Here is an important corollary to KillOrderImportance : when your systemis overloaded, you should always kill processes with ' kill -9 ' .

There are a fair number of sources that will tell you that you shouldalways kill processes with something besides kill -9 , unless theywon't die from lesser measures. In an overloaded situation this isterribly wrong: either the processes don't have a signal handler for thelesser signal, in which case the two are equivalent, or they do have asignal handler,

While BitTorrent doesn't hide , it also doesn'tgo out of its way to give you information. One of the interestingquestions, at least from the perspective of some organizations and thepeople who dislike them, is how much you know about the peers in a givenBitTorrent swarm beyond their IP address. It turns out that the generalanswer is 'not much'.

Without talking to a peer, all you know is that the peer has registeredwith the tracker. You don't know if they

It's struck me that there are two different situations for content-typesniffing in web agents: when the web browser knows that it is requestinga specific sort of thing, and when it can have no expectations aboutwhat it will get. The first situation happens when the browser is doingthings like loading CSS stylesheets or retrieving inlined images; thesecond situation usually happens when the user clicks on a link.

When the browser knows what it is supposed to be getting, it alreadyknows what it's trying

Because someone quoted me , I mightas well explain my earlier quick comment about how I consider the lack of a Debian package for a program to be afairly serious warning sign, and why I specifically picked Debian forthis.

Debian has a huge package selection with a fairly large number of peopledriving it. If a program is still not packaged for Debian, this meansthat either that it can't attract even one Debian developer's interestor that the program has serious issues of some sort; immaturity,

Someone around here recently asked me my opinions on Solaris on x86machines, and in thinking about it I decided I might as well put downmy current thoughts on the whole matter.

First, we're no longer interested in SPARC hardware and thus SPARCSolaris. The hardware is clearly no longer competitive for genericcomputing; it may be competitive in some niche roles, but my area doesn't have any of those niches we needfilled.

(In the long run I feel that a retreat to specialized

There are two parties that could be responsible for determining whattype of content you are getting in a HTTP response, whether the data isHTML or a PDF or a JPEG or so on: the server or the client. The web hasopted to make it determined by the server ,and this is the correct place for a simple reason: consistency .

Imagine a world where the clients determine what the content type is.If there is no standard for how clients determine the content type, theconsistency problems are obvious;

When a web server answers your request for a URL, you get boththe contents of the URL and its type; ie, whether you are gettingHTML, plain text, a PNG image, a PDF, and so on. Specifically, thistype information is returned in the form of a MIME type in the Content-Type: HTTP reply header.

(Some web browsers then sniff the data themselves and second guess theweb server, generally with ruinous results.)

Now, the web server has to get this

One of the problems with the current anti-spam environment is thatthere are not enough disincentives against doing really horriblethings , like spam, virus, and so on notificationautoresponders, or challenge response systems, or your favorite abuse.Practically speaking, people doing these things do not bear any costsfor their actions, or at least none large enough to make them noticeanything wrong.

(In fact there pretty much aren't any disincentives at the moment.There are a few blocklists of places that do bad things

In thinking more about my dislike of smooth scrolling , I think it's useful to distinguish scrollingthrough something from panning through it. The difference is thatpanning operations are a continuous process, whereas scrolling is adiscrete thing that theoretically has a specific size that it's supposedto jump.

Since panning is continuous anyways, panning operations clearly cansmooth 'scroll' without problems; it matches how people think of them tostart with. Scrolling, especially scrolling large amounts, is not likethat so (at least