being a genius, like in
Flowers for Algernon or Charly.
But seriously, Einstein was just one man. Yes, he was a genius, but just one of many geniuses we've had over the years. I'm not sure how much we can learn just by looking at his brain in a pickle jar. And whatever this defect was, they missed it the first time -- I wonder if they (the people who look at his brain in the pickle jar) are just finding what they wanted to find?
It is still "politically correct" to belittle both intelligent and fat people in today's society too.
So what? I don't let what is PC dictate my actions. If you want to, that's fine, but I don't. (I do try and let courtesy dictate my actions, but that's different.)
In any event, it's relatively scientifically established that fat people don't live as long. Is stating that or researching that politically incorrect?
You get far more exposure to radiation from using a cellphone than you do from living near a cell tower.
True. However, you get even more radiation by stepping out into the sun. Roughly 1000 watts/square meter in direct sunlight. Granted, most of it's in the visible light region, but you'll probably get more overall radio/microwave energy from the sun than you will from the tower 30 meters away. (Remember, it's not confined to a few well-defined channels.)
It's R-Squared, stupid. You are a few centimeters from the phone and at least 30m from the tower. The tower just doesn't put out enough power to make a sizable impact on your exposure.
I'm not quite sure the `stupid' is appropriate there. The phone is only transmitting 1) when you're talking on it, and 2) when it's negotiating with the local towers (which is more often than you might think. Leave your phone next to your computer speakers for a while.) The tower is probably transmitting 24/7, on lots of channels at once, with a lot more power than your phone (I believe 20-100 watts/channel is more typical. Your phone probably averages around 0.25 watts.)
(In case it wasn't clear, I do agree that the cell phone is a bigger danger, but it's not as obvious as you make it sound.)
Of course, there has been no scientific studies that have shown that there any any serious effects of microwaves (emitted by cell phones, WiFi, microwave ovens, etc.) on flesh beyond heating it, as long as the field strength stays small (it's small coming from your cell phone. It's not small inside your microwave oven, as that Mmmm-Bop! CD you just microwaved can attest to.)
Adding in possible revotes to the law is not a solution either. Why?
Easy. Right now, people start freaking out and whomever is on the losing end starts crying shenanigans whenever the vote is like 50.5%/49.5% or so. (Ok, the exact cutoff point may not be quite right, but it's a gradual process -- the closer it is, the more the losing side screams that it's wrong and the more the winning side screams that it's right.)
Adding a recount if the vote is too close merely shifts the possiblities for these fiascos. Suppose the law says that there will be (it must be absolute -- it can't be a maybe thing) a revote if the vote is within 0.5%. Fine. Suppose it turns out to be within 0.51%. The losing side will be saying `it's too close to requiring a revote! Recount! Recount!' until they get their revote. The winning side will be saying `no! it's not close enough! No revote! And besides, we won!' (Which they did.)
And why would you do a revote anyways? The only valid reason for a revote that I can see is if 1) proven vote fraud, fraud that actually affected the results of the election, and fraud that can be eliminated if we can vote again, and 2) an exact tie (i.e. everybody got exactly the same number of votes.) If neither of those conditions are true, then somebody has won by getting more votes than the other guy, and why should he be denied his victory just because it's close?
If a basketball game is 112-111, do they play the game over just because it's close? No. Do they put an asterix next to the winner's name because they barely won? No. (Of course, the score on a professional ball game can be carefully audited...)
In races this close, call it a statistical tie, and run a revote.
1) revotes cost lots of money.
2) unless the relevant law has this an an option, this is not an option. I realize that this sounds redundant, but it's true and important to keep in mind.
Ultimately, when a vote is this close, half the people want whatever makes candidate A win, and half want whatever makes candidate B win. They don't seem to care how this win happens, they just want the win. So invariably the losing candidate will push for a revote, recount, disqualifying votes -- anything that has a non-negligable change of making them the winner. And once they're the winner, they push for everything to stay the same.
We've seen this happen time and time again when the elections are close, with both parties being on both sides of the argument, often even switching sides in the middle (as happened here.)
When things are this close, the only absolute is the law that governs the entire election. If it doesn't allow a recount, there's no way you can have a recount, unless a large majority agrees, and if a large majority agreed, there'd be no need for a recount.
Ultimately, if we want get rid of all the fraud and inaccuracies that keep showing up in voting, we need to get rid of the anonymous vote. If there is a record of who voted how somewhere, then individual voters could somehow verify that their vote was counted correctly and not altered, and the election officials could correctly disqualify votes later that are found to not be valid.
I realize that we are not likely to give up anonymous voting any time soon, but it would be the best way to fix the problem. Vote counting would become sort of like accounting, easy to audit, even down to the exact vote. etc. We could have exact, accurate figures. But it's not likely to ever happen, as there's always going to be a side, with approximately 50% of the vote, pushing for the status quo...
Short of non anonymous voting, electronic voting needs to at least have a paper trail, one that cannot be easily altered, and can be easily inspected by the voter to make sure that his vote was counted correctly before being put into the locked box...
What claim does Sony (or whoever) have on the DVD Decrypter source code?
None. Same goes for the domain in question.
But as you suggested, might makes right. Or, more accurately, money makes right.
I'd like to see the author fight it, but the risks for him are far greater than the possible benefits, so it make sense for him to simply give them what they want. Overall, the world will have lost, but he'll personally come out better for having just caved. It's not ideal, but it's the way things are. Fighting this would cost money.
The ACLU or EFF probably would like to help him, but they only have limited funds to work with as well, so they're going to pick their battles carefully and pick the fights that they have the best chances of winning and which will provide the most overall benefits to their causes.
Also note that the announcement said nothing of the DMCA -- he only mentioned a C&D (cease and desist) letter. The DMCA may be involved, but he hasn't mentioned it that I'm aware of. But judging from what he said, he's talked to them a lot more than just having read a C&D that they sent him.
Alexander Noé: The letter itself is not explicitely marked as such, but I'm not sure if I have the right to publish an email sent to me in general without the sender agreeing on this.
Just recently I received an email from a lawyer in Nigera. Apparantly his client's father had died and left a large sum of money in a bank account. Apparantly they need my help to get the money...
Seriously, serious legal threats usually don't arrive via email. Lawyers usually prefer to speak with certified letters and such, where they know it was received and who received it and when (and can prove it in court), and so in general anything received via email should be taken with a big grain of salt. Email is too unreliable (my spam filter ate it!) and just hasn't been around enough decades to make the legal system trust it. At most, they might send a certified letter and an email at the same time (and so the email will arrive first) but I suspect that even that's rare.
The email may be legitimate, and in this case it sounds like it probably is, but even so... big grain of salt.
So 200 CD's, with ~20 songs a cd. And about 3.5 minutes a song.
I think what you're missing is that modern Walkmen (is that the plural for a Walkman?) can play mp3s -- just burn a CD-R or CD-RW with mp3 files in an ISO-9660 format. So rather than 20 songs per CD, you get 240, and only need 17 CDs.
Well, perhaps the Sony Walkman brand Walkman can't play mp3s, but the $20 models I've bought at Fry's recently can. (Hmm, OK, even the
Sony models can play mp3s too now. They'll probably cost you more than $20, however.)
To be fair, the sending teen (the receiving teen needed no special skills beyond being able to read) had some sort of record at SMS sending speed or something. I seem to recall doing the math and finding that he sent at 30 wpm -- which is pretty impressive, considering! (Of course, the world record for morse code sending and receiving by humans is around 75 wpm.)
Though he also had the crappy cell phone keyboard (which was probably the point), and the sending ham had a high quality paddle that by itself was bigger than the guy's phone...
When I was involved last, 2003, they hadn't figured a way to use them except in the smallest park flyer.
I'm pretty sure this hasn't just happened in the last two years, but nowadays you can power any plane of any size with LiPos. It gets expensive in the 0.40 sized plane size, but it's still doable, with similar performance to the glow planes.
The glow engines aren't going away any time soon (your OS and Saito are safe) but the electrics are coming on strong.
Slashdot Mirror
Some cable modems will let you `reset' them by various means (holding down the rest button at power up, holding it down for a long time, leaving the modem off for a long time) and in fact may require that before they'll work with another MAC address (because you're limited to one IP address, and it'll think you still have the old one.)
And then you need to make sure your DHCP client doesn't request the same IP address again -- many do this by default.
All in all, getting a new IP address from your cable modem network is often a PITA -- but it's nothing compared to the PITA it is to actually get somebody on the phone at their support organziation who understands what a DoS attack is and can actually help you with it.
In my expereience, when somebody's saying that `X is using up all my bandwidth', where `X' is things like virii, `hackers', ARP requests or something else, what that really means is that somebody doesn't really understand what's going on.
Most cable modems have a lot of downstream bandwith and not so much upstream bandwidth -- but even the upstream bandwidth is far far more than is used by a standard port scan where somebody hits all your ports to see if they're open.
And even that's unusual -- usually people seem to scan entire networks to see if one port is open, so a single scanner would only send a few packets at your box. It would take several thousand people hitting your box _at once_ like this to make things as bad as you make it sound.
Your box may actually be under attack (a DoS attack.) I get a lot of trouble like this when people want the nick I use on IRC -- they packet my box incessantly. I've got 5 Mb/s downstream on my cable modem, so as long as my packet filtering isn't responding to each packet, it takes a pretty signifigant attack to kick me off of IRC. But if my system does respond to every packet with packets of approximately the same size, an attack of about 0.3 Mb/s is enough to bring everything down to a crawl. It's all a matter of configuring my filters properly ...
Ultimately, what you should do is log all the packets being sent at your IP address with a tool like tcpdump, then send those logs to the abuse department of the ISP where they're coming from. If it's a DDoS attack, the odds are that the IPs are spoofed, but if it's really a portscan it's probably not (becuase they need to see the returning packets to see which ports are open.)
You could also contact Comcat and see if they could filter the traffic out, though I'd reserve that option for an attack that lasts days and doesn't give up, because if they're anything like RR, getting to somebody who can actually do that will be very difficult.
Another way of dealing with an attack is to turn off your cable modem long enough for your DHCP lease to expire, and then come back and get a new IP address, one that's hopefully not being attacked.
But I also give preference to devices that work with stock kernels, rather than things I have to download special drivers for. Less work = good.
For example, I generally only only buy Nvidia cards, because they have the best Linux 3D support. But the support is not there by default -- I have to download it and jump through a few steps to get it going. But once done, it's very nice.
For now, I don't buy ATI graphics cards, because their 3D is not well supported by Linux. But if this changes, especially if the support can be included in XFree86, er, Xorg by default (i.e. it's open source), I may have to consider switching.
I work part-time as a sysadmin for a small company, so the dollar figure of hardware purchases I affect is small, but I do have signifigant input in what they buy, and I suspect I'm not alone in this general policy ...
Granted, if the initial purpose of a box is to run Windows (we're mostly a *nix shop, but several people do like Windows, and we let them use it) I won't worry too much about Linux compatibility, but if there's two choices, and one works in Linux but costs more, and the other does not and costs less, I'm likely to spend the extra money to help alleviate problems in the future. This policy has served me/us well, and I see no point in changing it.
In this case, the default firewall either needs to be opened up (or an option given to open it up if you need this functionality), or this functionality needs to be documented as `not working with the default firewall'. It's probably a good candidate for a release note mention in it's current state, but isn't serious enough to prevent the release of FC4 until fixed.
Personally, I think a default configuration of `secure' is better than a default configuration of `everything works'. Things that are broken by the security should be documented, however, with instructions included on how to open things up to get the functionality you need.
The average download rate of a torrent is pretty much independant of the number of downloaders -- that's what's so neat about it. (Compare to downloading via ftp or http -- double the number of downloaders, and you half the average download rate, assuming that you're out of bandwidth in the first place.)
If you've got a torrent being seeded by some fast sites, then adding new downloaders on cable modems (fast download, slow upload) will generally slow the average download down rather than speed it up. But it won't slow down to almost nothing, which is what happens if thousands of people are hitting a ftp or http server ...
Now, if people who are downloading leave their BT clients running after they're done downloading, then the average download rates (of those still downloading, that is) will go up, as there will be more sites seeding at that point.
But in general, merely having more people using BT to download something will not make the average download rates go up. BT is way cool -- don't get me wrong -- I love it. But it's not magic ...
It's pretty basic, but it does most of what I need. What it's lacking is somethign to take Outlook/Exchange events and import them automatically -- I need to write something to do that for me.
Multiple CPU x86 boxes have been available for a long time -- I recall seeing Sequent boxes with lots of 386 cpus, for example. I'm typing this on a dual p3 700 right now ...
The vast majority of server applications will benefit from multiple cpus right now, as long as the box isn't already disk bound.
As for desktop boxes, two or more cpus means you can do two or more things at full speed. One application may not run faster with two cpus unless it's written to support it, but two seperate applications certainly will.
As for games, games could certainly benefit from multiple cpus. Now, most may not seperate different things into different threads that can run in different cpus, but this will change rather quickly if desktop boxes start regularly having more than one cpu ...
Part of what was neat about the BeBox was that they offered two cpus. They couldn't make the cpus faster, so they just gave you two of them ...
But don't try to tell us it's a waste of time. It most certainly isn't. And we don't need any need to materialize, or special software to be written -- we can use multi-cpu machines NOW.
However, there is a bit more to it. If he has a web server on his Windows or Mac OSX box, the odds are that the filesystem in use is case insensitive, so either robots.txt or ROBOTS.TXT will work, because either would be served up by the web server when one requested /robots.txt ...
Funnel all your own sysadmin work through it too. If you find a problem, create a ticket, then solve it.
Why? Because if you're a good sysadmin, you fix many things before anybody else even notices, so tickets won't get created unless you create them. But it'll still take time from what is supposed to be your `real' job ...
If you set QueueFactor to a very small value, THEN Queue_LA will start working like he says it does.
Here's a bit more about it, and how I figured out how it worked ...
I personally get a lot of spam. About 3000/day that make it past the filters set in sendmail before it makes it to spamassassin, though now that we've changed how sendmail works quite a bit that's down to about 1000/day (with sendmail rejecting the rest outright before accepting it.) I used to think 3000/day was bad -- and it probably is, especially for a guy with an email address that's not quite so generic -- most of my spam is from posting to Usenet and places like /. ... but 1 million/day? wow!
How very ... PC. (I do agree that people are not born equal, but as for it making us so interesting, well, not so much. What generally makes us interesting is what happens after birth ...)
And yet political correctness also suggests that we are all born equal. Quite the oxymoron ...
Generally, science has shown that the effects of `applying themselves' and `believing they can do it' on intelligence is relatively small, especially as one becomes an adult.
I suspected that you might try to define it. However, merely going to http://www.answers.com/intelligence comes up with several other definitions --
Each one of these is subtly different. Yes, they're all related, but they're all different too. And how do you measure these things, in a way that gives an accurate result for everybody? It's not like you can have people just concentrate and measure it that way, like the aliens used the `brain boost machine' in Forbidden Planet.
`Musclehead' is generally considered to be an insult. Discuss.
And just because people like to say `the brain is a muscle, it needs to be developed', that doesn't mean it develops like a muscle. I'm of a pretty average build, a bit round. I'm also pretty smart, though not a genius. I'm pretty sure that if I started seriously hitting the gym and running and such, in a six months I'd be `buff', with probably 2-3 times the strength and endurance that I have now. But if I started working on brain-puzzles non-stop, reading books, etc. for the same six months, I still wouldn't be a genius. In fact, I don't think my IQ would go up by any signifigant degree, though I might have a lot more knowledge and be a bit better at doing puzzles.
You're mixing your terms. Mental abilities and IQ are not the same, though a person with a high IQ may have more mental abilities. Being able to list the dates that things happened, or being able to fix a car is a mental ability, but not a sign of high intelligence. Being able to find the pattern in a sequence of images is often a sign of high intelligence (and a mental ability(, though that ability will probably improve with practice. (But does that practice make you more intelligent? That has not been really determined.)
Also, it seems to have been shown that any benefits to intelligence caused by studying and thinking and such are much larger if done as a child. Once you become an adult, your IQ is generally fixed (though of course you can make it low
But seriously, Einstein was just one man. Yes, he was a genius, but just one of many geniuses we've had over the years. I'm not sure how much we can learn just by looking at his brain in a pickle jar. And whatever this defect was, they missed it the first time -- I wonder if they (the people who look at his brain in the pickle jar) are just finding what they wanted to find?
So what? I don't let what is PC dictate my actions. If you want to, that's fine, but I don't. (I do try and let courtesy dictate my actions, but that's different.)In any event, it's relatively scientifically established that fat people don't live as long. Is stating that or researching that politically incorrect?
(In case it wasn't clear, I do agree that the cell phone is a bigger danger, but it's not as obvious as you make it sound.)
Of course, there has been no scientific studies that have shown that there any any serious effects of microwaves (emitted by cell phones, WiFi, microwave ovens, etc.) on flesh beyond heating it, as long as the field strength stays small (it's small coming from your cell phone. It's not small inside your microwave oven, as that Mmmm-Bop! CD you just microwaved can attest to.)
Easy. Right now, people start freaking out and whomever is on the losing end starts crying shenanigans whenever the vote is like 50.5%/49.5% or so. (Ok, the exact cutoff point may not be quite right, but it's a gradual process -- the closer it is, the more the losing side screams that it's wrong and the more the winning side screams that it's right.)
Adding a recount if the vote is too close merely shifts the possiblities for these fiascos. Suppose the law says that there will be (it must be absolute -- it can't be a maybe thing) a revote if the vote is within 0.5%. Fine. Suppose it turns out to be within 0.51%. The losing side will be saying `it's too close to requiring a revote! Recount! Recount!' until they get their revote. The winning side will be saying `no! it's not close enough! No revote! And besides, we won!' (Which they did.)
And why would you do a revote anyways? The only valid reason for a revote that I can see is if 1) proven vote fraud, fraud that actually affected the results of the election, and fraud that can be eliminated if we can vote again, and 2) an exact tie (i.e. everybody got exactly the same number of votes.) If neither of those conditions are true, then somebody has won by getting more votes than the other guy, and why should he be denied his victory just because it's close?
If a basketball game is 112-111, do they play the game over just because it's close? No. Do they put an asterix next to the winner's name because they barely won? No. (Of course, the score on a professional ball game can be carefully audited ...)
2) unless the relevant law has this an an option, this is not an option. I realize that this sounds redundant, but it's true and important to keep in mind.
Ultimately, when a vote is this close, half the people want whatever makes candidate A win, and half want whatever makes candidate B win. They don't seem to care how this win happens, they just want the win. So invariably the losing candidate will push for a revote, recount, disqualifying votes -- anything that has a non-negligable change of making them the winner. And once they're the winner, they push for everything to stay the same.
We've seen this happen time and time again when the elections are close, with both parties being on both sides of the argument, often even switching sides in the middle (as happened here.)
When things are this close, the only absolute is the law that governs the entire election. If it doesn't allow a recount, there's no way you can have a recount, unless a large majority agrees, and if a large majority agreed, there'd be no need for a recount.
Ultimately, if we want get rid of all the fraud and inaccuracies that keep showing up in voting, we need to get rid of the anonymous vote. If there is a record of who voted how somewhere, then individual voters could somehow verify that their vote was counted correctly and not altered, and the election officials could correctly disqualify votes later that are found to not be valid.
I realize that we are not likely to give up anonymous voting any time soon, but it would be the best way to fix the problem. Vote counting would become sort of like accounting, easy to audit, even down to the exact vote. etc. We could have exact, accurate figures. But it's not likely to ever happen, as there's always going to be a side, with approximately 50% of the vote, pushing for the status quo ...
Short of non anonymous voting, electronic voting needs to at least have a paper trail, one that cannot be easily altered, and can be easily inspected by the voter to make sure that his vote was counted correctly before being put into the locked box ...
But as you suggested, might makes right. Or, more accurately, money makes right.
I'd like to see the author fight it, but the risks for him are far greater than the possible benefits, so it make sense for him to simply give them what they want. Overall, the world will have lost, but he'll personally come out better for having just caved. It's not ideal, but it's the way things are. Fighting this would cost money.
The ACLU or EFF probably would like to help him, but they only have limited funds to work with as well, so they're going to pick their battles carefully and pick the fights that they have the best chances of winning and which will provide the most overall benefits to their causes.
Also note that the announcement said nothing of the DMCA -- he only mentioned a C&D (cease and desist) letter. The DMCA may be involved, but he hasn't mentioned it that I'm aware of. But judging from what he said, he's talked to them a lot more than just having read a C&D that they sent him.
Seriously, serious legal threats usually don't arrive via email. Lawyers usually prefer to speak with certified letters and such, where they know it was received and who received it and when (and can prove it in court), and so in general anything received via email should be taken with a big grain of salt. Email is too unreliable (my spam filter ate it!) and just hasn't been around enough decades to make the legal system trust it. At most, they might send a certified letter and an email at the same time (and so the email will arrive first) but I suspect that even that's rare.
The email may be legitimate, and in this case it sounds like it probably is, but even so ... big grain of salt.
I suspect you already know this, but figured somebody else might not get the reference.
Sex Objekt is much better Kraftwerk. Autobahn is just ... 22.72 minutes of boredom. (I've got that vinyl somewhere. ..)
I may need to pull it out and hook up the turntable just to remind myself how bad it is, 31 years later. (It's from 1974, right?)
God, that game kicked ass for it's day!
Well, perhaps the Sony Walkman brand Walkman can't play mp3s, but the $20 models I've bought at Fry's recently can. (Hmm, OK, even the Sony models can play mp3s too now. They'll probably cost you more than $20, however.)
Though he also had the crappy cell phone keyboard (which was probably the point), and the sending ham had a high quality paddle that by itself was bigger than the guy's phone ...
AD5RH
The glow engines aren't going away any time soon (your OS and Saito are safe) but the electrics are coming on strong.