Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: P2P, OS X, Blinkenlights
The difference between theory and practice ... Paul Harrison writes: "I see your theoretical discussion of a scalable gnutella, and raise you a working, open source implementaion! Details in this linux.conf.au talk."
I was in Berkeley at a party, and then things got hazy. In response to the recent story on fixing the UNIX configuration mess, jbloggs writes: "OS X is not on top of NetBSD, but rather is a BSD compatibility layer on top of a Mach kernel. Its closest BSD-lite would be FreeBSD, which is used as a reference platform."
The problem with unstated motivations. Reader app writes "Tim O'Reilly responds to the BountyQuest piece on Salon and featued here. Tim makes some interesting points and clarifications -- especially where he refers to theodp as a crank."
You can't watch, and neither can they. UberOogie writes: "Who didn't see this coming? The MPA shut down Movie 88 today. What should be noted by everyone is that they took no legal action: they just went to the ISP, HiNet, and got them to shut off the pipe. (Movie88 was legal through a loophole in Tiawan copyright law.) So much for process, even in Tiawan. Movie 88 vows to find another provider."
I hope they use the time to reconsider. Cynical_Dude writes: "David Cohen, one of the producers of Futurama, was interviewed on Cinescape. He says that Futurama is not really cancelled, but will run for another year or so ... at least that's how many episodes they've got more or less ready now. FOX hasn't ordered any additional episodes, but Cohen asks fans to "write those letters [...] in physical form, not email" to the FOX executives."
And in other TV News, Glitch Tybalt writes: "Working for Hot Topic has its benefits. We recieved an e-mail saying that Invader Zim will not be cancelled after all. It seems that it was getting no ratings whatsoever, because they kept changing the time slot for it. Once they had decided to cancell it, they left it in one slot to finish playing the remaining episodes out. Then, since everyone could figure out when it was on, it got great reviews. (plus, the Schweet Schwag has started selling like crazy)the Invader Zim petition must have been pretty convincing as well. I guess one of them stopped to read it before wiping his ass. Maybe there's hope for a megaconglomo like Nikelodeon after all..."
Won't someone start making money with unmetered wireless? tabbser writes: "According to Aerie networks, the folks that bought bankrupt Ricochet (www.richochet.com) tests are being conducted in Denver, CO with the support of the City and county of Denver's Office of information technology. Ricochet will test and evaluate the network as part of an initial step to reactivating the service. The full story can be found on Ricochet's web site news room at http://www.ricochet.com. Go Aerie!" Aerie announced this a while ago, but in these uncertain times it's nice to see it actually happening.
Ashes to ashes, little blinking lights likewise. spike666 writes: "Blinkenlights.de is coming to an end! The Blinkenlights project by the Chaos Computer Club will be ending its run February 23, 2002. It was exposed to /. back here They are having a big party, and we're all invited. One last chance for Taco to embarrass Kathleen ..."
I'm from Taiwan, and have been to many Asian countries. Corruption is rampant -- Taiwan is relatively good compared to places like China, Thailand and Vietnam, but even so, if you pay the right authorities the right amount of money, you can pretty much skirt nearly any sort of law.
I wouldn't be surprised if the MPAA paid the ISP some "money" to do so...
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
In case you didn't know, FOX is planning to pull the plug in it. Futurama is pretty good, but nothing compares to Family Guy!
http://www.damnyouall.net/savefamilyguy/
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Even though they may have a case, I just don't like the fact that some major corporation can shut down your website based solely on their word.
In my opinion, this is something only a court should be able to order.
Movie88 had posed an unexpected threat to studios' own video-on-demand services such as Movielink and Movies.com, which are still months away from commercial service.
The Taiwanese site was run on a video-store model, allowing people to "rent" access to movies for three days in return for a payment of just $1. The movies, which were streamed to a computer in RealNetworks' video format, could not easily be saved to a hard drive or downloaded.
So how is Movie88 a pirate site if it attempts to prevent downloading of the videos? (Yes, I know Real Video can be downloaded with some utilities, but then again, you could copy rental video tapes/DVDs with the right hardware too)
How is it different in concept from any video store for that matter?
And most importantly, how is it different than the movie studios getting into the act, except for where the money goes? (Do video stores like Blockbuster have to pay royalties to movie studios? Curious...)
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
If they "took no legal action", does that mean everything they did was illegal?
Sorry, it had to be said.
What I want to know is why we haven't seen Family Guy on DVD here in the U.S.? The U.K. has a Season 1 DVD, as well as a Futurama DVD. They even have an announcement for the Simpsons, Season 2 DVD.
Looks like I'm going to have to invest in a region-free DVD player.
Bestill my beating heart!
sulli
RTFJ.
I wonder if we'll start seeing ISPs advertising rates to shut down customers:
- Turn off a Normal Account $2000
- Turn off a Priority Account $4000
- Turn off High Bandwith Account $50000
You will be informed in 10 days whether the account has outbid you to re-enable service...Sounds kind of like something out of a Gibson novel.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Quite seriously. HBO needs something animated to balance all that real-life action stuff, :-), and Futurama isn't a bad choice. Could give the show a little more edge, and supply many more comedy possibilities (and likely a little cartoon nudity), plus HBO won't get hysterical at episodes like "Kwanzabot" and prevent their airing.
David Cohen, you out there? Shop that show around.
1.CD Disc Recording Peripherals: Expanded support for QPS, EZQuest, LaCie, Yamaha, MCE Technologies and Sony devices
2.Image Capture and iPhoto: Improved support for several digital camera models from Canon, Kodak and Sony
3.DVD Playback on external VGA displays on PowerBook G4
4.PowerBook video mirroring will be on by default when connecting to a new display
5.Improvements for iTunes when the full screen visualizer is used
6.Login authentication support for LDAP and Active Directory services
7.OpenSSH version 3.0.2p1
8.WebDAV support for Digest authentication
9.Mail includes support for SSL encryption
Get it via Software Update. If you're a bit hesistant, might want to wait for what xlr8yourmac.com says. And MacsOnly does a variety of speed tests for every version released. I'm sure they'll put up new benchmarks shortly.
A lot of people seem to be confused about this.
Just because you have a region-free DVD player doesn't mean you can actually watch the movies you buy. If it's sold in the UK, chances are it's in PAL format. You can't watch that format on your NTSC TV, sorry.
You either have to get a TV that can play both or you get a converter. Take your pick, and neither are cheap.
If I'm wrong about this, feel free to tell me. But from the research I've done, this is true.
I wish it weren't.. then I could get Neverwhere on DVD and be able to watch it...
"All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening."
- Alexandar Woolcot
I think it's really funny that in an article about intellectual property and prior art Tim O'Reilly cites Morgan's Tarot as the origination of the quote "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger." All good geeks know that's from J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings. Woops!
Oh, I dunno about that. The CowboyMeal Buffet Luncheon hour is pretty entertaining. That foodfight that broke out between him and CmdrTaco was an uproar!
What I want to see is the excellent Clerks! cartoon continued. I have the 2 dvd set, it's all classic, and another victim of corporate 'policy'. The Tick (live action) can rot in hell, it was a stupid idea to begin with. Some things just aren't meant to be live action. Could you imagine the horror of Speed Racer live action? Or Garfield?
And I've learned some great things by being willing to listen to the target.
TheoDP briefly laid out his complaint in his own words in a Usenet Posting
At the very least, this makes me dubious about the claim by O'Reilly that TheoDP wouldn't explain the relevance of his material.
Hmm, let's compare, O'Reilly claims, regarding TheoDP:
Now let's look at a news report published at the time : (I've added emphasis below) How interesting. I assume TheoDP is Ted Conway.Pending further evidence. I'm inclined to side with TheoDP. It looks like the power of journalism again. Throw the mud, make the smear, virtually no-one will ever check the evidence, and the target can't fight back. Yes, my experiences do color my view here.
The previous Slashdot article was about n-dimensional cube or torus topologies. Paul Harrison's "Circle" network (slashdotted - Google cache) is...wait for it...a simple circle. Sort of like Chord, it seems, but less sophisticated. It's not at all clear why a reasonable person would expect Circle to scale particularly well, especially in an environment with high node turnover (lots of potentially circle-breaking join/leave operations).
There's nothing wrong with Circle. It just doesn't seem to meet the promise of being a fully functional network that scales better than Gnutella.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Amen about the clerks, brother. Me and Silent Bob loved that show. We were raking in the mad money. That shit was better than selling smoke! But that wasn't like us at all, all cartooney and shit. But we do miss the phat cash. I gotta get out of here before that tubby bitch breaks out that fuckin' Amy story again. Snoogans.
Love,
Jay and Silent Bob
Zim is in fact, still cancelled. I work at nick, I've seen the ratings from last month, the above statements are, unfortunately, untrue :(
There are still some episodes left to air that are being finished up, including a possible xmas episode, there will be a total of about 27 episodes when all is said and done, but there are no "new" shows nor a "next season" after this lot. Sorry.
^nA! Creatures in my Head
Circle is cool, but it is really a subset of Chord, with searching kind of hacked on top of a hashing index system (i.e. search is implemented by tying keywords to hashes and distributing this hash space.)
.
:-)
This means that high peer churn rates, hot spots in popular keywords, spamming keywords, etc, all make this a rather vulnerable and fragile implementation of searching. It probably is better than gnutella, but that isnt saying much, and it certainly does not mean it is 'infinitely scalable'. The real world is a harsh place...
If you want a scalable, distributed search/discovery mechanism for large peer networks here is your recipe:
1. Build on a base of juicy lightweight UDP messaging. This allows you to send messages directly to peers, circumvent NAT's, and handle many thousands of virtual connections.
2. Sending queries to many thousands of peers is still a large task, even if only small packets are sent directly. Must optimize this.
3. Optimize by using a social discovery mechanism to keep track of which peers are good at answering your queries. Query them first and more often than other peers. Call this peer ranking the 'relative quality' of the peer.
4. Optimize further by halting the query once a sufficient number of matches are found. This way you only need to query a handfull of peers (maybe 10, maybe 200) to complete a query.
5. Finally, perform transitive introduction using the high quality peers in your group. This way you use peers with a high quality to find new peers, and it is highly likely that they will be high quality peers as well.
This is how the ALPINE Network works, and it scales. The number of connections any peer may have is solely up to their discretion, based on bandwidth and memory resources. All communication is direct, and every peer is in direct control over his own resources, which makes for a very robust environment.
There are a number of details, the above simply a 30,000ft description. If you are interested you can read more in the ALPINE Overview and the ALPINE FAQ
One last comment, this stuff is no longer vaporware
As in many countries in Asia, it's not only the largest ISP in-country, but also either majority owned or at least a significant chunk, by the incumbent telco, Chunghwa Telecom.
Should Chungwa decide that Movie88 has no need for ISP service it should be a relatively simple matter to drag their feet in bringing up a new circuit.
Regarding the overt use of bribery in Asia, yes it's quite rampant and with the exception of only a few countries in Asia, quite a normal modus operandi.
Linux is UNIX.
Well, in talking to the guys responsible for the creative side of Zim, it seems that the biggest thing going against it is the age group that likes it the most. Apparently, Nick doesnt give a poop about anyone over 11. This is a crying shame. All us gen-x'ers grew up on You can do that on television, turcky TV, all the way up to ren and stimpy.... Nick should get rid of crap-at-night, and pander to the generation of people who have name recognition and affinity to the network since its inception. Zim, ren and stimpy, think "adult-swim". Its a shame nick has seemingly lost the collective brain cell running the show there. The other thing i gleened is that Zim is a Viacom property, and the creators have no control over it whatsoever (the show was created at the behest of nick, coming to Jhonen apparently). Chances of ever seeing a new zim episode? Pretty close to 0. Put that one in the f***ed up by viacom marketing trashbin.
And BTW, when they say the ratings were poor, keep in mind a few things:
1. People over 11 dont count apparently in Nick ratings
2. It was on at the END of regular nick programming
3. It had no consistant time slot (i STILL managed to find it whenever it was on)
I personally loved it, and if you want to see more, go buy the comics by the guys who created and wrote zim. Off the top of my head:
Johnny the homicidal maniac
Squee
Lenore
Filler Bunny
Characters like Happy noodel boy are priceless =)
GIVE ME MENTOS! I DEMAND TO BE FRESH! DO YOU DENY ME FRESHMAKER???!!
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
Actually, they could. BeOS was available for them to buy, and would have been much cheaper than what they paid for NeXT. They had a choice, and chose NeXT.
Bottom line, Apple believed that Be simply was not worth over $200M, but NeXT was worth over $400M. I suspect the reasons for that difference could be summed up in five words: Steve Jobs and Avi Tevanian.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Given the behaviour at Fox, NO show should be scheduled for 7 pm Sunday. Like others have said: if it's not football, it's baseball. If it's not baseball, it's...
Always pre-empted. Of course the show never got ratings: it's never on!!!
It kinda makes sense. Seeing as how the 4:00 NFL games are never over until ~7:15, it's easier to let the talking idiots run their collective mouth for another 15 minutes, instead of screwing up the entire evening lineup.
So pull 'that 80's' show garbage, pull the live action Tick, pull Family Guy, but give Futurama a real time slot.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
so there must be some sort of computer control already implemented...
Or three guys with graph paper and roller-blades...
i know that when they do that in some skyscrapers they just use the computer controlled lighting systems that are pre-existant. but they have to usually manually figure out what room is what...