Really? Drizzle? That was the best they could do for a name of the new project?
This was their second choice. The first wanted to call it GonorrheaDB, but the development team agreed that they should only use that name in case Twitter was interested in using it as a backend.
How much ISK did they have to sell to make $229,000?
Let's see.... I haven't played Eve in a long while now, but from what I remember, you could buy two PLEXes for about 35 USD. At the time I played a plex was worth somewhere between 300M isk and 350M isk, but the market is user driven, so the prices vary. Let's say 300M so we don't overinflate the number. (Feel free to pricecheck in that hellhole known as Jita)
229.000 / 35 = 6543 ETCs, which amounts to 13086 PLEXes (both rounded up). That becomes 13086 * 300.000.000 = 3.925.800.000.000 ISK . So rougly 4 trillion ISK, assuming that all items sold were ISK, which they weren't (the article mentions super carriers, titans and characters, but for the sake of curiousity I'm going to ignore the article).
Usually they have terribly dull and uninteresting storylines you couldn't be bothered to give a goddamn about.
Yes, well not all RPGs can have you be the son/daughter of the dead lord of Murder on a quest to discover your heritage and powers. That would get old real soon.
Oblivion remains an unbelievably gorgeous game, jaw-dropping and absolutely amazing. But the counter-intuitive leveling system took immersion and broke it on the wheel. The trite and boring storyline snuffed out any sense of weight and meaning in the gameplay.
The expansion made it even prettier, although I forgot the name already. Oblivion had a lot of issues, and the most annoying one was having only 4 voice actors for the entire game (not counting Patrick Stewart). If you're complaining about the leveling system I'm guessing that you never played Morrowind, which used the same leveling system for characters (although with slightly different skills). What was really broken was enchanting if you'd keep the soulstone that one of the deities would give you. I'm talking "murdering the entire world in under two hours"-kind of broken with corpses flying left and right.
On top of that was another annoying issue: scaled level encounters. While it served to keep the game interesting, the effect was quite the opposite. The encounters didn't really become any harder, just longer and more tedious. In the end it became so over the top that simple bushrobbers had the best gear. To top it off, the nearly psychic guards who could detect you murdering people and stealing stuff even if you were inside a building. The guards of course had one a single line for catching your doing evil: "Stop right there criminal scum!", after which the player would invariably choose "Resist" at which point all the guards in town would start attacking you all saying the following four sentences "HRWAH!" "You should've paid the fine!" "HRAAAGH!" and "Help! Murder! Someone's been murdered!". To this day, those guards still haunt me.
Storywise Oblivion was kind of okay, except it was much too short. The main storyline would take only two evenings to complete, and with the guild storylines combined you'd have about a week of evenings before you'd finished the game. The dungeons that were spread across the lands were pretty much copy pasted. If you'd done a dungeon or 5 you'd recognize most parts after that. Same for the ruins, same for the areas in oblivion. There was very little unique loot in Oblivion. In an RPG I'd expect to find a bit more variation than "Randomly Generated Enchantment Stats Sword #29485". You'd expect that in diablo, but not in a more traditional RPG.
But... If you think that's bad for a modern RPG, I suggest you avoid the genre entirely. A prime candidate of everything wrong combined would be Two Worlds, and to a lesser extent Two Worlds 2. Those are just HORRIBLE in every department. A surprisingly decent game was The Witcher. It's no Baldurs Gate or Planescape : Torment storywise, but it does decent enough, has a neat skill and alchemy system. Don't expect to go looting "Vorpal Sword +5" or something like that, since it doesn't accomodate that, but it's fun.
And I'd like to second whoever said the original Dragon Age had hideous graphics. Ugly beyond all belief. I don't know how they were able to release it in this day and age.
Meh, graphics... Give me decent gameplay or a damn good storyline and I'd play it if it was still sprite based. I personally care less to see each blade of grass moving in the wind, than I care about a story that keeps me entertained enough to want to know how it ends. Fallout 3 looked really terrible in my opinion, but the story was more than involving enough for me to see it through 'till the end.
And finally, it's always the little things that do it for me in an RPG. Sometimes it's finding a rare weapon in a chest, or finding a small side-quest that is actually involving, or f
"Shatner said in a prerecorded message." Historic event, he almost considered waking up for it.
They tried doing a live version, but gave up and simply cut out all the pauses between the words. They were also afraid that Ricardo Montalban would show up in the middle of the introduction. Instead of a wakeup call with some memorable words, there'd be a scream so powerful that it would be capable of making sound in a vacuum. "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!". I mean, imagine waking up to that.
So NASA kinda looked at all the pros and cons, and decided that the best option was simply not to invite Shatner personally. He's been known to be a bit of a prick at times too, so that's why people don't invite him to the cool parties anymore either. That, and that horrible toupee. Does he still wear the toupee?
We will take no more, at least until this bag of cheetos is finished. OMNOMNOMNOM
This is the year that companies have to wise up and realize that they're destroying the experience of the very machines they are marketing so vigorously against their competitors.
Says who? What makes you think they even care about your opinion. You're obviously still buying their hardware even though you're complaining. Otherwise you wouldn't be complaining. I mean, you could always stop buying their shit and just order the parts, right?
it ruins your brand
"Dude, you bought a Dell." The brand is already ruined. That doesn't stop them from supplying most businesses.
why are you saddling your machines with software that makes it less enjoyable to use?
Because they're making money doing it, and so are a lot of other companies.
If you still wish to include loads upon loads of third-party software, stick it all on a thumb drive and include it with every new machine.
That would cost them money.
tl;dr version: they do it because they make money doing so and 90% of the home consumers who buy Dell don't know any better. It's not going to change unless it starts hurting their profits, and quite frankly I don't see how some silly website's (well meant) "open letter" is going to change a damn thing. Enjoy your Dell.
There are 100 or so really good proxies out there(maybe tor end nodes?)
Tor would be possible, but tor means that every X minutes you would get a random endnode (it might not be every X minutes, the way tor works in detail is not my area of expertise), which is suboptimal at best for bittorrent. Tor is also more often than not slow, and unreliable for connections that take a long time. Typical use such as HTTP consists of relatively short connections (a few text files, a few binary files for images), but I do have to admit that I don't know if HTTP Keep Alive is respected out of the box by the tor bundles (and I doubt HTTP Keep Alive is such a good idea on an "anonymous" network anyway).
In general, Tor is as reliable as the weakest node in your circuit of nodes you're using as a proxy, which in my experience is not all that reliable at all.
I have no idea what that would do to the torrenting protocol, but it might make it have issues recognizing available resources.
A peer in the bittorrent protocol put simply is a pair of an IP and a port, and it has no trouble distinguishing between other clients on the same IP. It's a little bit more complicated (there's a randomly generated 20 byte ID involved, but as far as I can remember trackers aren't required to send that to other peers in compact mode). Even when you're not using a tracker (by such extensions to the protocol as DHT or PEX), it's still not much of a problem. I've recently spent a bit of time reading up on the protocol (do check out the BEPs if interested, there's some really cool stuff in there) for a little hobby project.
The thing is, without joining the swarm there's really no way to keep track of the peers in the swarm other than by IP and port, and even then. Say for instance you're a member of the swarm and you've got a provider that uses DHCP. The researchers script then does the announce request to the tracker to get a list of peers and among the randomly returned peers is your IP and port number. After about an hour or so, you leave the swarm, shutdown your computer and go to bed. You release your IP back into the ISPs DHCP pool, and 10 minutes later the guy who lives next door turns on his computer and gets that IP. His bittorrent client by default chooses the same port number as you. Suppose that the tracker only returns IP-port pairs in compact mode, instead of the 20 byte id, ip, port triplet, then there is no way for those researchers to see that the peer has become someone else. The chances of this happening are small though, unless it's a really really popular torrent, and even then the handful or random peers returned by the tracker would require quite a bit of luck to have the same peer in it twice on sufficiently large torrent.
Next, even IF the tracker returns the 20 byte id, IP and port triplet, the 20 byteid is supposed to be randomly generated every time the bittorrent client starts. There is an optional field that you can pass as a unique id to the tracker for keeping track of you, but peers in the swarm will never see that. So basically, you can't really tell who is who from IP-port pair. It is a peer, but two different peers over a period of time could be the same person.
Everyone here has probably heard this, but an IP address does not represent a person.
"In order to remain anonymous, - explains Professor Rubén Cuevas - many of them rent servers from companies that perform this service and then publish contents from those servers".
Are you sure they are renting it, and didn't just script-kiddie their way into the server? Explain to me the logic in paying for something, with mon
The problem arises when you're trying to deploy a large number of machines, and you know which devices are where on the PCI buses (modern servers are coming with 4 Ethernet ports on the motherboard now).
Strange, I've never encountered this problem when deploying images on a batch of identical servers. I know that Debian has an issue when the MAC address of a NIC changes, so you'll have to edit a file (that I've got documented somewhere in an install procedure but for the love of god can't remember by heart), but I've never had the problem under RHEL so far. I've only run into the problem on debian after replacing NICs on a server, and when using virtual machines under Xen (which by now is ages ago).
Finally, I'd rather have a consistent solution that follows the eth[x] naming scheme. I have this thing where I like the fact that eth[x] means it's an ethernet device, tun[x] and tap[x] are tun and tap devices, fddi[x], ppp[x], wlan[x]... It says a lot more about the nature of the device than em[x] (for embedded), pci[x]#[y] (for PCI devices). Really, what is on pci[x]#[y]? Is it an ethernet card or something else? If the whole thing doesn't apply to something else, won't those interfaces suffer the same problem? Also: dont worry though, just add more numbers if you're dealing with aliases pci[x]#[y]:[z], or a vlan em[x]#[y].[z]. What about usb network interfaces (as much as I abhor them)? I guess the following command will become important for sysadmins who want to remain sane in the future:
ip link set dev pci[x]#[y] name eth[x]
The above is at least supported for the past 5 years by all major linux distributions, and could probably be scripted by reading from/proc. Maybe I'm afraid of change, or maybe I've never seen this issue as a real dramatic problem needed to be dealt with in such a dramatic naming scheme... It just reeks of a solution without a real problem.
this is why I don't like the/dev/sd* interfaces in Linux - you have to dig deep into/proc to find out which port SATA and SAS devices are on
This problem was solved years ago by placing labels on your filesystems, and there's the option of using UUIDs as well. Hell, if you want to go all the way, you can use LVM in exchange for a minor performance hit. Oh, and there's/dev/disk/by-path/ and/dev/disk/by-uuid/ as well. This problem has not been solved just once, but several times (and most people still use/dev/sd on simple server setups too).
On firefox4b9 it's HUEG! But firefox4 handles textarea's a little differently. Opening a new page on slashdot no longer makes my browser hang for a couple of seconds.
Things I don't like:
"News for nerds, stuff that matters" is gone. I guess the editors recognize that with all the stuff that really shouldn't be on a tech site, and all the idle videos of a dog thinking it's people that slashdot is but a shadow of its former self.
Too much freaking whitespace.
The new way comments are presented are terrible. If the comment is "minimized" I can no longer see who wrote it, just the first line of the comment is presented and that's it. While I guess content trumps identity, when the content is then reduced to the first line (eg. a post here starts with "Ok, here I go:" followed by a list which is never displayed) it really doesn't promote discussion and certainly doesn't help reading.
While the site is faster, why the hell is it using up so much CPU? Is this a new trend in web design? Is there some sort of javascript code in the background participating in a distributed environment to something like SETI@Home?
and finally, very subjective but: It looks uglier.
And yet you did exactly that. I've seen enough episodes of the show to say "I've had it with this". I hear most people didn't make it to the first season finale. It's about suspension of disbelief, and I feel the show really fails to do that. Please excuse me for not sitting through at least 3 seasons of handwaving and not having an opinion to your liking.
your opinion
There you go, fixed that for you. But I guess that after spelling such difficult words as "slack-jawed, mouth-breathers" I should cut you some slack. For someone who watches shows that require a certain amount of intelligence with all that hard math and science, one would expect you to have a certain level of eloquence.
It must suck being you surrounded by so many other inferior beings, huh?
In other words: "Stop not liking what I like!" You mad, bro? You do sound a little butthurt about the ordeal.
Seriously though, Fringe has barely anything to do with science. Just because an elderly man wearing a lab coat draws pretty pictures that look kinda mathsy and sciency on blackboard and keeps a cow in his lab, that doesn't make it science. Fringe is to science what CSI is to forensic investigations.
Hey, but enjoy your show... while it lasts. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be writing that postcard.
This is Fringe we're talking about right? Cause there's very little math and science involved in the episodes I saw. Just lots of handwaving and "Quick, hire Leonard Nimoy, we're a bit thin on plot!"
I think there should be another letter writing campaign
A postcard with the words "Thank you!" will do just fine.
Those companies shouldn't have all our information either.
Now if we can only convince everyone to stop giving out their information to them.
Let's take a look at facebook and twitter alone. I don't have an account, but sure enough some of my friends have public profiles. After about 10 minutes of googling I've found out that a friend of mine is nearly done building a house (with the address included, ideal for stealing building materials, such as copper tubes which is worth quite a bit these days), a woman I know has a bladder infection (really? why is this on the Internet?), a coworker has just gotten an achievement for a videogame that posted it on twitter (during work hours, productive friday I assume). A little googling reveals quite a lot these days, and most of the time it's stuff people put online without thinking about who can read it.
The point is they are harder to use. Why should you buy more screws? You already paid for the one it had bolted on, right?
Meh. There's plenty of consumer electronics that come with non-standard screws and we hardly ever hear about how this hampers do it yourself repairs. The reality is: they don't, they just make it a little more annoying. I'm not exactly shy on tools here, but I've encountered plenty of screws I don't have the right screwdriver for and it's never stopped me before.
Yes, they do it to keep people out of their device and claim that you voided the warranty, but really now... When I open a consumer electronics device I'm clearly not expecting the manufacturer to give me any warranty anymore. Hell, if you break the seal on a device here the manufacturer is no longer required to give the legally guaranteed warranty. If there's something to be upset about it's that Apple skirts the warranty laws here quite a bit, without actually breaking them. That's personally kept me from buying any of the new fancy Apple products. If you're going to make consumer electronic devices, give a decent warranty period and not one that complies to your product lifecycle and charge a premium for your extended warranty.
it would have been a sin if it didn't see the light of day in the end.
Yeah, but now we'll have to look for a new nerdy injoke that is the equivalent of "When hell freezes over". I'm personally hoping the release date is pushed back at least once, just for the heck of it.
Back when I was a student, DN3D was always the game for a fun blast while Quakeworld was for whose who took things a bit more seriously.
Tripmines used to cause quite the bit of nerdrage. I personally am hoping those things find their way back into the game.
It is possible to trigger false positives with certain foods. On top of that there is no accounting for different body sizes and metabolic rates and any host of other biological variables. There is no possible way to derive an accurate measurement using these instruments.
Which is why most countries use them as a first screening to see who needs a blood test and who doesn't. The courts here don't like these vague situations where people could get away with a DUI by eating certain foods. If the alcohol test turns out to be clean, you'll be sent on your merry way with an apology, a thanks for the cooperation, and a merry christmas wish. You have the right to refuse the breath test at all times, and many do (eg. asthma patients). You don't need a medical ground to refuse it. But you'll go straight to the blood test.
Really, I don't get why people are getting so upset about it. We have these kinds of blockades here since about 10 years, and drunk driving accident rates have dropped to about a fifth of what they used to be. In those 10 years I've been stopped a single time and was on my merry way 5 minutes later. That's a half minute a year in the timespan of 10 years. It's not liked you're stopped and they start searching your car for god knows what or you get frisked for no reason. Hell, they just tow the damn thing to an impound if you test positive.
2 weeks? What a sad and barren language that must be. Or were you referring to the basics?
English speakers often forget there's this whole other world out there. Imagine how unproductive it is that many nations are all working in parallel.
I live in a country with 3 national languages. We are trained in the usage of those 3 languages, although most people have trouble to master a single one. English is not one of them. The fourth language we pick up in middle school is English.
So let's compare Esperanto with English for a country such as mine. English is on the television, radio, in local cinemas and thanks to the digital age on the Internet. Esperanto is nowhere to be seen. In the past 30 years I have never heard someone utter a single word of Esperanto, never read a piece of literature in Esperanto, nor have I even heard anyone mention the language Esperanto other than in passing, more often than not in a derogatory fashion.
So a few years ago I was doing some consultancy work for a Japanese customer. I barely speak Japanese and other than to ask directions I would probably fail horribly at getting a point across. The customer in question doesn't speak a lick of Dutch, German or French other than the words for various local delicacies. Yet somehow, there was this mysterious language that everyone is constantly confronted with on television, on the radio, the Internet and even in schools: English.
You'll have to excuse me for the rudeness of what I am about to say in the following paragraphs, but there really is no good reason to learn Esperanto. The handful of speakers (with a headcount probably lower than the native speakers of my local dialect) barely make up for the amount of people that can get the point across in English. Even most of the French will answer "Yes" to "Parlez vous anglais?", and we're no longer talking a language barrier but pride being overcome at that point in some cases.
Perhaps Esperanto is to be called a stillborn language. The language has no real cultural impact other than being a linguistic creation. Two full length films have been made in the entire history of the language. A language is so much more than a set of vocabulary mixed together with a few rules of grammar decided upon by a committee. It carries with it a piece of history and culture, mixed together with borrowed words, local idioms and subtle quirks and oddities that came to be over centuries of evolution. If you learn a real language, one that people actually use in day to day conversation, you will grow much closer to understanding the culture of those who speak it instead of being able to say "Hello" in some mixed bag gobbledygook.
Most people just like to immediately react emotionally and label it with preconceptions.
I find that the few people I've encountered online praising Esperanto fail to realize that the world has moved on and mostly adopted English as the de facto international language. In a country like mine, the language would act as a barrier between those of a different language simply because of the local culture. In education Esperanto would serve as yet another hurdle that kids would have to hop over, while more than half when leaving high school never speak another tongue for the rest of their lives. If you wish to label that as a preconception, then by all means, stay in denial about what a language really is together with the handful of people proficient enough to write a technical essay in it.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe some high profile OSS guys can help fund or start some kind of OSS naming service.
That's always an option, but you just know that they'll give the organization a terrible name.
Really? Drizzle? That was the best they could do for a name of the new project?
This was their second choice. The first wanted to call it GonorrheaDB, but the development team agreed that they should only use that name in case Twitter was interested in using it as a backend.
Most people who use it do so to commit crimes, from trolling to murder.
Damn, there's laws against trolling now? I always thought people were joking about the internet police thing, but I guess it's all true then.
Oh shit, what have I done. Quick guys... HELP ME DELETE THE INTERNET!
How much ISK did they have to sell to make $229,000?
Let's see.... I haven't played Eve in a long while now, but from what I remember, you could buy two PLEXes for about 35 USD. At the time I played a plex was worth somewhere between 300M isk and 350M isk, but the market is user driven, so the prices vary. Let's say 300M so we don't overinflate the number. (Feel free to pricecheck in that hellhole known as Jita)
229.000 / 35 = 6543 ETCs, which amounts to 13086 PLEXes (both rounded up). That becomes 13086 * 300.000.000 = 3.925.800.000.000 ISK . So rougly 4 trillion ISK, assuming that all items sold were ISK, which they weren't (the article mentions super carriers, titans and characters, but for the sake of curiousity I'm going to ignore the article).
Usually they have terribly dull and uninteresting storylines you couldn't be bothered to give a goddamn about.
Yes, well not all RPGs can have you be the son/daughter of the dead lord of Murder on a quest to discover your heritage and powers. That would get old real soon.
Oblivion remains an unbelievably gorgeous game, jaw-dropping and absolutely amazing. But the counter-intuitive leveling system took immersion and broke it on the wheel. The trite and boring storyline snuffed out any sense of weight and meaning in the gameplay.
The expansion made it even prettier, although I forgot the name already. Oblivion had a lot of issues, and the most annoying one was having only 4 voice actors for the entire game (not counting Patrick Stewart). If you're complaining about the leveling system I'm guessing that you never played Morrowind, which used the same leveling system for characters (although with slightly different skills). What was really broken was enchanting if you'd keep the soulstone that one of the deities would give you. I'm talking "murdering the entire world in under two hours"-kind of broken with corpses flying left and right.
On top of that was another annoying issue: scaled level encounters. While it served to keep the game interesting, the effect was quite the opposite. The encounters didn't really become any harder, just longer and more tedious. In the end it became so over the top that simple bushrobbers had the best gear. To top it off, the nearly psychic guards who could detect you murdering people and stealing stuff even if you were inside a building. The guards of course had one a single line for catching your doing evil: "Stop right there criminal scum!", after which the player would invariably choose "Resist" at which point all the guards in town would start attacking you all saying the following four sentences "HRWAH!" "You should've paid the fine!" "HRAAAGH!" and "Help! Murder! Someone's been murdered!". To this day, those guards still haunt me.
Storywise Oblivion was kind of okay, except it was much too short. The main storyline would take only two evenings to complete, and with the guild storylines combined you'd have about a week of evenings before you'd finished the game. The dungeons that were spread across the lands were pretty much copy pasted. If you'd done a dungeon or 5 you'd recognize most parts after that. Same for the ruins, same for the areas in oblivion. There was very little unique loot in Oblivion. In an RPG I'd expect to find a bit more variation than "Randomly Generated Enchantment Stats Sword #29485". You'd expect that in diablo, but not in a more traditional RPG.
But ... If you think that's bad for a modern RPG, I suggest you avoid the genre entirely. A prime candidate of everything wrong combined would be Two Worlds, and to a lesser extent Two Worlds 2. Those are just HORRIBLE in every department. A surprisingly decent game was The Witcher. It's no Baldurs Gate or Planescape : Torment storywise, but it does decent enough, has a neat skill and alchemy system. Don't expect to go looting "Vorpal Sword +5" or something like that, since it doesn't accomodate that, but it's fun.
And I'd like to second whoever said the original Dragon Age had hideous graphics. Ugly beyond all belief. I don't know how they were able to release it in this day and age.
Meh, graphics... Give me decent gameplay or a damn good storyline and I'd play it if it was still sprite based. I personally care less to see each blade of grass moving in the wind, than I care about a story that keeps me entertained enough to want to know how it ends. Fallout 3 looked really terrible in my opinion, but the story was more than involving enough for me to see it through 'till the end.
And finally, it's always the little things that do it for me in an RPG. Sometimes it's finding a rare weapon in a chest, or finding a small side-quest that is actually involving, or f
"Shatner said in a prerecorded message." Historic event, he almost considered waking up for it.
They tried doing a live version, but gave up and simply cut out all the pauses between the words. They were also afraid that Ricardo Montalban would show up in the middle of the introduction. Instead of a wakeup call with some memorable words, there'd be a scream so powerful that it would be capable of making sound in a vacuum. "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!". I mean, imagine waking up to that.
So NASA kinda looked at all the pros and cons, and decided that the best option was simply not to invite Shatner personally. He's been known to be a bit of a prick at times too, so that's why people don't invite him to the cool parties anymore either. That, and that horrible toupee. Does he still wear the toupee?
I think the first page of your bible is missing. The one that says:
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental
They killed SGU so they could put wrestling in its place
On the bright side, wrestling has a more credible plot and more likeable characters.
If someone tells you a secret, you need to keep it to yourself, and not worry about how you can share the secret and not get caught.
That's why I use forward, it totally doesn't have this problem.
Fw: Secret
Fwd: Fw: Secret
Fwd: Re: Fwd: Fw: Secret
Doorg: Fwd: Re: Fwd: Fw: Secret
This is the final straw, the last stand.
We will take no more, at least until this bag of cheetos is finished. OMNOMNOMNOM
This is the year that companies have to wise up and realize that they're destroying the experience of the very machines they are marketing so vigorously against their competitors.
Says who? What makes you think they even care about your opinion. You're obviously still buying their hardware even though you're complaining. Otherwise you wouldn't be complaining. I mean, you could always stop buying their shit and just order the parts, right?
it ruins your brand
"Dude, you bought a Dell." The brand is already ruined. That doesn't stop them from supplying most businesses.
why are you saddling your machines with software that makes it less enjoyable to use?
Because they're making money doing it, and so are a lot of other companies.
If you still wish to include loads upon loads of third-party software, stick it all on a thumb drive and include it with every new machine.
That would cost them money.
tl;dr version: they do it because they make money doing so and 90% of the home consumers who buy Dell don't know any better. It's not going to change unless it starts hurting their profits, and quite frankly I don't see how some silly website's (well meant) "open letter" is going to change a damn thing. Enjoy your Dell.
Why yes, I'm a cynic, why do you ask?
There are 100 or so really good proxies out there(maybe tor end nodes?)
Tor would be possible, but tor means that every X minutes you would get a random endnode (it might not be every X minutes, the way tor works in detail is not my area of expertise), which is suboptimal at best for bittorrent. Tor is also more often than not slow, and unreliable for connections that take a long time. Typical use such as HTTP consists of relatively short connections (a few text files, a few binary files for images), but I do have to admit that I don't know if HTTP Keep Alive is respected out of the box by the tor bundles (and I doubt HTTP Keep Alive is such a good idea on an "anonymous" network anyway).
In general, Tor is as reliable as the weakest node in your circuit of nodes you're using as a proxy, which in my experience is not all that reliable at all.
I have no idea what that would do to the torrenting protocol, but it might make it have issues recognizing available resources.
A peer in the bittorrent protocol put simply is a pair of an IP and a port, and it has no trouble distinguishing between other clients on the same IP. It's a little bit more complicated (there's a randomly generated 20 byte ID involved, but as far as I can remember trackers aren't required to send that to other peers in compact mode). Even when you're not using a tracker (by such extensions to the protocol as DHT or PEX), it's still not much of a problem. I've recently spent a bit of time reading up on the protocol (do check out the BEPs if interested, there's some really cool stuff in there) for a little hobby project.
The thing is, without joining the swarm there's really no way to keep track of the peers in the swarm other than by IP and port, and even then. Say for instance you're a member of the swarm and you've got a provider that uses DHCP. The researchers script then does the announce request to the tracker to get a list of peers and among the randomly returned peers is your IP and port number. After about an hour or so, you leave the swarm, shutdown your computer and go to bed. You release your IP back into the ISPs DHCP pool, and 10 minutes later the guy who lives next door turns on his computer and gets that IP. His bittorrent client by default chooses the same port number as you. Suppose that the tracker only returns IP-port pairs in compact mode, instead of the 20 byte id, ip, port triplet, then there is no way for those researchers to see that the peer has become someone else. The chances of this happening are small though, unless it's a really really popular torrent, and even then the handful or random peers returned by the tracker would require quite a bit of luck to have the same peer in it twice on sufficiently large torrent.
Next, even IF the tracker returns the 20 byte id, IP and port triplet, the 20 byteid is supposed to be randomly generated every time the bittorrent client starts. There is an optional field that you can pass as a unique id to the tracker for keeping track of you, but peers in the swarm will never see that. So basically, you can't really tell who is who from IP-port pair. It is a peer, but two different peers over a period of time could be the same person.
Everyone here has probably heard this, but an IP address does not represent a person.
From the press-release from the univesity about the paper:
"In order to remain anonymous, - explains Professor Rubén Cuevas - many of them rent servers from companies that perform this service and then publish contents from those servers".
Are you sure they are renting it, and didn't just script-kiddie their way into the server? Explain to me the logic in paying for something, with mon
The problem arises when you're trying to deploy a large number of machines, and you know which devices are where on the PCI buses (modern servers are coming with 4 Ethernet ports on the motherboard now).
Strange, I've never encountered this problem when deploying images on a batch of identical servers. I know that Debian has an issue when the MAC address of a NIC changes, so you'll have to edit a file (that I've got documented somewhere in an install procedure but for the love of god can't remember by heart), but I've never had the problem under RHEL so far. I've only run into the problem on debian after replacing NICs on a server, and when using virtual machines under Xen (which by now is ages ago).
Finally, I'd rather have a consistent solution that follows the eth[x] naming scheme. I have this thing where I like the fact that eth[x] means it's an ethernet device, tun[x] and tap[x] are tun and tap devices, fddi[x], ppp[x], wlan[x]... It says a lot more about the nature of the device than em[x] (for embedded), pci[x]#[y] (for PCI devices). Really, what is on pci[x]#[y]? Is it an ethernet card or something else? If the whole thing doesn't apply to something else, won't those interfaces suffer the same problem? Also: dont worry though, just add more numbers if you're dealing with aliases pci[x]#[y]:[z], or a vlan em[x]#[y].[z]. What about usb network interfaces (as much as I abhor them)? I guess the following command will become important for sysadmins who want to remain sane in the future:
ip link set dev pci[x]#[y] name eth[x]
The above is at least supported for the past 5 years by all major linux distributions, and could probably be scripted by reading from /proc. Maybe I'm afraid of change, or maybe I've never seen this issue as a real dramatic problem needed to be dealt with in such a dramatic naming scheme... It just reeks of a solution without a real problem.
this is why I don't like the /dev/sd* interfaces in Linux - you have to dig deep into /proc to find out which port SATA and SAS devices are on
This problem was solved years ago by placing labels on your filesystems, and there's the option of using UUIDs as well. Hell, if you want to go all the way, you can use LVM in exchange for a minor performance hit. Oh, and there's /dev/disk/by-path/ and /dev/disk/by-uuid/ as well. This problem has not been solved just once, but several times (and most people still use /dev/sd on simple server setups too).
- Comment text box is way too small.
On firefox4b9 it's HUEG! But firefox4 handles textarea's a little differently. Opening a new page on slashdot no longer makes my browser hang for a couple of seconds.
Things I don't like:
I'm not even going to bother to argue.
And yet you did exactly that. I've seen enough episodes of the show to say "I've had it with this". I hear most people didn't make it to the first season finale. It's about suspension of disbelief, and I feel the show really fails to do that. Please excuse me for not sitting through at least 3 seasons of handwaving and not having an opinion to your liking.
your opinion
There you go, fixed that for you. But I guess that after spelling such difficult words as "slack-jawed, mouth-breathers" I should cut you some slack. For someone who watches shows that require a certain amount of intelligence with all that hard math and science, one would expect you to have a certain level of eloquence.
It must suck being you surrounded by so many other inferior beings, huh?
In other words: "Stop not liking what I like!" You mad, bro? You do sound a little butthurt about the ordeal.
Seriously though, Fringe has barely anything to do with science. Just because an elderly man wearing a lab coat draws pretty pictures that look kinda mathsy and sciency on blackboard and keeps a cow in his lab, that doesn't make it science. Fringe is to science what CSI is to forensic investigations.
Hey, but enjoy your show... while it lasts. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be writing that postcard.
based in higher subjects like math and science
This is Fringe we're talking about right? Cause there's very little math and science involved in the episodes I saw. Just lots of handwaving and "Quick, hire Leonard Nimoy, we're a bit thin on plot!"
I think there should be another letter writing campaign
A postcard with the words "Thank you!" will do just fine.
Those companies shouldn't have all our information either.
Now if we can only convince everyone to stop giving out their information to them.
Let's take a look at facebook and twitter alone. I don't have an account, but sure enough some of my friends have public profiles. After about 10 minutes of googling I've found out that a friend of mine is nearly done building a house (with the address included, ideal for stealing building materials, such as copper tubes which is worth quite a bit these days), a woman I know has a bladder infection (really? why is this on the Internet?), a coworker has just gotten an achievement for a videogame that posted it on twitter (during work hours, productive friday I assume). A little googling reveals quite a lot these days, and most of the time it's stuff people put online without thinking about who can read it.
The point is they are harder to use. Why should you buy more screws? You already paid for the one it had bolted on, right?
Meh. There's plenty of consumer electronics that come with non-standard screws and we hardly ever hear about how this hampers do it yourself repairs. The reality is: they don't, they just make it a little more annoying. I'm not exactly shy on tools here, but I've encountered plenty of screws I don't have the right screwdriver for and it's never stopped me before.
Yes, they do it to keep people out of their device and claim that you voided the warranty, but really now... When I open a consumer electronics device I'm clearly not expecting the manufacturer to give me any warranty anymore. Hell, if you break the seal on a device here the manufacturer is no longer required to give the legally guaranteed warranty. If there's something to be upset about it's that Apple skirts the warranty laws here quite a bit, without actually breaking them. That's personally kept me from buying any of the new fancy Apple products. If you're going to make consumer electronic devices, give a decent warranty period and not one that complies to your product lifecycle and charge a premium for your extended warranty.
Of course, only Apple-authorized service technicians have Pentalobular screwdrivers and they're not allowed to resell them.
In before someone simply makes one and sells it online.
It's just a screw, not a miracle of modern engineering.
it would have been a sin if it didn't see the light of day in the end.
Yeah, but now we'll have to look for a new nerdy injoke that is the equivalent of "When hell freezes over". I'm personally hoping the release date is pushed back at least once, just for the heck of it.
Back when I was a student, DN3D was always the game for a fun blast while Quakeworld was for whose who took things a bit more seriously.
Tripmines used to cause quite the bit of nerdrage. I personally am hoping those things find their way back into the game.
I will pray for your unworthy soul as I fill my tank with His Love.
Score: 2, Troll
Really slashdot? I am disappointed.
Engineer is just another cheap title, like CEO/CFO/CIO/CTO, etc, free to be used by anyone.
I resent that remark! My lawyers will be in touch!
Cordially yours,
discord23
Chieft Toilet Officer
Executive Sanitation Engineer
Craptastic Inc
Yes, I know he had a couple of kids.
Are we still going on about that? I thought he paid the parents a hefty sum in the end to be left alone.
It is possible to trigger false positives with certain foods. On top of that there is no accounting for different body sizes and metabolic rates and any host of other biological variables. There is no possible way to derive an accurate measurement using these instruments.
Which is why most countries use them as a first screening to see who needs a blood test and who doesn't. The courts here don't like these vague situations where people could get away with a DUI by eating certain foods. If the alcohol test turns out to be clean, you'll be sent on your merry way with an apology, a thanks for the cooperation, and a merry christmas wish. You have the right to refuse the breath test at all times, and many do (eg. asthma patients). You don't need a medical ground to refuse it. But you'll go straight to the blood test.
Really, I don't get why people are getting so upset about it. We have these kinds of blockades here since about 10 years, and drunk driving accident rates have dropped to about a fifth of what they used to be. In those 10 years I've been stopped a single time and was on my merry way 5 minutes later. That's a half minute a year in the timespan of 10 years. It's not liked you're stopped and they start searching your car for god knows what or you get frisked for no reason. Hell, they just tow the damn thing to an impound if you test positive.
This language took me just 2 weeks to learn.
2 weeks? What a sad and barren language that must be. Or were you referring to the basics?
English speakers often forget there's this whole other world out there. Imagine how unproductive it is that many nations are all working in parallel.
I live in a country with 3 national languages. We are trained in the usage of those 3 languages, although most people have trouble to master a single one. English is not one of them. The fourth language we pick up in middle school is English.
So let's compare Esperanto with English for a country such as mine. English is on the television, radio, in local cinemas and thanks to the digital age on the Internet. Esperanto is nowhere to be seen. In the past 30 years I have never heard someone utter a single word of Esperanto, never read a piece of literature in Esperanto, nor have I even heard anyone mention the language Esperanto other than in passing, more often than not in a derogatory fashion.
So a few years ago I was doing some consultancy work for a Japanese customer. I barely speak Japanese and other than to ask directions I would probably fail horribly at getting a point across. The customer in question doesn't speak a lick of Dutch, German or French other than the words for various local delicacies. Yet somehow, there was this mysterious language that everyone is constantly confronted with on television, on the radio, the Internet and even in schools: English.
You'll have to excuse me for the rudeness of what I am about to say in the following paragraphs, but there really is no good reason to learn Esperanto. The handful of speakers (with a headcount probably lower than the native speakers of my local dialect) barely make up for the amount of people that can get the point across in English. Even most of the French will answer "Yes" to "Parlez vous anglais?", and we're no longer talking a language barrier but pride being overcome at that point in some cases.
Perhaps Esperanto is to be called a stillborn language. The language has no real cultural impact other than being a linguistic creation. Two full length films have been made in the entire history of the language. A language is so much more than a set of vocabulary mixed together with a few rules of grammar decided upon by a committee. It carries with it a piece of history and culture, mixed together with borrowed words, local idioms and subtle quirks and oddities that came to be over centuries of evolution. If you learn a real language, one that people actually use in day to day conversation, you will grow much closer to understanding the culture of those who speak it instead of being able to say "Hello" in some mixed bag gobbledygook.
Most people just like to immediately react emotionally and label it with preconceptions.
I find that the few people I've encountered online praising Esperanto fail to realize that the world has moved on and mostly adopted English as the de facto international language. In a country like mine, the language would act as a barrier between those of a different language simply because of the local culture. In education Esperanto would serve as yet another hurdle that kids would have to hop over, while more than half when leaving high school never speak another tongue for the rest of their lives. If you wish to label that as a preconception, then by all means, stay in denial about what a language really is together with the handful of people proficient enough to write a technical essay in it.
2011: Year of the Linux Tablet
Analogous to "Year of the linux desktop every year, next year!"
Sorry, it had to be done.