While it is new as a consumer product, it isn't new. I believe Adobe provided it as a workflow component for their VARs. It has been around since at least 2.0 and I think 1.5. Someone else can confirm. As I understand it, it is a pretty basic text (or "copy") editor with some nice integration with InDesign. I was sorely disappointed to learn that it was not a Word (or better yet, FrameMaker) replacement.
Because knowing is half the battle.
I cut out the relevant question and put it up here, so you can judge for yourself, but I think the context and quote are pretty clear. In referring to the VT datacenter, he says: "They've configured one corner of that - umm - I think there are about 6 to 8 racks or maybe more with all of these machines standing on them." He may be somewhat removed from the minute details of the project, but if he was off by over a full magnitude of order, why would he throw out any number? And he is definitely saying "6 ta 8", not "6ti 8", "6 ti 8", or even "6ta 8".
BTW, in the archive files, the relevant quote is at 1:23:55, with the question starting at 1:23:40.
A rack is 43U.
A standard rack is 43U. Just after the quote above, at about 1:25, he mentions that Liebert custom built racks for them. And given that they are accommodating desktop chassis, I doubt they are using a design based on a standard rack (especially with regards to footprint).
But I guess we'll see when the pictures come up. I must admit, it was one of the odder things he said and I had to listen to it several times to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding. It has my curiosity piqued.
Actually, Apple called their next-gen OS Copland (to be followed by Gershwin). After buying out NeXT, they started Rhapsody, which was based on NeXT's OpenStep OS. There was no Rhapsody until NeXT; it had everything to do with NeXT.
A quick Google search turns up this (plus many more) if you would like to do your own little history reading.
Nope, the Dean of the Engineering school says they are using Mac OS X for now. They might look at something else in the future, but for now it is 10.2.7 (the only OS that fully supports Apple's G5).
Well, I browsed through the links at threshold=1 and I couldn't find any comments from anyone who had actually listened to the broadcast in question. No surprise there, I guess.
It wasn't that great, so you didn't miss much. It starts at 1:17 and ends at about 1:37 in the archive file for those who would like to listen. For everyone else, here is a list of the highlights:
They didn't go with an Xserve chassis because they couldn't get one with a G5.
They are using the stock chassis, no modifications.
It will take up about 6 to 8 racks. (Which seems really small to me; they must be packing them in tight).
Using OS X for now, the stock install (10.2.7). They have had other people approach them and they will consider other OSes in the future, but they are going with an OS X install for now (this seems to be a lack-of-support issue).
They do have a 400-node cluster running now, so they aren't complete novices to building clusters. But this was still very new for them and several times Mr. Aref mentioned that Apple had helped them out a lot, going to some of the other vendors involved and talking with them on VT's behalf, etc. Apple obviously sees this as a very strategic project for them.
They chose 1100 nodes because that hit the sweet spot for budgeting and where they wanted to be on the TOP500 list.
The cluster comprises over 19 tons of gear.
It will be a node on a network of supercomputers nation-wide - the National Lambda Rail initiative.
They (VT) are creating a video documentary of the whole project that it sounds like they will put online later in the year. They are also writing a handbook as a kind of howto for building your own cluster. Sound very willing to talk to other groups about how they did it and help others along.
That is about it. Not much as far as technical details. Mr. Aref said they will release all of the technical details later. He wouldn't venture a guess on where they will be on TOP500 until he's seen some benchmarks, but they obviously expect to make the top 10.
Personally, I am extremely curious about this whole project. Using a desktop chassis seems like an unconvential way to build a large cluster, so the photos will be very interesting. But the documentary! I think that is awesome. This might provide a unique perspective into how a large cluster is built (Mr. Aref joked that it involved a lot of pizza).
Re:So why didn't Intel do this? Politics
on
AMD64 Preview
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· Score: 1
My understanding was that the Itanium was originally HP's idea. They knew they didn't have the resources to make it a viable platform, so they sold it to Intel and had them do most of the heavy lifting. I'd like to see some articles on the origin of the Itanium, it sounded like an interesting story.
Re:64bit performance gains...
on
AMD64 Preview
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· Score: 1
No, you misread the original poster. He never said these were advantages of 64-bit chips in general, just the AMD64 implementation. You didn't read his post very carefully and assumed he was saying they were innate advantages of 64-bit CPUs.
Why can't you track downloaders? All you need are some honeypot clients that keep track of who downloads from them. You won't get all downloaders and it isn't as easy as tracking uploaders, but it is certainly possible. Neither uploading or downloading is safe if you don't want the RIAA to come knocking.
Very informative that. The best is at the end, where the Mellanox CEO says "[T]he combination of industry standard servers, Linux and InfiniBand...."
So, they are going to run Linux on it.
Although they mention "off-the-shelf" a couple of times, including prominently in the opening paragraph, it doesn't sound like the computers are what you get at retail. First, they are using PowerMacs and not Xserves, as noted here: "officials selected Apple's new Power Mac." However, it also says that "the university worked with Apple to purchase and adapt the new machines." I'm guessing this means they aren't using the retail case, which as many posters have pointed out would be insane for a cluster this size.
The other interesting piece to note is that "Liebert...custom designed computer racks along with power distribution equipment", although they did use their "new high-density rack mounted cooling system" unmodified, it sounds like. Okay, the only way the G5s could approach a heat load for which "normal air conditioning units were insufficient" would be if they were out of their retail cases. You just can't achieve enough density otherwise. And while a custom designed rack could mean made to fit PowerMac retail cases, I think the likelier possibility is that they were significantly increasing density. A G5 has about half the heat output of an Athlon or P4, so they must be packing them in pretty dense.
Anyway, the conclusion is that they are using a custom case and running Linux.
I have moderator points, but I'll reply rather than use them.
Regarding your second question, you seem to be confusing professional ethics with personal morality. Both deal with morals, but the former deals with conduct in a business setting, while the latter govern an individual's life.
Business ethics are also widely agreed upon and usually codified by a professional organization while personal morals can vary widely from person to person (although the common ones are codified in our laws). So not including one person's set of personal morals as criteria for grading companies is not failing the mission of grading companies based on business ethics nor does it have anything to do with being on the "Liberal side of the aisle."
As such, I would have moderated you Offtopic rather than Flamebait.
Nathan
I'd just like to point out that the actual quote is:
Mr. Gates acknowledged today that the company's error reporting service indicated that 5 percent of all Windows-based computers now crash
more than [em. mine] twice each day.
So that is greater than 2, not greater than or equal to 2; i.e. 3 or more times a day. How annoying would that be? I'm ticked if OS X does that in a year.
If you read my post, you'll realize I've already answered your first point. GCC is in a medium, text, for which it is possible and easy to make exact copies. It is the same with books. The words can be copied directly, in most cases changed to different fonts and formatting (although some works use the design of the words as well as their meaning) and they lose none of their original value. If you really think that your VHS copy of "2001: A Space Odyssey" is the exact same quality as the print of the original (which I'm sure you don't), your senses aren't working. A much closer analogy is that it is like viewing a postage stamp of a work of art versus experiencing it in a gallery. In fact, although the difference in quality is a bit exaggerated, that is a very apt analogy.
And I never said it must never be altered. Like I said, I don't have a fundamental problem with what Lucas or Spielberg did to their movies, provided we still have the original. If someone wants to make a painstakingly exact copy of the Mona Lisa and draw a mustache on it, fine. I would probably think it stupid, but as long as we have the original, they can do what they like.
I think the problem with movies, and where it gets sticky, is that we don't have access to the original. Spielberg can do something as inane as change all the shotguns in E.T. to walkie-talkies, fine. Prints of the original still exist. But we, the public, don't have access to those prints. So it becomes similar to the owner of the Mona Lisa making the mustachioed version and hiding away the original, so that we can only experience the modified one. That is wrong.
Yes, there is an original. There is a print that was displayed to the public, that we all went and saw and are familar with, that was entered into our culture. That is the original.
There were initial sketches of the Mona Lisa, too, and most other great works of art. But we haven't all gone and seen the preliminary sketches, we aren't all familar with them, they aren't part of our cultural heritage. They have their place, and as historical documents are interesting, giving a glimpse into the creation of a work of art and a better understanding of that work. But they don't carry the cultural signifigance of the original work. You're suggesting that the pieces of rock chiseled away from David have the same significance as David. They don't.
The problem here is that works of art are inextricably tied to the world in which they are created. They say something about the times, about the mindset of the artist at that moment, about the culture in which they were created. As Heraclitus said, "We cannot stand in the same river twice, for neither we nor the river are the same." And so it is with the world in which works of art are created. When you change them, when you modify them, you destroy the link to the world in which they were created and you link them to your own. When Romeo and Juliet are updated for modern times, it ceases to be Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Sure, the story is the same, even the dialog can be the same, but instead of saying something about Shakespeare's time, it says something about our time. That doesn't automatically make it any worse than Shakespeare's work, but it does make it different. It is important that we have a culture deeper than popular culture, that we understand more about our past than just the dates and times, facts and figures. And that is why it is important that we preserve original works of art as best we can.
What!? Do you really think there wasn't buzz already? The rumour sites have a new rumour every day and even Slashdot has had stories speculating about Apple using the PPC970. The parent poster was right, these specs deflate the surprise, not build it up.
Editing a personal copy of a film and a studio or director editing the original are completely separate debates.
The former deals with an individual's copy of a piece of our culture, the latter with the piece of culture itself. It is similar to a person having a replica of Michaelangelo's David and putting shorts on it as compared to the museum doing it. Or putting a moustache on a picture of the Mona Lisa versus the real one. One is an individual's property, and one is owned, at least partially, by the whole culture. It is the same reason we designate buildings as historic landmarks.
Making a file system driver for BitTorrent - not possible too different? I don't buy that. I could be done. Of course, there'd be latency.
Perhaps not handy of interactive use.
This is just plain dumb. This would be like trying to use a tftp client for a filesystem. And then insulting the author of a tftp client that didn't think it was feasible as having a "lack of vision." Bram is exactly right. The filesystem metaphor does not apply to everything. Filesystem semantics are very different from file transfer semantics.
However, I'd love to see you try to cram this under the BSD VFS layer as an fs driver. So go ahead. I could use the laugh. But don't insult the creator for understanding what his creation was designed to do and designed not to do.
I'd love a photo and if you're e-mailing them out, count me in. You can e-mail me at n8_f at myrealbox.com. I think it would make a nice background on my Mac. : )
Thanks,
Nathan
Re:Questions I'd like the experts to answer
on
Today's SCO News
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· Score: 1
Where is the code?
SCO said in yesterday's interview and several other recent interviews that the code is in the Linux kernel. The quote is:
How many lines of code in the Linux kernel are a direct copyright violation?
It's very extensive.
I think that is also the basis of the "sue Linus" comment.
Of course that obviously doesn't tell us much and the other questions you raise in regards to that point still need to be answered, but it is the kernel that is affected, not just a user space application.
As I recall, in earlier articles SCO claimed the code had been added to Linux last year. So I don't think this is the smoking gun you think it is. Also, you would have to prove not only that the changes were made a while ago, which is easy, but that SCO knew about them and purposefully did nothing, which is hard. They will say that after finding the code IBM added last fall, they went back and found older examples they had previously been unaware of.
Sorry to be a wet blanket, but I don't think this aspect will have a bearing on the case.
But other people have seen it, right, just under confidentiality agreements. That seems to raise an interesting question: If you have seen the source code and know that SCO is committing fraud and adding code from Linux that wasn't there before, are you legally justified in breaking your confidentiality agreement to blow the whistle? I think ethically and morally you would be compelled to, but legally it might open you up to a suit for breaching your confidentiality agreement.
This is not how it works. The client uploads to the n clients it gets the best download rates from, where n is the number of uploads allowed. The point being that it is asymmetrical, not symmetrical. Also, most people have no trouble maxing out the download capacity of asymmetric broadband connections on moderately busy torrents, so it doesn't do much to discourage leechers.
The reason you don't get good downloads when you are firewalled is that by default trackers check for if clients are behind a firewall or NAT and ban those that are. On the few that don't, other clients can't connect to you, meaning you have to initiate all the connections, which doesn't work very well.
I think one of the main reasons was simplicity. Converting the binary SHA1 hashes to text and then gzipping them is much more involved than just sticking them in a file.
I really don't see what the problem is. So you can't cat them, big deal! Use a text or hex editor. These aren't meant to be human readable, but it isn't hard to read simple ones.
It isn't very hard. I've written one in C/Objective-C that is less than 300 lines (including all of the comments, generous white space, etc., but not the headers). A straight C one wouldn't be too much more.
Bram's Python one is ~170, but then again he doesn't have any comments and doesn't have to deal with memory management, etc. Python is helped by having native hash and list types.
But it isn't very hard. Not sure what the parent poster's difficulties are, unless they are implementing all of the data structures themselves. But even then, it is pretty basic (just a lot of lines).
I've read the other replies and they aren't quite right.
I run into this when I try to restart a download and I command-complete to the file and not the torrent and hit enter too quickly (luckily I run OS X and it survives, although it can slow things down a bit).
The problem is that BT is expecting a.torrent file and ONLY a.torrent file (since that is the only valid input). It doesn't bother checking, though. Instead, it tries to read the WHOLE FILE into memory. This is why it chokes and your computer becomes unresponsive: by the time you notice it, your computer is thrashing. Plus, I think during the read call Python doesn't respond to signals. You should still be able to kill -9 it, though (or whatever the windows equivalent is - ending the task from the GUI probably won't cut it). Assuming your OS is robust enough, once it finishes reading the file into memory, it then checks to see if it is a.torrent file. It will then exist gracefully as soon as it realizes it is not. So, to fix this bug, it should at least sanity check the file before trying to read it into memory.
The relevant code is line 107 in download.py.
I've written a Mac OSX client in C/Objective-C that of course doesn't suffer this problem (and is at least twice as fast), which is I am aware of it.
Regarding his use of Python, I would guess because he likes it better than Java. While he knows Java and Python, if you look at his page you'll find most of his code is in Python. I agree that Java would have been a better choice (for anything non-trivial), but not for your reasons. BT is only a few hundred K at most compressed. I doubt it could have been much smaller in Java. Your download is so large because the Windows version has to include the Python runtime libraries, since Python is not installed by default on Windows. But that isn't Python's fault. And since Windows no longer ships with a Java runtime, that would be an even bigger download AND would have to be downloaded and installed separately by the user, since I don't know of any Windows Java VM vendors that let you bundle their runtime for free. As far as better platform support, that is also wrong. Python is installed by default on most Unix machines, is freely available on the rest, and is available for Windows. What platforms aren't supported?
No, the reason I would have liked Bram to use Java is for code readability. The Python code is a mess to try to read due to the lack of any typing, no variable declarations, and lots of function pointers (which in Python are indistinguishable from functions). Of course, if there were comments it would help, but with Java I wouldn't need comments (although they never hurt). This was my first exposure to a Python program and there is no way I would ever use it for anything more than a script. Java seems to give the same benefits (garbage collection, object-oriented, portability) and is much easier to maintain.
Read the parent before posting a reply to someone's post. Wes was responding to a post that read:
Actually Mac OS X has had it since the launch of OS X in March of 2001, you just have to choose UNIX File System when installing and it turns your disk in to ext2 FS.
You can click the parent link on Wes' post to get to it.
It does keep a history of what you have purchased, but you would have to re-purchase your music if you failed to back it up. If your initial download was interrupted, though, you can download it again.
See "How to Back Up Purchased Songs" and "About Interrupted Downloads".
Slashdot Mirror
While it is new as a consumer product, it isn't new. I believe Adobe provided it as a workflow component for their VARs. It has been around since at least 2.0 and I think 1.5. Someone else can confirm. As I understand it, it is a pretty basic text (or "copy") editor with some nice integration with InDesign. I was sorely disappointed to learn that it was not a Word (or better yet, FrameMaker) replacement. Because knowing is half the battle.
I cut out the relevant question and put it up here, so you can judge for yourself, but I think the context and quote are pretty clear. In referring to the VT datacenter, he says: "They've configured one corner of that - umm - I think there are about 6 to 8 racks or maybe more with all of these machines standing on them." He may be somewhat removed from the minute details of the project, but if he was off by over a full magnitude of order, why would he throw out any number? And he is definitely saying "6 ta 8", not "6ti 8", "6 ti 8", or even "6ta 8".
BTW, in the archive files, the relevant quote is at 1:23:55, with the question starting at 1:23:40.
A rack is 43U.
A standard rack is 43U. Just after the quote above, at about 1:25, he mentions that Liebert custom built racks for them. And given that they are accommodating desktop chassis, I doubt they are using a design based on a standard rack (especially with regards to footprint).
But I guess we'll see when the pictures come up. I must admit, it was one of the odder things he said and I had to listen to it several times to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding. It has my curiosity piqued.
Actually, Apple called their next-gen OS Copland (to be followed by Gershwin). After buying out NeXT, they started Rhapsody, which was based on NeXT's OpenStep OS. There was no Rhapsody until NeXT; it had everything to do with NeXT.
A quick Google search turns up this (plus many more) if you would like to do your own little history reading.
Nope, the Dean of the Engineering school says they are using Mac OS X for now. They might look at something else in the future, but for now it is 10.2.7 (the only OS that fully supports Apple's G5).
It wasn't that great, so you didn't miss much. It starts at 1:17 and ends at about 1:37 in the archive file for those who would like to listen. For everyone else, here is a list of the highlights: That is about it. Not much as far as technical details. Mr. Aref said they will release all of the technical details later. He wouldn't venture a guess on where they will be on TOP500 until he's seen some benchmarks, but they obviously expect to make the top 10.
Personally, I am extremely curious about this whole project. Using a desktop chassis seems like an unconvential way to build a large cluster, so the photos will be very interesting. But the documentary! I think that is awesome. This might provide a unique perspective into how a large cluster is built (Mr. Aref joked that it involved a lot of pizza).
My understanding was that the Itanium was originally HP's idea. They knew they didn't have the resources to make it a viable platform, so they sold it to Intel and had them do most of the heavy lifting. I'd like to see some articles on the origin of the Itanium, it sounded like an interesting story.
No, you misread the original poster. He never said these were advantages of 64-bit chips in general, just the AMD64 implementation. You didn't read his post very carefully and assumed he was saying they were innate advantages of 64-bit CPUs.
Why can't you track downloaders? All you need are some honeypot clients that keep track of who downloads from them. You won't get all downloaders and it isn't as easy as tracking uploaders, but it is certainly possible. Neither uploading or downloading is safe if you don't want the RIAA to come knocking.
Very informative that. The best is at the end, where the Mellanox CEO says "[T]he combination of industry standard servers, Linux and InfiniBand...."
So, they are going to run Linux on it.
Although they mention "off-the-shelf" a couple of times, including prominently in the opening paragraph, it doesn't sound like the computers are what you get at retail. First, they are using PowerMacs and not Xserves, as noted here: "officials selected Apple's new Power Mac." However, it also says that "the university worked with Apple to purchase and adapt the new machines." I'm guessing this means they aren't using the retail case, which as many posters have pointed out would be insane for a cluster this size.
The other interesting piece to note is that "Liebert...custom designed computer racks along with power distribution equipment", although they did use their "new high-density rack mounted cooling system" unmodified, it sounds like. Okay, the only way the G5s could approach a heat load for which "normal air conditioning units were insufficient" would be if they were out of their retail cases. You just can't achieve enough density otherwise. And while a custom designed rack could mean made to fit PowerMac retail cases, I think the likelier possibility is that they were significantly increasing density. A G5 has about half the heat output of an Athlon or P4, so they must be packing them in pretty dense.
Anyway, the conclusion is that they are using a custom case and running Linux.
I have moderator points, but I'll reply rather than use them.
Regarding your second question, you seem to be confusing professional ethics with personal morality. Both deal with morals, but the former deals with conduct in a business setting, while the latter govern an individual's life.
Business ethics are also widely agreed upon and usually codified by a professional organization while personal morals can vary widely from person to person (although the common ones are codified in our laws). So not including one person's set of personal morals as criteria for grading companies is not failing the mission of grading companies based on business ethics nor does it have anything to do with being on the "Liberal side of the aisle."
As such, I would have moderated you Offtopic rather than Flamebait.
Nathan
Nathan
If you read my post, you'll realize I've already answered your first point. GCC is in a medium, text, for which it is possible and easy to make exact copies. It is the same with books. The words can be copied directly, in most cases changed to different fonts and formatting (although some works use the design of the words as well as their meaning) and they lose none of their original value. If you really think that your VHS copy of "2001: A Space Odyssey" is the exact same quality as the print of the original (which I'm sure you don't), your senses aren't working. A much closer analogy is that it is like viewing a postage stamp of a work of art versus experiencing it in a gallery. In fact, although the difference in quality is a bit exaggerated, that is a very apt analogy.
And I never said it must never be altered. Like I said, I don't have a fundamental problem with what Lucas or Spielberg did to their movies, provided we still have the original. If someone wants to make a painstakingly exact copy of the Mona Lisa and draw a mustache on it, fine. I would probably think it stupid, but as long as we have the original, they can do what they like.
I think the problem with movies, and where it gets sticky, is that we don't have access to the original. Spielberg can do something as inane as change all the shotguns in E.T. to walkie-talkies, fine. Prints of the original still exist. But we, the public, don't have access to those prints. So it becomes similar to the owner of the Mona Lisa making the mustachioed version and hiding away the original, so that we can only experience the modified one. That is wrong.
Yes, there is an original. There is a print that was displayed to the public, that we all went and saw and are familar with, that was entered into our culture. That is the original.
There were initial sketches of the Mona Lisa, too, and most other great works of art. But we haven't all gone and seen the preliminary sketches, we aren't all familar with them, they aren't part of our cultural heritage. They have their place, and as historical documents are interesting, giving a glimpse into the creation of a work of art and a better understanding of that work. But they don't carry the cultural signifigance of the original work. You're suggesting that the pieces of rock chiseled away from David have the same significance as David. They don't.
The problem here is that works of art are inextricably tied to the world in which they are created. They say something about the times, about the mindset of the artist at that moment, about the culture in which they were created. As Heraclitus said, "We cannot stand in the same river twice, for neither we nor the river are the same." And so it is with the world in which works of art are created. When you change them, when you modify them, you destroy the link to the world in which they were created and you link them to your own. When Romeo and Juliet are updated for modern times, it ceases to be Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Sure, the story is the same, even the dialog can be the same, but instead of saying something about Shakespeare's time, it says something about our time. That doesn't automatically make it any worse than Shakespeare's work, but it does make it different. It is important that we have a culture deeper than popular culture, that we understand more about our past than just the dates and times, facts and figures. And that is why it is important that we preserve original works of art as best we can.
What!? Do you really think there wasn't buzz already? The rumour sites have a new rumour every day and even Slashdot has had stories speculating about Apple using the PPC970. The parent poster was right, these specs deflate the surprise, not build it up.
Editing a personal copy of a film and a studio or director editing the original are completely separate debates.
The former deals with an individual's copy of a piece of our culture, the latter with the piece of culture itself. It is similar to a person having a replica of Michaelangelo's David and putting shorts on it as compared to the museum doing it. Or putting a moustache on a picture of the Mona Lisa versus the real one. One is an individual's property, and one is owned, at least partially, by the whole culture. It is the same reason we designate buildings as historic landmarks.
Making a file system driver for BitTorrent - not possible too different? I don't buy that. I could be done. Of course, there'd be latency. Perhaps not handy of interactive use.
This is just plain dumb. This would be like trying to use a tftp client for a filesystem. And then insulting the author of a tftp client that didn't think it was feasible as having a "lack of vision." Bram is exactly right. The filesystem metaphor does not apply to everything. Filesystem semantics are very different from file transfer semantics.
However, I'd love to see you try to cram this under the BSD VFS layer as an fs driver. So go ahead. I could use the laugh. But don't insult the creator for understanding what his creation was designed to do and designed not to do.
I'd love a photo and if you're e-mailing them out, count me in. You can e-mail me at n8_f at myrealbox.com. I think it would make a nice background on my Mac. : ) Thanks, Nathan
SCO said in yesterday's interview and several other recent interviews that the code is in the Linux kernel. The quote is: I think that is also the basis of the "sue Linus" comment.
Of course that obviously doesn't tell us much and the other questions you raise in regards to that point still need to be answered, but it is the kernel that is affected, not just a user space application.
As I recall, in earlier articles SCO claimed the code had been added to Linux last year. So I don't think this is the smoking gun you think it is. Also, you would have to prove not only that the changes were made a while ago, which is easy, but that SCO knew about them and purposefully did nothing, which is hard. They will say that after finding the code IBM added last fall, they went back and found older examples they had previously been unaware of.
Sorry to be a wet blanket, but I don't think this aspect will have a bearing on the case.
But other people have seen it, right, just under confidentiality agreements. That seems to raise an interesting question: If you have seen the source code and know that SCO is committing fraud and adding code from Linux that wasn't there before, are you legally justified in breaking your confidentiality agreement to blow the whistle? I think ethically and morally you would be compelled to, but legally it might open you up to a suit for breaching your confidentiality agreement.
Anyone have any idea?
This is not how it works. The client uploads to the n clients it gets the best download rates from, where n is the number of uploads allowed. The point being that it is asymmetrical, not symmetrical.
Also, most people have no trouble maxing out the download capacity of asymmetric broadband connections on moderately busy torrents, so it doesn't do much to discourage leechers.
The reason you don't get good downloads when you are firewalled is that by default trackers check for if clients are behind a firewall or NAT and ban those that are. On the few that don't, other clients can't connect to you, meaning you have to initiate all the connections, which doesn't work very well.
Nathan
I think one of the main reasons was simplicity. Converting the binary SHA1 hashes to text and then gzipping them is much more involved than just sticking them in a file.
I really don't see what the problem is. So you can't cat them, big deal! Use a text or hex editor. These aren't meant to be human readable, but it isn't hard to read simple ones.
Nathan
It isn't very hard. I've written one in C/Objective-C that is less than 300 lines (including all of the comments, generous white space, etc., but not the headers). A straight C one wouldn't be too much more.
Bram's Python one is ~170, but then again he doesn't have any comments and doesn't have to deal with memory management, etc. Python is helped by having native hash and list types. But it isn't very hard. Not sure what the parent poster's difficulties are, unless they are implementing all of the data structures themselves. But even then, it is pretty basic (just a lot of lines).
Nathan
I've read the other replies and they aren't quite right.
.torrent file and ONLY a .torrent file (since that is the only valid input). It doesn't bother checking, though. Instead, it tries to read the WHOLE FILE into memory. This is why it chokes and your computer becomes unresponsive: by the time you notice it, your computer is thrashing. Plus, I think during the read call Python doesn't respond to signals. You should still be able to kill -9 it, though (or whatever the windows equivalent is - ending the task from the GUI probably won't cut it). Assuming your OS is robust enough, once it finishes reading the file into memory, it then checks to see if it is a .torrent file. It will then exist gracefully as soon as it realizes it is not. So, to fix this bug, it should at least sanity check the file before trying to read it into memory.
I run into this when I try to restart a download and I command-complete to the file and not the torrent and hit enter too quickly (luckily I run OS X and it survives, although it can slow things down a bit).
The problem is that BT is expecting a
The relevant code is line 107 in download.py.
I've written a Mac OSX client in C/Objective-C that of course doesn't suffer this problem (and is at least twice as fast), which is I am aware of it.
Regarding his use of Python, I would guess because he likes it better than Java. While he knows Java and Python, if you look at his page you'll find most of his code is in Python.
I agree that Java would have been a better choice (for anything non-trivial), but not for your reasons. BT is only a few hundred K at most compressed. I doubt it could have been much smaller in Java. Your download is so large because the Windows version has to include the Python runtime libraries, since Python is not installed by default on Windows. But that isn't Python's fault. And since Windows no longer ships with a Java runtime, that would be an even bigger download AND would have to be downloaded and installed separately by the user, since I don't know of any Windows Java VM vendors that let you bundle their runtime for free.
As far as better platform support, that is also wrong. Python is installed by default on most Unix machines, is freely available on the rest, and is available for Windows. What platforms aren't supported?
No, the reason I would have liked Bram to use Java is for code readability. The Python code is a mess to try to read due to the lack of any typing, no variable declarations, and lots of function pointers (which in Python are indistinguishable from functions). Of course, if there were comments it would help, but with Java I wouldn't need comments (although they never hurt). This was my first exposure to a Python program and there is no way I would ever use it for anything more than a script. Java seems to give the same benefits (garbage collection, object-oriented, portability) and is much easier to maintain.
Yours,
Nathan
It does keep a history of what you have purchased, but you would have to re-purchase your music if you failed to back it up. If your initial download was interrupted, though, you can download it again. See "How to Back Up Purchased Songs" and "About Interrupted Downloads".