OK, it's been a while since I've used tape:-) The typical digital tape things held about 4GB of data, which would cost you about $4 to store on current disk drives. (At this point, the little plastic trays for removable disks are about 10% of the cost of the disks themselves:-) What do tapes cost today, and how big are they?
The operational costs of using that tape were generally higher than the disk drive - a good tape robot and automation software can reduce them, and to make up for the lack of random access on the tape, you need to make the tape from backup/mirror disk rather than from working disks (while queuing up journalling request for the drive you're making the tape from), but restoration was the hard part.
It's possible that tapes are still cheaper for offline archival backup - the weekly stuff you dump in the safe deposit box so you can defend yourself against that patent lawsuit three years from now, or get that copy of version 0.6.1.8 to support that customer who's got a problem with the embedded device he built last year that uses your code. I've never found tapes to be highly reliable; you certainly don't want to trust them for restoring last night's build when the developers scrambled things this morning, and one reason you can trust them for your weekly archives is that if you lose Week N-48, usually Week N-47 or N-49 will have a copy of what you need.
But you've also got to keep a spare tape drive in your archive vault, and a spare copy of your backup software, because it's likely that any Really Bad Event that wipes out your onsite disk storage will also trash your tape drive, and tape drive formats seem to change at least annually, or at least the interfaces and backup software do, and the Non-Random-Access performance of tape and the popularity of compression means it's highly likely that the data format on the tape is much different than a disk file system; you can't simply find an old ATA controller or USB1.0 bus and expect to plug the thing in and read it. You don't necessarily have to store a backup tape robot - a single drive of the appropriate type is probably adequate - but you at least need the drive and all the software.
The purpose of on-disk cache isn't to cache your files - that's your operating system's job, and system RAM is the place to do that. On-disk cache is for speed and latency matching between your disk drives and the request queues from your system, so you can do things like start caching a whole track on the disk wherever the heads are right now, rather than waiting for the disk to rotate around to the bytes you asked for (which lets you work on the next request after one rotation, rather than one and a half), and caching write requests so that you can work on them after finishing the current request. How fancy the software in your disk controller and operating system is can affect the efficiency of these operations, but it's basically for scheduling around the rotational and seek latency of the disk.
Does anybody know how big disk tracks are these days? If 2MB was enough on a 20GB disk, does a 200GB disk need 20GB, because the tracks are 10 times as large, or does the disk have 10 times as many tracks of the same size, or somewhere in between? The price of memory hasn't come down as fast as the price of disks, but it has come down a lot, and 10MB of RAM costs about $1 - even though the price of disks is really competitive, drives might as well have as much as makes sense for current geometries and speeds. The sizes are still likely to be on the order of 10MB, not 256MB, and since there's got to be _some_ chip there, it's cheaper as well as more reliable to just make the chip big enough rather than adding sockets for plug-ins.
Large quantities of write-cache on a disk drive are bad, though, because they're not backed up by battery - the system needs to know that when it's written something to disk, it's really written in some form that can be read back later. Read cache is harmless, because losing it just loses a bit of repeatable fetch work - you need enough to cache a couple of tracks of data, but more than that doesn't usually accomplish much, unless there's a big mismatch between your disk speeds and the bus that transmits to your system memory.
Caching cards are usually silly, unless they either provide battery backed-up RAM or are part of RAID controllers where they can help in the assembly/disassembly process. Their main purpose is to make up for limitations in operating system caching design (i.e. they help Windows a lot more than Unix) or making up for other hardware limitations (e.g. CPU RAM limitations, or bus speed differences, or letting you run server disks off the otherwise-unused AGP port instead of the PCI bus.) Their other main purpose is to take advantage of memory speed / price differences - disk caching works just fine with cheap PCI-100 memory, while system RAM needs to be the fastest Quadruple-Data-Rate Gigahertz-RAMBUS Quadruple-Price memory you can buy to keep the CPU running at maximum speed, so if you're buying large quantities of the stuff, it's sometimes worth spending an extra $50-100 for a card that can hold lots of cheap memory.
Battery-backed RAM cards are actively useful for applications that need secure writes, such as database commits or NFS writes. A decade or so ago, the Legato Prestoserve NFS accelerator cards had a meg of battery-backed RAM, which was enough to commit writes to while waiting for the disk drive to spin. This meant that you could respond to NFS requests in sub-millisecond time rather than waiting 10ms or more for a disk to seek and spin (seek time was still slower than rotational latency back then, plus your request might be queued with other disk requests), so you could handle one or two orders of magnitude more requests per second, and a megabyte was more than enough to buffer traffic from a 10mbps ethernet. Database transactions might be generated much faster than NFS requests, but it was still enough to handle caching for a lot of disk space.
Abuse of identity systems is what leads to many of the problems, and tracking people and their activities leads to many more of them. Even 20-30 years ago, US driver's licenses weren't primarily used as identity documents, except for tracking bad driving, though they were also used as age verification credentials for getting into bars. But that was when adults didn't need permission to work, and states were using DLs to track drivers rather than withholding them to harass Spanish speakers.
During the mid-80s, the kinds of people who wanted national databases and ID systems required states to tie driver's licenses and social security numbers together; there was no clearly Constitutional way to do so, but they used the usual bribe of "we'll cut off Federal highway funding to any state that doesn't cooperate." There were some actual problems this helped with, such as truck drivers with licenses from multiple states who could use their State X license if they'd had their State Y license pulled for bad driving.
Sigh. The current SSN system is bad enough, but at least as Americans we didn't used to need no stinkin' badges. Until we get rid of a using a single national identifier number for everything, identity theft will be an increasing problem, and consumer tracking and electronically-assisted stalking and corrupt clerks selling license cards and control of individuals by taking away their IDs or licenses will just keep increasing.
Unfortunately, the concept of giving people a stack of uncorrelatable tax ID numbers that they can give to different people who need them is complex-sounding enough that if it's ever implemented, it'll probably be done on a smart card of some sort (or a dumb memory card rather than a processor-equipped card.)
A PDA is a Personal Digital Assistance - What do you want digital help with today? For a lot of people, playing MP3s is a digital activity they'd like help with, and 16MB of memory just doesn't cut it - the 128MB is marginally enough. Depending on what other new applications people want to develop, they might or might not be able to fit them in Palm's atrociously limited applications memory, and if this makes it easier to develop new cool apps, they win.
Some of the potential new applications you might create if you had more memory include transporting documents around; those little 64MB USB memory frobs can do that almost as well. If a PDA had a VGA adapter and Powerpoint-like applications on it, it could let me leave the laptop at home or the office when I'm going out to visit customers, but I'm not aware of any that do.
My big frustration with the Palm as a Digital Assistant is that memos are limited to 4kb. My old Psion 3a had 32kb documents, which were almost always big enough for a month's worth of all my random notes, and I could type fast enough on its little keyboard to take good telephone notes; 4kb usually doesn't get me through a month, and there's no efficient way to search it, and it only lasts that long because Graffiti is slower than typing (even though I'm pretty good at Graffiti), so I don't write as much. But 8MB has also been more than enough for what I've used it for, and I keep half a dozen ebooks on it for reading on the train as well as my notes.
Is that really $40 only if everybody buys it? Or is it really $80 if only half the people buy it? Is that $40 that everybody will have to pay whether they want to buy it or not? Is there already cable television, and is this piggybacking on the cable TV network, or buying services from the cable TV network, or selling services _to_ the cable TV network, and how solid are those prices? Does anybody know what the real market is?
Also, is it a transparent service that can connect to multiple ISPs, or not?
What's the difference between a PC and a game console? Peripherals are a bit different, and expandability is much different, but they're basically the same thing, and if the game console does the job you need and has almost all the same parts, why not go for it?
You can get a pretty comparable machine from Walmart in the low $200's range, except for the DVD player, and those are in the $50 range. Until MS drops the price, which I think is still $199 in the US, they're still pretty close, though of course the Walmart box is conveniently expandable.
So Are you saying that you can use jumpers instead of solder? Are they standard jumper widgets like disk drives and PC motherboards use, or some different mechanical construction? (Since I don't own an X-Box, I haven't diassembled one to find out...)
Maybe the things do work loose after a while, but I'm not planning on shaking the box around a lot, and I'd be *much* more comfortable buying something and adding a couple of jumpers than buying something and soldering on it.
For those of us who don't recognize the acronym XBMP, it's apparently the XBox Media Player. Besides the Sourceforge site, there's also some information at www.xboxmediaplayer.de (auf English.)
Of course, you can also get a DVD/CD player from your local big box retailer for $59 these days:-)
Yes, American movie censors allow more violence and less sex than movie censors in the rest of the world, and our TV censors are worse, and perhaps that does mean we're officially prudish and violent. Another thing that American movie censors have started doing in the last few years has been including "drug activity" in the list of things that affect the age ratings. (And for instance, when the movie "The Breakfast Club" was shown on non-subscription cable tv recently, they cut out the section where the kids smoke a joint, even though it was pivotal to the plot and they left in the kids acting stoned....)
As far as guns go, though, Western Europeans and American Liberals hire police to carry guns around for them, and except for the Swiss they seem to freak out about them as badly as Americans freak out about sex.
First of all, it's an absolutely gorgeous graphical website. But there's no documentation on
what it's really doing,
or how it really works,
or what it can tell you other than letting you browse through the pretty pictures, like get a summary of clique statistics, or looking up specific names
or whether the user interface will scale if a few hundred thousand people check in to it.
Also, if it's depending on people to enter their own data, rather than having some efficient way to siphon up all the data directly (which would be a major security/privacy risk of its own if it were possible), then it's really not scientific, and the statistics won't be meaningful, just anecdotal. And if it does get a countable fraction of AOL users, it'll get AOLdotted pretty quickly.
There are some DSL providers that have policies against running servers, and other providers that don't have policies against it but do make it inconvenient, and other DSL providers that explicitly say "Yes, it's your connection, run anything you want". That's why I get my DSL from sonic.net, though Speakeasy also looked like a good choice, and even Earthlink's terms of service weren't too bad. The "No Servers" Policy is an evil meme they picked up from the Cable Modem people, who had problems with asymmetric shared bandwidth and flaky equipment and wanted to avoid bad press from Network Hogs and neighborhood porn servers. (Asymmetric DSL doesn't have the same problem - it's only asymmetric on the dedicated parts, not the shared parts.)
But that's separate from the question of sending SMTP mail yourself - clients can do that just fine, and so can proxies that run on your home machines but don't provide services to other people. Most of the popular Windows email clients use SMTP to deliver outgoing email, but send it to proxy servers rather than delivering it directly because it's more reliable in cases where the first delivery attempt fails. But that doesn't make them servers.
The real issue with "residential" email senders is that anybody with $20 can set up an internet connection at home and start sending spam, and if they get booted by their ISP, they can spend another $20 on another dialup service or $50 on another DSL service. By contrast, spammers from business locations often need to spend $1000 for a T1 line, so there aren't as many of them, or else buy web hosting service that costs somewhere in between and is monitored more tightly than a home email dialup connection. Yes, it's rude that legitimate Linux users at home get their email rejected because spammers use the same kinds of connectivity, and ISPs that do that should get slapped around by the market.
No, that's a terrible move. (Begin Rant: It's the kind of thing advocated by Enemies of Unix who think that everybody on the net should be a Couch Potato Infotainment Consumer instead of a first-class citizen. End Rant.)
The only reasons you should be using some other server to transmit your mail instead of doing it yourself are
Your connection isn't reliable enough - That's a problem for dial, not DSL.
Your machine or mail delivery software isn't connected reliably enough to handle reattempts on messages that didn't get delivered successfully the first time - Laptops have this problem, and it _is_ easier to write mail client software that hands everything to a proxy server than software that tries direct delivery first and then falls back to using the proxy.
Your mail software isn't smart enough to handle complex deliveries - That was a real problem back when we had UUCP and Bitnet and other non-SMTP mailers in common use and the Internet was only for universities and defense contractors, but we've fixed that problem, though some mail client software isn't smart enough.
They're providing a service you don't want to do yourself - Maybe some kind of timestamping or notary service or encryption gateway or anonymizer or tunnel into your corporate Intranet.
Anybody can get a Hotmail or Yahoo account for free. If AOL only took mail from other AOL subscribers, that'd be a different problem. Free accounts are really useful for fixing stupidity like this, or at least sending flames to clueless postmasters who won't bother doing the right thing....
When I was in my late 20s, I got outside a lot, did gardening, went to the beach, biked, didn't drink coffee very often, and worked at a place where there was no point in having anything other than tuna salad for lunch, and weighed less than when I got out of high school. Then they invented this Home Computer thing, and changed jobs at my company, and started working crazy hours and doing business travel, and I started drinking lots of coffee as a substitute for exercise and sleep.
The first year or two of that I was gaining 10 pounds a year, and over the years I've kept the average down to 5, but gaining 5 pounds a year for 20 years is still really NOT a good thing.... I don't think the caffeine's directly related except as an indicator of other things going on, and I was a tea-drinker before I got into coffee.
While that's true, communications is a critical part of building an economy, making hospitals work, and making governments function. The Internet is fairly appropriate technology for parts of this job, though other things like cell phones are also important. International trade is another important activity where the Internet will help, such as facilitiating selling oil, which will be their main revenue source until more of the economy evolves again.
Some of these problems weren't just caused by the recent bombing - the 1990-1991 bombing destroyed Iraq's water system, and the US/UK trade embargo against Iraq specifically kept out repair parts for water purification equipment over the next decade, which was a major contributor to the estimated 1.5 million war-related deaths in that period.
Mail, not Spam - and this is Good.
on
WLANs As Spam Conduit
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The article doesn't say they were spamming, it just says they were sending mail, then starts ranting about spam. Of course they were sending mail - that's one of the big reasons that people want to use wireless, along with receiving their email and web surfing.
1 - Yes, that's pretty much the point, and that's just about how much this BitTorrent download of RedHat 9 carried. One of the anime BitTorrent sites shipped about 1.3TB in the last 24 hours alone. The root system has to ship out the entire set at least once (obviously:-) and the tracker has to keep track of who's connected now and occasionally tell them where to get chunks they want, but the only time it's shipping out actual data is if there are chunks that people want that aren't available from people who already have them, or when it's proactively shipping out chunks to improve the distribution a bit. (i.e. Bram's done lots of cool tuning:-) If you're using it for a business application, a T1 (or hosting center space) is good because it's more stable than DSL or cable modems.
2 - There's download-direction overhead and upload-direction overhead. Because everybody who's downloading is also an uploader, you're obviously shipping a lot of data to other people, and in asymmetric environments like ADSL or cable modems this is likely to be the bottleneck. So the guy who downloaded the 500MB file probably uploaded 500-1000MB as well. But the actual overhead besides the data itself is pretty small - basically checksums on the parts. It's been a while since I talked to Bram about it, but I think it was well under a percent.
0 - If you're asking "So how do I make my commercial distribution system much more efficient using BitTorrent?", the obvious answer is "So go hire Bram as a consultant"...
A number of years ago, my wife had a tax consulting business. At one point she had a 25MHz 386sx laptop, which was annoyingly slow for the then-current tax software. One of her clients needed to access some files from a couple of years before, when she'd been using a spreadsheet on her Toshiba 1000 9.xMHz 8086-clone laptop. Wow! Was that ever Fast!.
At least one machine of that era, I think the TRS-80, did 300 baud. Nice to know Apple's much faster:-)
Things like that have been done since then - Information Society has a song on one of their CDs called "300 8N1" - play it to your modem, and it'll output ascii...
Anonymous Coward may be a bigot, but he's right that the government won't play fairly, and will try to censor any search engine they're part of, and will interfere if Google tries to provide real search capabilities (as they've already been doing.) However, it's hard to keep search engines from finding things, and the more competition there is, the harder it is to keep people from finding the things they're looking for. A peer-to-peer search engine network, if somebody finds a good way to build one of them, would be harder to censor.
A more serious problem is that if there _is_ a search engine with good coverage of China, the Chinese government will find it easier to locate and kill any web sites with politically incorrect information.
(Oh, and the last time the local Amnesty group had a publicity table, there were Chinese people working there....)
Floppies aren't Inexpensive any more. They cost about a dime for the floppy, while El Cheapo blank CD-Rs also cost about a dime, and they're 400 times as large. I think I've gotten CD-RWs for about $0.50 on sale. And IDE drives cost about $1/GB as well.
Slashdot Mirror
The operational costs of using that tape were generally higher than the disk drive - a good tape robot and automation software can reduce them, and to make up for the lack of random access on the tape, you need to make the tape from backup/mirror disk rather than from working disks (while queuing up journalling request for the drive you're making the tape from), but restoration was the hard part.
It's possible that tapes are still cheaper for offline archival backup - the weekly stuff you dump in the safe deposit box so you can defend yourself against that patent lawsuit three years from now, or get that copy of version 0.6.1.8 to support that customer who's got a problem with the embedded device he built last year that uses your code. I've never found tapes to be highly reliable; you certainly don't want to trust them for restoring last night's build when the developers scrambled things this morning, and one reason you can trust them for your weekly archives is that if you lose Week N-48, usually Week N-47 or N-49 will have a copy of what you need.
But you've also got to keep a spare tape drive in your archive vault, and a spare copy of your backup software, because it's likely that any Really Bad Event that wipes out your onsite disk storage will also trash your tape drive, and tape drive formats seem to change at least annually, or at least the interfaces and backup software do, and the Non-Random-Access performance of tape and the popularity of compression means it's highly likely that the data format on the tape is much different than a disk file system; you can't simply find an old ATA controller or USB1.0 bus and expect to plug the thing in and read it. You don't necessarily have to store a backup tape robot - a single drive of the appropriate type is probably adequate - but you at least need the drive and all the software.
Does anybody know how big disk tracks are these days? If 2MB was enough on a 20GB disk, does a 200GB disk need 20GB, because the tracks are 10 times as large, or does the disk have 10 times as many tracks of the same size, or somewhere in between? The price of memory hasn't come down as fast as the price of disks, but it has come down a lot, and 10MB of RAM costs about $1 - even though the price of disks is really competitive, drives might as well have as much as makes sense for current geometries and speeds. The sizes are still likely to be on the order of 10MB, not 256MB, and since there's got to be _some_ chip there, it's cheaper as well as more reliable to just make the chip big enough rather than adding sockets for plug-ins.
Large quantities of write-cache on a disk drive are bad, though, because they're not backed up by battery - the system needs to know that when it's written something to disk, it's really written in some form that can be read back later. Read cache is harmless, because losing it just loses a bit of repeatable fetch work - you need enough to cache a couple of tracks of data, but more than that doesn't usually accomplish much, unless there's a big mismatch between your disk speeds and the bus that transmits to your system memory.
Caching cards are usually silly, unless they either provide battery backed-up RAM or are part of RAID controllers where they can help in the assembly/disassembly process. Their main purpose is to make up for limitations in operating system caching design (i.e. they help Windows a lot more than Unix) or making up for other hardware limitations (e.g. CPU RAM limitations, or bus speed differences, or letting you run server disks off the otherwise-unused AGP port instead of the PCI bus.) Their other main purpose is to take advantage of memory speed / price differences - disk caching works just fine with cheap PCI-100 memory, while system RAM needs to be the fastest Quadruple-Data-Rate Gigahertz-RAMBUS Quadruple-Price memory you can buy to keep the CPU running at maximum speed, so if you're buying large quantities of the stuff, it's sometimes worth spending an extra $50-100 for a card that can hold lots of cheap memory.
Battery-backed RAM cards are actively useful for applications that need secure writes, such as database commits or NFS writes. A decade or so ago, the Legato Prestoserve NFS accelerator cards had a meg of battery-backed RAM, which was enough to commit writes to while waiting for the disk drive to spin. This meant that you could respond to NFS requests in sub-millisecond time rather than waiting 10ms or more for a disk to seek and spin (seek time was still slower than rotational latency back then, plus your request might be queued with other disk requests), so you could handle one or two orders of magnitude more requests per second, and a megabyte was more than enough to buffer traffic from a 10mbps ethernet. Database transactions might be generated much faster than NFS requests, but it was still enough to handle caching for a lot of disk space.
During the mid-80s, the kinds of people who wanted national databases and ID systems required states to tie driver's licenses and social security numbers together; there was no clearly Constitutional way to do so, but they used the usual bribe of "we'll cut off Federal highway funding to any state that doesn't cooperate." There were some actual problems this helped with, such as truck drivers with licenses from multiple states who could use their State X license if they'd had their State Y license pulled for bad driving.
Unfortunately, the concept of giving people a stack of uncorrelatable tax ID numbers that they can give to different people who need them is complex-sounding enough that if it's ever implemented, it'll probably be done on a smart card of some sort (or a dumb memory card rather than a processor-equipped card.)
Some of the potential new applications you might create if you had more memory include transporting documents around; those little 64MB USB memory frobs can do that almost as well. If a PDA had a VGA adapter and Powerpoint-like applications on it, it could let me leave the laptop at home or the office when I'm going out to visit customers, but I'm not aware of any that do.
My big frustration with the Palm as a Digital Assistant is that memos are limited to 4kb. My old Psion 3a had 32kb documents, which were almost always big enough for a month's worth of all my random notes, and I could type fast enough on its little keyboard to take good telephone notes; 4kb usually doesn't get me through a month, and there's no efficient way to search it, and it only lasts that long because Graffiti is slower than typing (even though I'm pretty good at Graffiti), so I don't write as much. But 8MB has also been more than enough for what I've used it for, and I keep half a dozen ebooks on it for reading on the train as well as my notes.
Also, is it a transparent service that can connect to multiple ISPs, or not?
What's the difference between a PC and a game console? Peripherals are a bit different, and expandability is much different, but they're basically the same thing, and if the game console does the job you need and has almost all the same parts, why not go for it?
You can get a pretty comparable machine from Walmart in the low $200's range, except for the DVD player, and those are in the $50 range. Until MS drops the price, which I think is still $199 in the US, they're still pretty close, though of course the Walmart box is conveniently expandable.
Maybe the things do work loose after a while, but I'm not planning on shaking the box around a lot, and I'd be *much* more comfortable buying something and adding a couple of jumpers than buying something and soldering on it.
Of course, you can also get a DVD/CD player from your local big box retailer for $59 these days :-)
As far as guns go, though, Western Europeans and American Liberals hire police to carry guns around for them, and except for the Swiss they seem to freak out about them as badly as Americans freak out about sex.
- what it's really doing,
- or how it really works,
- or what it can tell you other than letting you browse through the pretty pictures, like get a summary of clique statistics, or looking up specific names
- or whether the user interface will scale if a few hundred thousand people check in to it.
Also, if it's depending on people to enter their own data, rather than having some efficient way to siphon up all the data directly (which would be a major security/privacy risk of its own if it were possible), then it's really not scientific, and the statistics won't be meaningful, just anecdotal. And if it does get a countable fraction of AOL users, it'll get AOLdotted pretty quickly.But that's separate from the question of sending SMTP mail yourself - clients can do that just fine, and so can proxies that run on your home machines but don't provide services to other people. Most of the popular Windows email clients use SMTP to deliver outgoing email, but send it to proxy servers rather than delivering it directly because it's more reliable in cases where the first delivery attempt fails. But that doesn't make them servers.
The real issue with "residential" email senders is that anybody with $20 can set up an internet connection at home and start sending spam, and if they get booted by their ISP, they can spend another $20 on another dialup service or $50 on another DSL service. By contrast, spammers from business locations often need to spend $1000 for a T1 line, so there aren't as many of them, or else buy web hosting service that costs somewhere in between and is monitored more tightly than a home email dialup connection. Yes, it's rude that legitimate Linux users at home get their email rejected because spammers use the same kinds of connectivity, and ISPs that do that should get slapped around by the market.
The only reasons you should be using some other server to transmit your mail instead of doing it yourself are
- Your connection isn't reliable enough - That's a problem for dial, not DSL.
- Your machine or mail delivery software isn't connected reliably enough to handle reattempts on messages that didn't get delivered successfully the first time - Laptops have this problem, and it _is_ easier to write mail client software that hands everything to a proxy server than software that tries direct delivery first and then falls back to using the proxy.
- Your mail software isn't smart enough to handle complex deliveries - That was a real problem back when we had UUCP and Bitnet and other non-SMTP mailers in common use and the Internet was only for universities and defense contractors, but we've fixed that problem, though some mail client software isn't smart enough.
- They're providing a service you don't want to do yourself - Maybe some kind of timestamping or notary service or encryption gateway or anonymizer or tunnel into your corporate Intranet.
But that's about it.Anybody can get a Hotmail or Yahoo account for free. If AOL only took mail from other AOL subscribers, that'd be a different problem. Free accounts are really useful for fixing stupidity like this, or at least sending flames to clueless postmasters who won't bother doing the right thing....
href="tada.wav"
So how much effect is this split going to have on the KDE - vs - Gnome toolkits and the various window managers out there?
The first year or two of that I was gaining 10 pounds a year, and over the years I've kept the average down to 5, but gaining 5 pounds a year for 20 years is still really NOT a good thing.... I don't think the caffeine's directly related except as an indicator of other things going on, and I was a tea-drinker before I got into coffee.
Some of these problems weren't just caused by the recent bombing - the 1990-1991 bombing destroyed Iraq's water system, and the US/UK trade embargo against Iraq specifically kept out repair parts for water purification equipment over the next decade, which was a major contributor to the estimated 1.5 million war-related deaths in that period.
The article doesn't say they were spamming, it just says they were sending mail, then starts ranting about spam. Of course they were sending mail - that's one of the big reasons that people want to use wireless, along with receiving their email and web surfing.
1 - Yes, that's pretty much the point, and that's just about how much this BitTorrent download of RedHat 9 carried. One of the anime BitTorrent sites shipped about 1.3TB in the last 24 hours alone. The root system has to ship out the entire set at least once (obviously :-) and the tracker has to keep track of who's connected now and occasionally tell them where to get chunks they want, but the only time it's shipping out actual data is if there are chunks that people want that aren't available from people who already have them, or when it's proactively shipping out chunks to improve the distribution a bit. (i.e. Bram's done lots of cool tuning :-) If you're using it for a business application, a T1 (or hosting center space) is good because it's more stable than DSL or cable modems.
2 - There's download-direction overhead and upload-direction overhead. Because everybody who's downloading is also an uploader, you're obviously shipping a lot of data to other people, and in asymmetric environments like ADSL or cable modems this is likely to be the bottleneck. So the guy who downloaded the 500MB file probably uploaded 500-1000MB as well. But the actual overhead besides the data itself is pretty small - basically checksums on the parts. It's been a while since I talked to Bram about it, but I think it was well under a percent.
0 - If you're asking "So how do I make my commercial distribution system much more efficient using BitTorrent?", the obvious answer is "So go hire Bram as a consultant"...
A number of years ago, my wife had a tax consulting business. At one point she had a 25MHz 386sx laptop, which was annoyingly slow for the then-current tax software. One of her clients needed to access some files from a couple of years before, when she'd been using a spreadsheet on her Toshiba 1000 9.xMHz 8086-clone laptop. Wow! Was that ever Fast!.
Things like that have been done since then - Information Society has a song on one of their CDs called "300 8N1" - play it to your modem, and it'll output ascii...
A more serious problem is that if there _is_ a search engine with good coverage of China, the Chinese government will find it easier to locate and kill any web sites with politically incorrect information.
(Oh, and the last time the local Amnesty group had a publicity table, there were Chinese people working there....)
On the other hand, it's certainly Redundant :-)