T100

I was on Bit Torrent about two and a half years ago and the first client I used was the official one. The official client turned out to be a great disappointment. The allocation of disk space is not good and it takes me a long time to kick off before I really get anything on my disk. I have tried several bit torrent clients with the python core, including ABC and burst, which are all based on shadow experiment core. They took a huge amount of resources, though and my super old computer would simply hang with more than sixty connections. Their allocation of memory is not satisfactory either. Then I though, it the inefficient language, python, must be the culprit here. Then I turned to clients whose core are written in other language. There are a few alternatives, Aruzeus, a very famous one is based on Java, BitComet is based on C plus plus and libtorrent also comes with a default client in C plus plus. BitComet pleased me. You can connect to virtually any number of peers you would like to and the core is not so hungry with CPU resources. The bad thing about it is of course that it is not open source, and God knows what the author has put into this piece of software. However, it is the only client that you can use to connect more than 500 peers with download rate of more than 1500KB per second. I run this piece of software on a very old Pentium 2 400MHz machine and there is no lagging or hanging even at this load. So it remains unrivaled as my favorite bit torrent client. For exeem, the new coming p2p software, I think it is not very stable at the moment. Some users also complained that some nodes cannot be connected. Wikpedia has come up with the following criticisms. Point 3 is not fair but I think points 1 and 2 are quite justified and valid.

Japan is the country that fascinates me. I have been to there twice, once to Tokyo, the metropolis home to twenty million people, and once to Kyoto, Osaka, Himeji and Kobe, where the old traditions still remain in the well preserved castles and temples. Tokyo consists of a number of ?districts?, many along the JR Yamanote line: Shibuya, Shinjuku, Roppongi, Central District are all huge sub cities. Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe are kansai cities that are quite different from Tokyo. Kyoto used to be the old capital city and so there are quite a lot of things from the past to see. What amazed me was the transport. Unlike other cities where the historic monuments are quite far away from the Central Business District, in Kyoto, the historic sites are right inside the city. So it is very convenient to get to those palaces and temples simply by taking the underground. Kobe is a port, and so there are quite a lot of exotic buildings, and the city also has great infrastructure. Japan, I think, is one of those countries that you can travel on your own, without even hiring an automobile, because the railway network is so extensive and reliable that I never missed a train during both trips. I am planning to travel to Hokkaido and other more remote cities later this year?

I have zero tolerance for pop ups. They make me switch to Netscape 7.0, which had an integrated pop up killer, more then a year ago. Of course, now IE 6 with SP2 is able to block pop ups too, but the browser is simply too bad for any user now. I hate pop ups because they open too many windows that they get piled up on my task bar. I don?t have any way to close them or I will have to terminate all the processes there. Some pop ups are even embedded with virus. They will pretend to ask you about installing some ActiveX viruses and while you are just too annoyed and click whatever you would to close them, you will mistaken click ?install? on those confirmation alerts. And then, you get infected. That?s why I am now using Mozilla, disabling Java and certain Javascripts and use Norton Internet Security with built-in the ad blocking feature. It sad that the Internet has become such a bad thing?

It should have abolished the death penalty altogether a long time ago. The death penalty is barbaric, no matter whether it is teenagers receiving the punishment or an adult. It should have no place in modern society. The US places itself among countries like North Korea, Iraq, Iran and China by allowing the public to put a man or woman to death. Scientific studies have already shown that the death penalty does not deter potential criminals from killing. So the sole reason for the capital punishment is that of revenge, artfully disguised in a wonderful term called justice. It is no better then the religious fanatics who call their suicidal assassinations a duty to God.

It is a technology to re-sequence your read and write command to the hard disk so that the hard disk reader will not have to search for bits and bits of information across the hard disk but would do it in a more organized way. To use this, you must have a high amount of cache, definitely 8 MB would be the minimum. However, the tests on several magazines have revealed that NCQ does not boost speed significantly. From a test I read, a WD 160GB hard disk without this technology outperforms a 160GB Seagate. Also, on 2.5 inch hard disk, Hitachi is faster then Seagate. So, I think we should wait and see.The following passage is from wikipedia---------------------------------------------------------------Native command queueing is a technology designed to increase performance of SATA hard disks by allowing the disk firmware to internally optimise the order in which read and write commands are executed. This can result in increased performance for workloads where multiple simultaneous read/write requests are outstanding, which occurs most often in server-type applications. Normal desktop applications will show less benefit from NCQ, or potentially a performance drop in some cases due to added overhead.For NCQ to be enabled, it must be supported and turned on in the SATA controller driver and in the hard drive itself. On some Intel chipset-based motherboards, this technology requires the enabling of the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) in the BIOS and for the installation of the Intel Application Accelerator software.NCQ differs from some other forms of command queueing previously available on IDE and SATA in that the command reordering is done on the drive itself. This is most effective since the drive has the most knowledge of its perfomance characteristics and is able to take rotational position into account.

As long as the slaughtering does not induce a lot of pain to the animal, I think it is morally right to the eat animals. Human beings are born to be the tertiary consumer in the food chain, and human beings can do nothing about it. Nature has produced an equilibrium in which human can live harmoniously with other animals, and the predation itself is a natural process of nature. The animals also eat other species and even their own species, and the eating will not cause the other species to become extinct. Human beings just behave naturally in eating meat. Actually, many of the species that are on our dishes everyday would not have survived without human beings helping them to reproduce. This is a deal. Human helps those species to reproduce and colonize the world, and in return, those species fill our gluttony. There is nothing right or wrong with it?

GT4 (GRAN TOURISMO 4) is definitely the most anticipated game of the year. It is also one of the games that ISPs here chose to bundle for sale. I am not very interested in car racing game, and GT4 (GRAN TOURISMO 4) is only one of the many famous car racing games, but I think GT4 (GRAN TOURISMO 4) really has something special that makes it stand out of the others. I think the first best thing about it is the scenery. Unlike other car racing games like NFS (the Need for Speed series), the design of the track is more realistic. The production put a lot of effort trying to make the race track looks real. There are two scenes in GT4 (GRAN TOURISMO 4) that impresses me a lot. One is that of Hong Kong Tsim Sha Tsui. The race track is built on the real Nathan Road and Park Lane Shopping Road at Tsim Sha Tsui with the help of the Tourist Board of Hong Kong. Of course, they trimmed part of the map in the game. But, the neon lights and decorations amazingly resemble those of the real world. The race in Kyoto is also marvelous. I have actually been to that famous little lane that becomes the race track this time. Again, I am impressed by the design there.

Brilliant! The site is very impressive, colorful and well designed. I guess your boyfriend used Dreamweaver for the codes. The built in flashes are also beautiful. One bad thing about the flash is that they take some time to load. You can optimize them for better performance by trimming the animation down a little bit. Another thing I don?t like is the code wrote in tables. Tables are not bad in per se, but upgrading or redesigning the page may be difficult as they are not that customizable. I think a better option is to use CSS (cascading style sheets) and divs tag on the page so that simply by rewriting the CSS, you can have a new skin of the page? I guess your boyfriend is commissioned for the work, right? He deserves good remuneration for the good work?

The games I like are always game that do not need plenty of involvement. Say first person shooting games and first personal shooting games are my favorite. I am still (you may laugh at me) playing Warcraft III (Frozen Throne). Not the campaign, but the online battles and offline battles. It is a good way to pass time, especially when you fighting difficult enemies.

This is interesting? For all open source operating systems, you can hack your codes. Say in linux, you often have to build your core for security and performance reasons. It is therefore not impossible to get a personal version of the operating system. Windows, of course, is another story. Its shell is bound with its GUI, its registry is somewhat of a mystery, and there are a lot of Easter Eggs in it waiting to be discovered? You never know what is inside. If there really is a Bill Gates version, I think it should not have 1) the stupid MSN messenger, 2) the crappy Windows Media Player and 3) the vulnerable Internet Explorer and 4) the malfunctioning Outlook Express.

Notepad is my best partner when storing passwords. I must confess that this is perhaps not a very good way of storing passwords, saving them in clear text in a file. But when you have passwords for emails, and all sort of accounts, and you do not want to use the same password for all the accounts, you must do this as a comprise. For passwords that are not some important, say passwords for free accounts at newspapers and magazines, I will simply let my browser remember it. For more important passwords, I will save it in a txt file, copy the file to both hard disks so that if one fails, the passwords are still recoverable. For passwords for FTP sites, I will simply save it on my FTP client so that I can export it to my clients on other operating systems without having to type them all again.

MSN search, like many failed products of M$, is more a propaganda then a useful tool. M$ has many of these failed products, ActiveX, which imitates Java, MSN messenger, which imitates ICQ, Space, which is a copy of Xanga, Blogger and sites alike, C#, a plagiary of C++, Windows media lossless, which imitates Apple Lossless, APE and FLAC. I don?t really see how such a company can earn respect from other when all its job is to find out something in the market, make something worse than it and force other to use it by bundling it with its rubbish OS (for example, Windows media player, Java Virtual Machine, which was forced to be taken away after the lawsult, MSN messenger) until somebody sues it? MSN search is not bundled with the OS, at least for the moment. I am glad that I have alternatives, which are superior to it...

Security Focus estimated that around one third of internet traffic went to p2p file sharing. And I estimate that about 70% goes to large files, which include DivX or Xvid files, DVD ISO and etc. And I think half of those files are porn movies. The traffic is really appalling. So it is really a good question to ask: What do you use the Internet for. And think the frankest answer is downloading. I think most of us have gone through various states being online. From downloading pics, to mp3 and then to software and movies. From 10MB per day to 10GB per day. I was once in the flat of my friend. I immediately spotted out the piles of CD-R there. There are really many people living more or less the same life around the world. We are downloading people.

There are several companies providing 1000MB mailbox, including Gmail, Redriff and etc. I think Gmail is the best. The server is stable, upload speed is decent and there is built in spam protection. However, Gmail is strict about the file type that you can upload. Say, you cannot send an mp3 to your friend or transfer an mdb to somewhere else. You cannot view the raw header of the emails like with some other servers. Its popularity, though, gives a number of advantages. You may have friends who are using Gmail now so the exchange of emails become incredibly fast. You may also use 3rd party programs like GFS and bunker to use Gmail as a network drive. Gmail has not approved such use of their service though and you risk having your account and storage deleted? Also, 10 MB of attachment is still too little for us. A pdf file are often greater then 10MB?

I have tried a lot of downloading managers, like Flashget, Net Transport, Getright and Internet Download Manager. Net Transport, I think, is the best. But since 1.87, it is no longer free in the strict sense. There are functions that you have to pay for and there is ad in the free version. Flashget contains some tricky phone back protection since 1.60, which I think is the worst thing they add to the software. The software performs not as well as Net Transport when it comes to downloading rms, rmvbs and asf on mms or rtsp. Getright is the worst. There are tons of restrictions posed on the client (say a connection limit) which I think is totally unacceptable. Internet Download Manager claims that its engine is unique, but actually I don?t think it outperforms other downloading manager, especially, when it is hindered by a 16 connection limit. Therefore, I think the old version of Net Transport is the best.

I have a Hitachi 80GB harddisk and a Western Digital 160GB harddisk, a total of 240GB. But I have 4 operating systems running on my computer, which include 3 versions of XP in different languages and a Linux (Fedora 2). I also have 2 encyclopedias on my harddisk. So space is really scarce. Doom 3 takes 3GB+, C&C with expansion set takes another 4 GB and Prince of Persia takes 2 GB, Simcity is 3GB+. Also, I have lots of movies waiting to be burnt. A DivX or Xvid rip will take 700MB to 1400MB depending on the length of the movie. A DVDISO takes about 4.4GB of space. You may easily get 10 GB per day from the Internet. That?s why 240 GB isn?t really enough for the modern world. If you are considering buying a harddisk, consider getting two 160GB harddisk.

The Asian language support of OpenOffice still needs improvement. But for European users, I think OpenOffice is the best substitute for M$ Office. OpenOffice even comes with integrated pdf maker, which means that you don?t even have to pay for Acrobat. And there is a swf generated, also saving you money for Flash. OpenOffice has another advantage: It is compact. Unlike the gigantic M$ Office, it can be run on older computers. Actually, I don?t really see why some businesses still let M$ suck their revenue. People are already using the LAMP system, Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP gives the best server platform in a low cost. It is more stable and more efficient than M$ server 2003, so why spend money to buy something of an inferior quality? Perhaps so businesses are too lazy to adapt to a new platform. But their laziness costs them money, and they will be urged to change soon?

The scene has been around even before the Internet. They managed to hunt down several prominent groups like razor 1911 but they failed to rip it out totally. New groups keep coming and new things like DivX Rip, CHM ebooks and even TV shows rips and DVDISOs are emerging as the new force of the scene. They will never manage to eradicate it when the people engaging in such sharing activities are not motivated by money, but just that they want to share. Take FTP as an example. Some once forecast that after BT, there will be not use for FTP for sharing. But actually, FTP is getting more and more popular as people with VDSL connection are now able to build a Serv-U FTP server with decent upload speed. Such leagues are gaining popularity and it is more ?discreet? then P2P programs like BT. I don?t really think piracy will hurt business because if people are not able to get certain mp3s, they won?t buy it either, for Mp3s are not essential for life?

Cable is usually shared, that is, you will get high bandwidth in non peak hours while suffering from congestion in peak hours. It also depends on your neighbors, say if 10 neighbors from the same network BitTorrent a lot, then you won?t have much left to use. One great thing about cable is that upload bandwidth is usually high; you can get good result with BT sometimes. ADSL and VDSL are similar. Upload bandwidth is low but download speed is more stable. Cable is usually on fixed IP where DSL usually operates on PPPoE or DHCP. Fixed IP is good if you host a website, but bad for security reasons. I would suggest getting VDSL if your budget allows, or even a CAT5 connection.

Wordpress is the best. I have been using it for half a year now and the script is quite stable. There are also a lot of plug-ins that you can install and plenty of styles available. There is some room for improvement though, say, there is no built in backup function and you have to get a host which supports phpmyadmin. Also there is no abstraction layer like phpBB, so you have to stick to MySQL but not other database. The script is not as compact as some other GNU blogging scripts but the built in functions are really good.

It is ?yet another IM? with a built in Internet Phone option. The Instant Messenger part is free, but you can buy credits from the company to get Internet Phone and IDD. There is also a WebCam function, but it does not have any apparent edge over other options like YahooIM and MSN. The best thing is: it is almost cross platform. I say almost, because I don?t think Linux is supported as the moment. It can be run in a Pocket PC, but not in a Palm, I think. It is not that attractive as people say.

80 GB of harddisk, I would say, is not really enough for the modern days. I have a Hitachi 80GB plus a WD 160GB, a total of 240GB but still find it not enough. I have to burn every day in order to get rid of all the files in them. 80GB harddisk is not the best option on the market. I think 160GB will be the best buy now. I also notice that you are putting 2 pieces of RAM of different clocks together. This will reduce the speed of the higher, not a very good thing to do?

I have heard that Apple's product has some copyright protection feature. If there really is, then I think I will not bother to look at it. I know Sony?s net MD recorders have a similar copyright protection feature, that?s why I do not buy Sony?s MD. Mp3 player with 20Gb something storage is very common on the market. Creative, Toshiba and other Korean brands offer similar feature. Apple?s product is not particularly attractive.

cgi-bin is a default folder with execute privileges so that you can put perl scripts, Unix sh scripts and probably ruby scripts into it and run. Of course you can run some of the scripts in other folder if the host allows. But cgi-bin is a legacy thing that most of the scripts will probably run there. You may not like the /cgi-bin/ folder in your address, so some hosts offer an option for you to include cgi as a subdomain. Also, the host has to have perl mod and things ready.

I like animes whose inteneded audience is small children. Digi Charat is my favorite. Puchiko is the most cute character I know. Azu Manga Daiho is also a good one, focusing on life of high school students. Some people above mentioned Love Hina, which I think is quite good too. Miyazaki's films are all classic, Castle in the Sky is of course the best, but Mimi wo Zumaseba and Zen to Chihiro are more mature...