Turns out the seedbox max upload speed is 11MB/s which appears to have only lasted 2-3 hours before dying down.

This is how much I had uploaded for Ubuntu 11.10 and elementary OS over the course of the previous 2 months:

At this current moment I have uploaded 137GB of Ubuntu 12.04 AMD64 in 4 days vs Ubuntu 11.10 and ElementaryOS combined with 101GB over the previous 2 months.

In terms of raw speed:

Which continued for around 3 hours before dying down:

You can see the previous days efforts and it’s not as if I’ve only got 1-2 torrents on there, there’s 130 torrents in total, quite a few distro’s being seeded and it’s nothing compared to what happened on release day, I can only imagine the type of bandwidth ubuntu.com must have been pumping out when it wasn’t down

I plan on seeding these for the next 5 years, and I’m slowly adding Xubuntu and Lubuntu on there as well

All in all was good fun, oh and ubuntu 12.04 is going quite swell

This is exactly the opposite of what linux is about, linux is fork or die! take someones software and make it better, make it worse, do what you want with it! Open Source baby!

Several points:

1) Gnome 3.4 is not on par with Mac OS X, this can be refuted by simply asking any apple fan.

2) You’re not trying to troll, but you then make several absurd points with highly emotional language, we call that trolling in my part of the world.

3) Fragmenting the linux userbase? This is hilarious given how fragmented linux is by nature, this is a good thing, choice is a good thing, but if we look at the desktop environment situation before Unity there was KDE, Gnome, XFCE, LXDE, Fluxbox, and that’s not including command line based window managers like awesome and icewm.

4) He claims the ‘linux brand’ has been tarnished by Unity, maybe he forgot that linux has no brand on the desktop, it’s a 1% market share failure.

5) He claims Ubuntu is getting slower and more useless every day, here’s a quick solution, try ubuntu 12.04…

6) I dare you to find one designer who thinks Gnome 3.4 is on par with Mac OS X :hah:

7) You don’t have a billion dollars

In other news, hardcore linux users discover there are other distro’s besides ubuntu that have horrible desktop environments.

What’s the difference between a pop up and those annoying in page pop ups? Nothing. They both suck and NO I won’t like your stupid facebook page.

apt-get install xserver-xorg-core gdm3 gnome-core

And you have yourself a nice minimal desktop, great for use on servers.

 
THE party line among scientists – believers and non-believers alike – is that science and religion are what Stephen Jay Gould called “non-overlapping magisteria”. In 1998 the US National Academy of Sciences issued a statement asserting “Science can say nothing about the supernatural. Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral.”

Yet according to a survey the same year, 93 per cent of the members of the academy do not believe in a personal god.

Since about the same percentage of all US citizens say they do believe in a personal god, it makes one wonder what, if not their science, leads the elite of US scientists to differ so dramatically from the general population.

A majority of scientists at all levels do not believe in any god. Yet most are unwilling to challenge the religious beliefs of others. I am a physicist who, along with others dubbed the New Atheists, is willing to challenge religious belief. The gods worshipped by billions either exist or they do not. And those gods, if they exist, must have observable consequences. Thus, the question of their existence is a legitimate scientific issue that has profound import to humanity.

We can consider the existence of God to be a scientific hypothesis and look for the empirical evidence that would follow. Many of the attributes associated with the Judaic-Christian-Islamic God have specific consequences that can be tested empirically. Such a God is supposed to play a central role in the operation of the universe and the lives of humans. As a result, evidence for him should be readily detectable by scientific means.

If a properly controlled experiment were to come up with an observation that cannot be explained by natural means, then science would have to take seriously the possibility of a world beyond matter.

Such experiments have been attempted. Scientists have empirically tested the efficacy of intercessory prayer – prayers said on behalf of others. These studies, in principle, could have shown scientifically that some god exists. Had they found conclusively, in a double-blind placebo-controlled trial, that intercessory prayers heal the sick, it would have been difficult to find a natural explanation. They did not.

Similar tests have been done on near-death experiences. Some people having an NDE during surgery have reported floating above the operating table and watching everything going on below. Whether this is a real experience or a hallucination can be tested easily by placing a secret message on a high shelf out of sight of the patient and the hospital staff. This has been tried, and no one reporting an NDE has yet to read the message.

Just as science can design experiments to test the existence of God, it can also seek evidence against a god’s existence in the world around us. Here we must be clear that we are not talking about evidence against any and all conceivable gods. For example, a deist god that creates the universe and then just leaves it alone would be very hard to falsify. But no one worships a god who does nothing.

If God is the intelligent designer of life on Earth, then we should find evidence for intelligence in observations of the structure of life. We do not. The Intelligent Design movement failed in its effort to prove that the complexity found in some biological systems is irreducible and cannot be explained within Darwinian evolution. Life on Earth looks just as it should look if it arose by natural selection.

Most religions claim that humans possess immaterial souls that control much of our mental processing. If that were true, we should be able to observe mentally induced phenomena that are independent of brain chemistry. We do not.

If God is the source of morality, then we should find evidence for a supernatural origin in human behaviour. We do not. People of faith behave on average no better, and in some cases behave worse, than people of no faith. History shows that the moral and ethical guides that most of us live by did not originate with the monotheistic religions, as proponents of those religions would have us believe. Instead, moral behaviour appears to have evolved socially.

Again, if God answers prayers, we should see miraculous effects of prayer. With millions of prayers having been said every day for thousands of years, we would expect some to have been answered by now in a verifiable way. They have not.

If God has revealed truths to humanity, then these truths should be testable. Over the millennia many people have reported religious or mystical experiences in which they have communicated with one god or another. By now, we should have seen some confirming evidence for this, such as a verifiable fact that could not have been in the person’s head unless it was revealed to them. We have not.

If God is the creator of the universe, then we should find evidence for that in astronomy and physics. We do not. The origin of our universe required no miracles. Furthermore, modern cosmology suggests an eternal “multiverse” in which many other universes come and go.

If humans are a special creation of God, then the universe should be congenial to human life. It is not. Theists claim that the parameters of the universe are fine-tuned for human life. They are not. The universe is not fine-tuned for us. We are fine-tuned to the universe. After evaluating all the evidence, we can conclude that the universe and life look exactly as they would be expected to look if there were no God.

Finally, I would like to comment on the folly of faith. When faith rules over facts, magical thinking becomes deeply ingrained and warps all areas of life. It produces a frame of mind in which concepts are formulated with deep passion but without the slightest attention paid to the evidence. Nowhere is this more evident than in the US today, where Christians who seek to convert the nation into a theocracy dominate the Republican party. Blind faith is no way to run a world.

Sound Card: ASUS Xonar Essence STX
Headphones: Grado MS-2
Speakers: AudioEngine A5+

Mouse: Coolermaster CM Storm
Mousepad: Razer Goliathus Control
Keyboard: Ducky Shine  9008S

(Soon) Monitor: Dell 30″
Just got my Ducky Shine 9008S the other day, mechanical keyboards are great however the most frustrating thing is the volume control.

I’ve gone from a logitech g15 v1 which had this awesome volume dial/knob, to the microsoft digital multimedia keyboard which had this with a + and – volume buttons in the top left, to a ducky shine which requires both the Fn key (which is in the middle right) held down at the same time as pressing the F2 or F3 key (which is in the top left), and you can’t hold the button down, have to press F2 or F3 every time for a certain % of the volume to go down or up,  this is a massive step backwards that actually bugs the crap out of me because I keep trying to do it with one hand (which I can’t do because my fingers aren’t long enough, but if I just stretch a little bit furtttheeerrr. nope still can’t do it… :/ ).

If audioengine had included this instead of the craptastic remote the problem wouldn’t be so bad, but when I’m switching between my headphones and speakers and listening to audio in different programs with different volume levels, for example in VLC music is loud as there’s no EQ, in Audacious music is soft as the EQ lowers the volume which can mean controlling volume is the difference between my ears bleeding and well… not bleeding… so I need a keyboard with a dial or at worst a quick one button press, really anything besides Fn + F2/F3.

And I think I just found the solution: The Griffin Powermate!

Ordered, will see how it goes, will write up on my experience with it on linux.

I seem to be able to read through stuff quickly, and can take in the big picture. (mcdonaldization is about speed/predictability/sameness in order to mass produce a product, ERD tables help establish relationships between objects and can be used to help plan out a database) but I fail to take in all the little things, like the specifics of what the author who first coined the term “disneyfication” meant by the word, or what six things help to create an ERD table.

So when the exam came around instead of getting a ‘fail’ I see myself getting a ‘you studied for weeks on end and failed to take in any of it, good job’.

So I’m not really happy with the end result, especially since it cost me a lot of money… but as per a certain song I listen to:

I’ve been taught to get the fuck up
To dust myself off, and to go it again

Speaker: MOXIE MARLINSPIKE

In the early 90′s, at the dawn of the World Wide Web, some engineers at Netscape developed a protocol for making secure HTTP requests, and what they came up with was called SSL. Given the relatively scarce body of knowledge concerning secure protocols at the time, as well the intense pressure that everyone at Netscape was working under, their efforts can only be seen as incredibly heroic. But while it’s amazing that SSL has endured for as long as it has, some parts of it — particularly those concerning Certificate Authorities — have always caused some friction, and have more recently started to cause real problems.

This talk will provide an in-depth examination of the current problems with authenticity in SSL, discuss some of the recent high-profile SSL infrastructure attacks in detail, and cover some potential strategies for the future. It will conclude with a software release that aims to definitively fix the disintegrating trust relationships at the core of this fundamental protocol.

For more information or download the video visit:http://bit.ly/BlackHat_USA_2011_information

Great watch!

#1: Can you provide a simple overview of IPv6 and the differences between it and IPv4?

(Answer by ARIN)

Internet Protocol is a set of technical rules that define how computers communicate over a network. There are currently two versions: IP version 4 (IPv4) and IP version 6 (IPv6).

IPv4 was the first version of Internet Protocol to be widely used and still accounts for most of today’s Internet traffic. There are just over 4 billion IPv4 addresses. While that is a lot of IP addresses, it is not enough to last forever.

IPv6 is a newer numbering system to replace IPv4. It was deployed in 1999 and provides far more IP addresses, which should meet the need well into the future.

The major difference between IPv4 and IPv6 is the number of IP addresses. Although there are slightly more than 4 billion IPv4 addresses, there are more than 16 billion-billion IPv6 addresses.

#2: IPv4 and IPv6 coexistence — what does that mean?

(Answer by ARIN)

The technical functioning of the Internet remains the same in both versions and it is likely that both versions will continue to operate simultaneously on networks well into the future. To date, most networks that use IPv6 support both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in their networks.

It is important for all organizations to consider the adoption of IPv6 for their Internet services over the next couple of years, but it is also important to know that IPv4 is not going away. IPv4 and IPv6 will coexist on the Internet for many years. Although it is necessary to make certain services like Web sites and e-mail available over the IPv6 network, it is not necessary to replace the already deployed IPv4 infrastructure. The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 will happen over the course of many years, with both protocols working together on the Internet. Much of the IPv4 deployed infrastructure may continue to work on the Internet for years to come.

#3: What will happen with older machines? What devices support IPv6? What Microsoft operating systems support IPv6?

(Answer by Command Information)

It is very difficult to generalize answers for questions like this. By older machines, I would assume we are talking about desktop machines. Some level of IPv6 support can be found (not necessarily through Microsoft) for all Windows systems from 95 through Vista, including Windows NT. However, the level of support will vary greatly. It should be noted that Windows XP, Vista, and Mobile all ship capable of running IPv6. Vista and Windows Mobile default to having IPv6 turned on, but the user has to turn it on in XP. As for what devices support IPv6 — the device world is large; check with your device vendor for details.

#4: What about having IPv6 perimeter IP addresses and IPv4 IP addresses on the internal network?

(Answer by ARIN)

ARIN asks organizations to consider “dual-stacking” IPv4 and IPv6 so they can continue to communicate with IPv4 portions of the Internet, yet be able to communicate with the new and soon-to-expand IPv6 portions. ARIN advises organizations to begin by deciding what makes their routers, DNS, Web servers, and mail servers compatible with IPv6.

The level of effort to make Web site, e-mail, and other communication services available via IPv6 will be different for each organization. It will depend greatly on how the network is set up and what services are deployed. Here are some examples.

• Some business entities host and manage their own Web sites and e-mail services at their own facilities. These companies will need to update the public-facing portion of their networks and servers so they are dual-stacked. This involves work at their own facility and coordinating with their service provider(s) to ensure some form of IPv6 connectivity is available.
• Some business entities use a service provider or contractor to host and manage their Web sites and e-mail services. These companies will need to contact their service provider(s) or contractor(s) and state their requirement that their services be available over both IPv4 and IPv6.
• Some business entities are Internet service providers themselves. These companies will need to update their infrastructure so that it includes connectivity to the Internet using IPv6.
• Individual users may not have Web sites of their own, but they do visit other sites and communicate via e-mail over the Internet. Individual users will rely on their ISPs to ensure proper updates have been made so they can still see and communicate with the entire Internet, including both IPv4 and IPv6.

Organizations may also establish protocol translation services for their network, allowing clients using one version of the protocol to interact with content on the Internet using the other version.

#5: How does IPv6 addressing work? Explain IPv6 IP address shorthand.

(Answer by Command Information)

In general, an IPv6 address is made up of eight 4-character hexadecimal chunks, each separated by a colon. For example, 2001:0db8:0049:0000:ab00:0000:0000:0102 is a full IPv6 address. The first four chunks (64 bits) of the address identify the network portion of the address, referred to as the “network prefix.” Because IPv6 addresses are hierarchical, the network prefix identifies the organization, service provider, and other elements of distribution. The last four chunks (64 bits) compose the interface ID, a unique identifier that is often created using a device’s MAC address.

Because a full address as shown above can be cumbersome, addresses can be compressed via two easy steps. First, all leading zeros within a given chunk can be eliminated. For the above address this would reduce the address to 2001:db8:49:0:ab00:0:0:102. Additionally, once per address (and only once; otherwise, you’d risk ambiguous addresses), any number of consecutive, all-zero chunks can be replaced by a double colon, making the most compressed form of the above address 2001:db8:49:0:ab00::102.

#6: Do IPv6-ready firewalls actually work?

(Answer by Command Information)

Yes, there are IPv6-capable firewalls, and they work just like any other firewall. The key when evaluating a firewall for compatibility is to make note of who is saying the device is capable. The vendor can say its device is IPv6 compatible, but what “compatible” means is up to the vendor to say. “IPv6 Ready” is a standard set forth by the IPv6 Forum and offers vendors a chance for their devices (of all kinds, not just firewalls) to be tested and certified to either silver or gold standards.

The Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) offers a more stringent testing and certification. NIST will offer a certification in the future, but does not actually have testing laboratories available at this point. Whenever we talk about firewalls, though, it goes without saying that whatever the performance of the device, unless the rules it operates under are sound, the device is not sound.

#7: Will common networking tools such as Ping work with IPv6?

(Answer by Command Information)

Yes. Depending on your platform, some might be slightly renamed (and/or protocol specific), such as “ping6,” but the essential, everyday, screwdriver/hammer-type tools like ping, traceroute, and telnet are present for IPv6.

#8: How does DHCPv6 work? How is it different from DHCPv4?

(Answer by Command Information)

Stateless Auto Configuration was originally designed to eliminate the need for DHCP in IPv6, and is in fact the default address assignment method in almost all host operating systems. However, some enterprises will feel the need to control their address allotments more tightly, and DHCPv6 was developed for this reason. Stateful DHCPv6 works, from a functional standpoint, very similarly to its v4 counterpart. The function of the protocol is to provide addressing and other useful information, such as the address of a DNS server. From an operation point of view, DHCP does have some differences, such as the use of multicast instead of broadcast and the ability to assign multiple addresses to a client. DHCPv6 also has two other modes of operation in addition to Stateful – Stateless and Prefix Delegation.

#9: How does DNSv6 work? How is it different from DNSv4?

(Answer by Command Information)

DNS (there is no “DNSv6″ protocol) continues to operate as the default, Internet-wide name resolution service — simply with a new record type and a new transport option. The new record type is AAAA (referred to a “quad A”), and the new transport — of course — is IPv6. From a logistics standpoint, DNS works just like it always has. If a host supports only IPv4, it works as it always has — asking for A records. If a host supports IPv6 only, it asks for AAAA records only. If a host supports both (and believes it has both transports available), it asks for both.

#10: How are packets fragmented in IPv6 and how does that compare to IPv4?

(Answer by Command Information)

Fragmentation has been completely rethought in IPv6. When different networks were joined together in the dawning of the Internet, the job of fragmentation was given to the entry points (routers) that connected different networks or segments. Since some had smaller maximum transmission units (MTUs) than others, it made sense that they be able to break the packets down when they reached the entry points, because network reliability and throughput were at a premium. In IPv6, it is the role of the sending node to handle fragmentation. Because fragmentation is done by the sending node and not in transit, load on routers is reduced and they can return to the job they were built for — passing packets to the next hop.

#11: What really happens to my company Internet access if it or my ISP network doesn’t transition in time?

(Answer by ARIN)

Without a dual-stacked network or deployed protocol translation services, an individual user gaining Internet access for the first time from an IPv6-only ISP may not be able to access the Web sites or mail servers for organizations that operate IPv4-only networks.

There are implications to not adopting IPv6. These implications become evident as wide-scale deployment of IPv6 accelerates. Not adopting IPv6 may cause the following types of issues for the various types of Internet users.

• Individual Users: Individual users may not be able to view Web sites and communicate with certain destinations. Many individuals use the Internet to communicate with distant friends and family, research medical issues, and participate in group discussions among other things.
• Enterprise Organizations: Enterprise organizations and corporations may not be able to communicate with certain critical government resources, clients, and potential customers. E-mail is a critical form of communication for most enterprise organizations today and their Web sites are vitally important resources for them to communicate with the public.
• Governments: Governments may lose their ability to see and communicate with the “whole Internet.” Access to information is critical for governments. There also may be an inability for citizens and other Internet users to access information about the government and communicate over the Internet with government agencies.
• Service Providers: Organizations that provide services over the Internet may experience customer and/or revenue losses if they do not update their offerings to include IPv6. Customers will expect to be able to communicate with everyone else on the Internet and may seek out other ways to do that if their current service provider is not capable.

#12: Is there some kind of a timeline for ISPs and backbone networks to implement IPv6 if it’s not already in place? When do I need to start the change over process?

(Answer by ARIN)

Within the next few years, once the regional Internet registries (RIRs) run out of large blocks of IPv4 address space, organizations that require larger contiguous blocks of address space will be able to receive them only in IPv6. Contiguous blocks of IP address space are necessary for activities like building out new large networks and adding new customers to existing Internet service providers’ networks.

Even organizations that have enough IPv4 address space and continue to operate their IPv4 networks will still need to implement IPv6 on their networks. Today, some people are voluntarily attempting to reach mail and Web servers via IPv6 connections to the Internet. Once the RIRs have no large blocks of IPv4 address space remaining and start allocating IPv6-only blocks to ISPs and other large networks, some people will have to use IPv6 to reach the Internet.

Therefore, any organization that has a Web site and communicates via e-mail will need to take steps to ensure those services are visible over both the IPv4 and IPv6 networks. The IPv4 network will allow continued communications with the legacy Internet, and the IPv6 network will allow Web site and e-mail communications to be visible for individuals connecting to the Internet using IPv6 only. When services are available over both IPv4 and IPv6, it’s referred to as “dual-stacked.”

The decision of when to make a network IPv6 capable is up to each organization, but every effort should be employed to begin planning and preparing for the transition as soon as possible.

As the free pool of available IPv4 addresses diminishes over the next couple of years, Internet service providers will begin to deploy services to customers using IPv6 only. When this occurs, there will be an IPv6-only portion of the Internet that begins to grow. For mutual communications to occur between an organization’s Web site, e-mail, and other communication services and individuals who are part of this IPv6- only portion of the Internet, the organization will need to first make services IPv6 capable.

It is not possible to accurately predict the exact rate at which the Internet will continue to grow, and even less possible to predict what portion of that growth will be IPv6 only. It is possible to imagine, though, that Internet growth will continue at a rapid rate. And with that rapid growth will come many individuals who are connected to the Internet using IPv6. Within one year past the point of IPv4 free pool depletion and wide-scale IPv6 deployment, perhaps 2% of users will be on the IPv6-only portion of the Internet. After two years, maybe 4%. After five years, a much larger percentage. Each organization will have to decide when it is time to adopt IPv6. If it decides it must be ready to communicate with the IPv6-only portion of the Internet before it begins to grow, the time to act is now.

Source: By Michael Kassner, http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10things/10-answers-to-your-questions-about-ipv6/443?tag=discussion-asset-thread