tangothedog

It could be running as a VM..

The ISP might not have any idea, but your usenet provider does. I'm curious if it's common practice for them to log user activity.

In my opinion, this is an unfortunate side effect of the "growth at all costs" economic policy of China. Money becomes the only thing that matters -- IP, the environment, even the health of citizens is second-class. As China further develops, we will hopefully see attitudes change. I don't believe you see this level of theft/piracy in more mature economies like Singapore or Taiwan (not China, but similar in that they are ethnically majority Chinese).

If the subject interests you, I'd recommend it since I've personally found it difficult to find detailed information about side projects. I purchased it partly for the information, but also to hopefully motivate myself to pursue some projects I've been thinking about. I do feel like $25 is a lot for any book, let alone a relatively short PDF file, but I understand there's a limited market.

It's a common way to describe uptime. It means 99.99% uptime/availability, which works out to under 1 hour of downtime per year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nines_(engineering)

systemtap is another utility in this vein that's worth checking out

http://sourceware.org/systemtap/

Somewhat off-topic, but I'd like an explanation for why startups are requiring facebook in order to sign up for a service? I'd love to try turntable.fm (as well as rolling.fm, and mixapp.com), but I'm not on facebook nor do I ever plan to be.

Is there some advantage to doing this that I'm not seeing? I understand the appeal of a limited beta and exclusivity, but I would think it would be to their advantage to offer multiple ways to sign up.