So to restate your goal you want to be able to use your computer remotely. There are several ways of doing this, each has their advantages and shortcomings; some work very well if you're on a LAN, others are better for slower connections. I'm sure their are more solutions then what I can think of here, but this is what comes to mind:
VNC, WindowsXP Remote Desktop and PC Anywhere. These programs allow you to control your actual desktop remotely, as if you we're actually there in front of it. Unfortunately the way this works is by streaming image data over the wire, this can be very slow, like when browsing the web a good deal of the data is images. For something like editing text (e.g. Word-processing) some of the programs are smart enough to just send text data, so the response time is acceptable; even over slow connections. WindowsXP Remote Desktop is the best I've used so far, it seems to be very efficient and even allows you do 'share' your hard drives for easy copying of files, copy&paste of text works flawlessly and it also streams music that's playing on your machine. Unfortunately VNC's and the like do not work for games, streaming video or any graphically intense application. They only work well with a broadband or LAN connection, while they will work over a slower pipe, it can be quite a painful experience.
Telnet, ssh: command line computing. Many people at slashdot will testify by it, and to be sure; once you mastered the tools they can be just as useful as their graphical counterparts. VI, gcc, and mutt can be just as productive as Word, Visual Studio and Outlook, it just takes some getting used to. However the tools can be limiting, you can't work with MSWord documents in VI, and you can't compile Win32 apps in gcc, so it depends greatly in the context of your work. The main advantage to command line apps are there very low bandwidth requirements and portability. Machines from the 80's can support a telnet connection over a 300baud modem, so you have no need for a modern windows machine to connect to home. For some, this is more important then being able to use GUI based apps.
Web based, Client/Server. Back in the.com boom their we're some companies that we attempting to create full blown office productivity apps in HTML, and they worked pretty well. A Solid example is yahoo.com. They offer free (centralized) email w/ spell checking, notes, calendar and other stuff all from your web browser. Web apps are not as powerful as client side applications, but they are improving rapidly and will probably be better tomorrow, this is also where Microsoft and others are heading. Hailstorm (correct me if I'm wrong) is Microsoft's attempt to mix a client side application that connects to server side 'web services' to access your data. This may be exactly what your looking for, but it's not out yet.
I work away from my computer all the time, I use yahoo.com's email because I don't trust other domains to stay around, and I need my email if my home computer isn't working. I use WindowsXP remote desktop for when I need to do something on my desktop, and I use ssh for when I want to mess around with my linux box at home or edit my sourceforge project page. They're all good solutions but are better suited for different tasks. I haven't used anything 'webservice' like yet (except messing around with.NET), but imagine I will within the next year or two.
Last movie i saw there was Danny Darko at the Alamo North and I didn't see anyone with a laptop. I'm as big a geek as anyone and i don't see the need for it, espicially at the Alamo.
Typically one orders a large beer, a hamberger and maybe some nachos. Beer, grease and cheese isn't the kind of thing i want next to my $1,000 laptop, besides it would be rude to the people behind me to have that bright LCD screen glaring, not to mention the sound of the keyboard.
SMPng - fully threaded, preemptable and re-entrant kernel with interrupt handlers running as threads. More than one CPU can run in the kernel simultaneously.
devfs - fully dynamic device creation and tear-down (for things like PCCARD and USB).
Geom - stackable disk model (http://www.freebsd.org/~phk/Geom)
Newcard - New PCCARD/CARDBUS subsystem with much better support for newer hardware (like CARDBUS) and integration with FreeBSD's newbus driver API.
I don't know what a trading standard is. But it seems that the fact of the matter would be that the store owns the land, and therefore when you shop there you are a guest on their land. You do not have the right to bring in a video camera, and if they ask you to leave, you have to leave. If that pisses you off then you don't have to go there. simple as that.
...Windows Media, which was judged to be, by far, the worst format for quality. What does this tell us?
I think it tells us that the reviewer(s) had some bias going. Other reviews i've read do not place WM8 squarly at the bottom, personally i think WM8 looks better then Real at lower bitrates, where Sorenson looks best at high bitrates.
Either way thought there is very little seperating the three. They're all based of MPEG4, which in turn is based of sorenson. Real and MS have just tweak the formats slighltly, trying to get smother motion, a sharper image, and tweak the performance.
Then there's companies like MediaExcel that have MPEG4 encoders that encode about 3X times faster then MS's, yet can't find a market.
I've played with Darwin a bit, the thing to understand is there are a lot of peices to a 'media server'. There's a video encoder card (the oone they used was $2,000) and there's a encoder, like WMA, Real, or Sorenson. Once you put the video source and the encoder together you have a 'video source', which is what these media servers will 'serve' to the clients.
You could think of Darwin as a amplifier, as it only does the TCP/IP server end, Real and Windows Media do the whole thing. It's also interesting that the auther credits Apple with having a such a wonderfull FREE product, but then lists the $250 Sorenson Media's Broadcaster and the $500 Sorenson 3 encoder ($499), not exactly free. While Real charges around 5k for the whole package and Microsoft charges nothing as it comes with Win2k.
I just saw a 90 minute film on Steve Mann called Cyberman at SXSW in Austin, basically he has for about 20 years now hooked up a camera and video screen to his glasses. I believe his setup can now zoom, playback and bring up a crude command line prompt, he also has a single hand keyboard for input, and yes he walks around with this all the time. He also has renegade antennas setup around his city to stream video from his head to the web.
However a few times they showed him going into retailers like walmart and gap with a consumer video camera (just to start shit). When an employee asks him to not bring the video camera in, he starts being a little smart ass about it. like "Well don't you have video cameras in here, why can you video tape me and I can't video tape you", "What if I told you that my glasses we're a video camera, would that be ok?". generally not agreeing with the store and making a jackass out of himself.
I also saw him take off his glasses constantly, he would slip them off to do something, then put them back to walk around (then look around like a space cadet ), but it did not seem that he was in any way disoriented without his gear. So I don't buy that all of a sudden once his stuff was busted up by the security guards (which we're just trying to do there freakin job) that he started bumping into things, or at least not more then normally.
I think what happened at the airport is that for "I'm cyberman" reasons he opted to keep his gear on, got shit from the security guards, proceeded to be a complete smartass while thinking, "if they fuck with me, I have it all on film", but when they broke his gear and is alibi that's when he really god pissed. I'm sure he was already expecting shit, but maybe hoping he could have covert footage of it to show the 8 o-clock news as well.
I just found out Steve Mann. There was a film about him at SXSW called CyberMan. Pretty interesting (and sureal) flick.
heres the little blorb about the film Part man, part machine, Steve Mann is a self-professed cyborg. Mann suggests we can reclaim our space by turning technology outwards and builds wearable computers in an attempt to alter his perceptions of reality. Cyberman is a layered and engaging look at our over-mediated world and one man's resistance to it.
I may hate RealNetworks, but i think their 'RealOne' idea is going to be the future for making money on the net.
The way it works is you have a flat monthly subscription fee, you get a player (RealOne player) and access to a there partner network. Already i've come acrose clips of video where i needed to subscribe to RealOne to be able to view, if 80% of the video clips on the.NET required a relativly cheap subscription it would become much more attrative.
Consequently, the porn industry has been doing this successfuly for years now, and as they say; when looking for new ways to expliot media, look at what comes out of porn.
If i downloaded a tetris clone, and in the EULA (required for installation) it claimed that by installing this software I:
A. Must driver no faster then 10mph, except in school zones, where i must drive at least 60mph. B. Must name my first child 'Tim', even if its a girl B. Can not use the software for more then 30 seconds, and if i find a bug in the software within those 30 seconds i must strip off all my clothes and run around the street five times yelling 'my pants are missing!'
These of course are unreasonable, and illegal in some cases, so i doubt a judge would find this EULA legal.
I think (not sure, IANAL) that EULA will be upheld if they are within reason, do not break other laws and relate to the software's fair use.
I disagree. If one wishes to sell a product, one must market that product. Having the only player for a companys codec be a complete 2 hour hackjob does not represent the company very well. It is a bad marketing move to give people a low quality first impression, which is exactly what they did.
Whats the reasoning for it anyway? Are they that in a hurry to beat the guy who next week is going to claim "better then mp3 at 32kbit", it's been done, they only way a company with a product like that is going to get anywhere is to market it as well as possible, and one way to do that is not have a shitty looking player.
-Jon
I think you're missing the point
on
HTTP's Days Numbered
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Mr. Box was not saything that HTTP is not good as a Hyper Text Transfer protocol, he was stating that it's being manipulated to perform RPC, which is true. The theme of the artical was on how HTTP is bad for RPC, which you seem to also agree with.
Simply because this guy now works at Microsoft does not mean he has an agenda for evil. As a matter of fact before working for Microsoft Mr. Box started a little company called DevelopMentor, He's also written a few books One of which is concedered "The" book on COM, Essential COM, ask any COM developer worth their salt if they own a copy, they do.
I've known of Mr. Box for years now and trully recpect him as a technical writter and developer and I honestly don't think that he would shill for Microsoft.
But ya i checked it out. The really impressive ones are the 8kbit comparisions. At 8bkit the kttech definatly sounded better. The 32kbit rate was more debatable.
Of course this comparision means nothing, every time i've been invited to listen and compare, whether it's for WMA, RM and MP3Plus the samples i'm given always sound better for the product the company is pushing, so what it really works and sounds like in real applications remains to be seen.
btw, they're "player", is a "strait off the template" SDI MFC application with no installer. The app opens with an empty document and the menu options File->Open, File->Stop and File->Close. Not even a play button!
Well, it could still be true. For one this is a PR release, not really a product release. What you see on the website has probably been feature complete for some months now. If this is true then it means that the only thing the developers have been doing for the last few months is fixing bugs in RAID (MS's bug tracking software). being that it's an OS, i'm sure they we're also doing some security incedents as well.
if you goto the Smart Phone site. then click on the Developer link. You'll notice that this is a rebranded Pocket PC.
Which is what it looks like (and i'm 99% sure) it shares the exact same subset of the Win32 API that the current PocketPC/WinCE API does. Which means a relativly sophisticaed OS, capable of real internet browsing (complete with DOM, scripting, GIF animation, etc..). Windows Media player, so WMA and mp3 playback. MSN Messenger (for those who are into that kind of thing). But at the cost of high resources, like 32 megs of RAM min, not to mainstreem with cellphones at the moment.
I respectfully disagree. Laws that protect a business are not necessarily bad. Laws that protect business at the cost of the people are bad. Where you draw the line is where it gets fuzzy.
A law that outlawed cars to protect the horse and buggy industry is bad because it hurts the people, clearly. A law that protects Disney logo is not bad for the people. The prosperity that Disney enjoys employees millions of people, which is clearly good for the people. Also Disney creates entertainment and amusement parks, also for the peoples enjoyment. Stifling Disney's business by taking away their rights to there mascot is not clearly good for the people, as it is clearly good for other business and bad for Disney.
The briefing a little to nebulas for me to grok, so i googled up this link on copyright extension, this one is regarding Disney.
I think the main problem with IP law is that it is too cut and dry. For example I agree that Disney should be able to hold it's copyright to Mickey Mouse, but disagree that movies made by MGM 70 years ago are still not public domain.
Mickey Mouse is a very important piece of Disneys brand, and Disney is a brand based company, so it's essential to their survival. Where movies from 70 years ago are simply rotting away, and will probably vanish.
I think IP law needs to be based of need. A auction system would work better. Where after a relatively short period, say 20 years. the rights to the IP would become public domain, but are then up for auction. Disney would only have to be the highest bidder, which they could probably do, being that it's more important to them then to anyone else. The public needs to set a price however on buying it back, in case no-one else shows up to bid. I don't know how that would work exactly, but i imagine something based of it's past worth like 20% of the generated revenue from the IP. Of course calculating revenue from an IP isn't cut and dry either.
While IP that companies don't care about are not worth the time or money to renew, and then become public domain. A good example would be old video games, the company that holds the IP have essentially forgotten about them. When the time is up, they either have to buy it back from the public, or give it away.
Freenet does not scale any better then gnutella. It has the same problem, which is flat decentraliztion. Meaning that every node has to pass trafic for every other node.
Freenet only does this for hash query matchs, where Gnutella does it for search strings, so it might be slightly more efficiant. Freenets real problem is the way it keeps data anonymous. For data to get from point D to point A it needs to copy all the data from D->C->B->A which uses all the bandwidth of C->B. It also limits the download speed to the slowest of C and B. On the other hand it distributes the traffic, so while A is getting data slowly from D->C->B, it's also getting it from X->Y->Z and maybe N->O->P. Multiplexing the download would be faster for A, but looking at the whole picture a lot of traffic is passing through nodes.
I think the biggest problem with FreeNET is that people compare it (unfairly) to Napster or Gnutella. I don't think it is trying to be these things, at least the design in it self doesn't speak that way. To me is seems like a robust system for keeping anonymous safe data, at the cost of speed and ease of use and resources.
I can't really comment on mojonation as last time i checked they didn't have any real documenation on how it actually worked, but Gnutella is way simpler then Freenet.
I wrote a gnutella client in one night, when gnutella first hit the net people had already figured out the protocol and we're writing clients for it within days. There are only about 5 different commands in Gnutella, i have no idea how many freenet is. But i have attempted to understand more then just a high level concept and found the details to be confusing as all hell.
first off let me state for the record that i don't think could entirly belive what you we're saying, unless maybe you other handle is Jon Katz.
to start let me list some differences:
In the real world there is no active god, and if there is one he truly works in cryptic ways. With a virtual world this is a very definable god, the oraniztion that runs the world. Unless a virtual world can be run without people in the real world controling what happens it is very hard to even compare the two.
Current virtual worlds are very static, the player can do very little to change the world. In EverQuest and DAoC a player can not start a even start a shop or build a hut. The only thing your avatar can do is kill monsters and sometimes other players. This should be exanded a bit when Shadowbane comes out (if it ever does).
whats keeping it from working:
The god of the world is also the ultimate dictator, if the people disagree with what is happening, the god can simply stop it. This elimates any freedom the players might have. The players can not topple the goverment, throw out the dictator and put a new goverment in place.
The people can not defend themselfs from other nations. In this context "other nations" is the real world, and the border is the server farm. still is it a border (in a sence). but in the virtual world there is no means of self defence.
Being as i don't like to be a complete pesimiest i'm forming a very vague idea on how it may actually work.
Think of a completly decentralized network as the server farm, some type of p2p system. This elimates the problem of the server farm being raided. Think Everquest meets Gnutella. How would this work? I'm not to sure it it would. But the idea that came to mind was that the world could be zoned of into areas, where each area is a computer on the network. The size of the area is in relation to the power/connection speed of the host computer. Of course the problem with this is that that part of the world goes down with that computer, So maybe a redunt caching scheme like freenet uses would help out with that.
People must be able to add code to the world. Perhapes making it open source would work. Where a group of people check a vworld 'plugin' (whathaveyou) for expliots and correctness and it is added to the 'hive'. So if a player thought it would be a nice idea to add a new longsord to the game he could make a 'weapon' plugin, submit it to the vworld group where it's checked by peers where it is then allowed to enter the world. Since there is no central server to proprogate the new plugins maybe some type of encrption scheme could be used to 'sign' a plugin. Of couse this adds some realworld dictator to the game, but it could at least it could be a democratic one.
Slashdot Mirror
actually the full abstract
PDF and ASCII
-Jon
VNC, WindowsXP Remote Desktop and PC Anywhere. These programs allow you to control your actual desktop remotely, as if you we're actually there in front of it. Unfortunately the way this works is by streaming image data over the wire, this can be very slow, like when browsing the web a good deal of the data is images. For something like editing text (e.g. Word-processing) some of the programs are smart enough to just send text data, so the response time is acceptable; even over slow connections.
WindowsXP Remote Desktop is the best I've used so far, it seems to be very efficient and even allows you do 'share' your hard drives for easy copying of files, copy&paste of text works flawlessly and it also streams music that's playing on your machine.
Unfortunately VNC's and the like do not work for games, streaming video or any graphically intense application. They only work well with a broadband or LAN connection, while they will work over a slower pipe, it can be quite a painful experience.
Telnet, ssh: command line computing. Many people at slashdot will testify by it, and to be sure; once you mastered the tools they can be just as useful as their graphical counterparts. VI, gcc, and mutt can be just as productive as Word, Visual Studio and Outlook, it just takes some getting used to. However the tools can be limiting, you can't work with MSWord documents in VI, and you can't compile Win32 apps in gcc, so it depends greatly in the context of your work.
The main advantage to command line apps are there very low bandwidth requirements and portability. Machines from the 80's can support a telnet connection over a 300baud modem, so you have no need for a modern windows machine to connect to home. For some, this is more important then being able to use GUI based apps.
Web based, Client/Server. Back in the .com boom their we're some companies that we attempting to create full blown office productivity apps in HTML, and they worked pretty well. A Solid example is yahoo.com. They offer free (centralized) email w/ spell checking, notes, calendar and other stuff all from your web browser. Web apps are not as powerful as client side applications, but they are improving rapidly and will probably be better tomorrow, this is also where Microsoft and others are heading. Hailstorm (correct me if I'm wrong) is Microsoft's attempt to mix a client side application that connects to server side 'web services' to access your data. This may be exactly what your looking for, but it's not out yet.
.NET), but imagine I will within the next year or two.
I work away from my computer all the time, I use yahoo.com's email because I don't trust other domains to stay around, and I need my email if my home computer isn't working. I use WindowsXP remote desktop for when I need to do something on my desktop, and I use ssh for when I want to mess around with my linux box at home or edit my sourceforge project page. They're all good solutions but are better suited for different tasks. I haven't used anything 'webservice' like yet (except messing around with
-Jon
Last movie i saw there was Danny Darko at the Alamo North and I didn't see anyone with a laptop. I'm as big a geek as anyone and i don't see the need for it, espicially at the Alamo.
Typically one orders a large beer, a hamberger and maybe some nachos. Beer, grease and cheese isn't the kind of thing i want next to my $1,000 laptop, besides it would be rude to the people behind me to have that bright LCD screen glaring, not to mention the sound of the keyboard.
-Jon
SMPng - fully threaded, preemptable and re-entrant kernel with interrupt handlers running as threads. More than one CPU can run in the kernel simultaneously.
devfs - fully dynamic device creation and tear-down (for things like PCCARD and USB).
Geom - stackable disk model (http://www.freebsd.org/~phk/Geom)
Newcard - New PCCARD/CARDBUS subsystem with much better support for newer hardware (like CARDBUS) and integration with FreeBSD's newbus driver API.
gcc 3.0 - Upgrade to latest compiler technology
source
I don't know what a trading standard is. But it seems that the fact of the matter would be that the store owns the land, and therefore when you shop there you are a guest on their land. You do not have the right to bring in a video camera, and if they ask you to leave, you have to leave. If that pisses you off then you don't have to go there. simple as that.
-Jon
...Windows Media, which was judged to be, by far, the worst format for quality. What does this tell us?
I think it tells us that the reviewer(s) had some bias going. Other reviews i've read do not place WM8 squarly at the bottom, personally i think WM8 looks better then Real at lower bitrates, where Sorenson looks best at high bitrates.
Either way thought there is very little seperating the three. They're all based of MPEG4, which in turn is based of sorenson. Real and MS have just tweak the formats slighltly, trying to get smother motion, a sharper image, and tweak the performance.
Then there's companies like MediaExcel that have MPEG4 encoders that encode about 3X times faster then MS's, yet can't find a market.
-Jon
I've played with Darwin a bit, the thing to understand is there are a lot of peices to a 'media server'. There's a video encoder card (the oone they used was $2,000) and there's a encoder, like WMA, Real, or Sorenson. Once you put the video source and the encoder together you have a 'video source', which is what these media servers will 'serve' to the clients.
You could think of Darwin as a amplifier, as it only does the TCP/IP server end, Real and Windows Media do the whole thing. It's also interesting that the auther credits Apple with having a such a wonderfull FREE product, but then lists the $250 Sorenson Media's Broadcaster and the $500 Sorenson 3 encoder ($499), not exactly free. While Real charges around 5k for the whole package and Microsoft charges nothing as it comes with Win2k.
-Jon
I just saw a 90 minute film on Steve Mann called Cyberman at SXSW in Austin, basically he has for about 20 years now hooked up a camera and video screen to his glasses. I believe his setup can now zoom, playback and bring up a crude command line prompt, he also has a single hand keyboard for input, and yes he walks around with this all the time. He also has renegade antennas setup around his city to stream video from his head to the web.
However a few times they showed him going into retailers like walmart and gap with a consumer video camera (just to start shit). When an employee asks him to not bring the video camera in, he starts being a little smart ass about it. like "Well don't you have video cameras in here, why can you video tape me and I can't video tape you", "What if I told you that my glasses we're a video camera, would that be ok?". generally not agreeing with the store and making a jackass out of himself.
I also saw him take off his glasses constantly, he would slip them off to do something, then put them back to walk around (then look around like a space cadet ), but it did not seem that he was in any way disoriented without his gear. So I don't buy that all of a sudden once his stuff was busted up by the security guards (which we're just trying to do there freakin job) that he started bumping into things, or at least not more then normally.
I think what happened at the airport is that for "I'm cyberman" reasons he opted to keep his gear on, got shit from the security guards, proceeded to be a complete smartass while thinking, "if they fuck with me, I have it all on film", but when they broke his gear and is alibi that's when he really god pissed. I'm sure he was already expecting shit, but maybe hoping he could have covert footage of it to show the 8 o-clock news as well.
-Jon
I just found out Steve Mann. There was a film about him at SXSW called CyberMan. Pretty interesting (and sureal) flick.
heres the little blorb about the film
Part man, part machine, Steve Mann is a self-professed cyborg. Mann suggests we can reclaim our space by turning technology outwards and builds wearable computers in an attempt to alter his perceptions of reality. Cyberman is a layered and engaging look at our over-mediated world and one man's resistance to it.
-Jon
and funny.. or maybe just disturbing.
My Compaq 1720 can play a full length DVD of it's single battery.
I may hate RealNetworks, but i think their 'RealOne' idea is going to be the future for making money on the net.
.NET required a relativly cheap subscription it would become much more attrative.
The way it works is you have a flat monthly subscription fee, you get a player (RealOne player) and access to a there partner network. Already i've come acrose clips of video where i needed to subscribe to RealOne to be able to view, if 80% of the video clips on the
Consequently, the porn industry has been doing this successfuly for years now, and as they say; when looking for new ways to expliot media, look at what comes out of porn.
-Jon
If i downloaded a tetris clone, and in the EULA (required for installation) it claimed that by installing this software I:
A. Must driver no faster then 10mph, except in school zones, where i must drive at least 60mph.
B. Must name my first child 'Tim', even if its a girl
B. Can not use the software for more then 30 seconds, and if i find a bug in the software within those 30 seconds i must strip off all my clothes and run around the street five times yelling 'my pants are missing!'
These of course are unreasonable, and illegal in some cases, so i doubt a judge would find this EULA legal.
I think (not sure, IANAL) that EULA will be upheld if they are within reason, do not break other laws and relate to the software's fair use.
-Jon
I disagree. If one wishes to sell a product, one must market that product. Having the only player for a companys codec be a complete 2 hour hackjob does not represent the company very well. It is a bad marketing move to give people a low quality first impression, which is exactly what they did.
Whats the reasoning for it anyway? Are they that in a hurry to beat the guy who next week is going to claim "better then mp3 at 32kbit", it's been done, they only way a company with a product like that is going to get anywhere is to market it as well as possible, and one way to do that is not have a shitty looking player.
-Jon
Mr. Box was not saything that HTTP is not good as a Hyper Text Transfer protocol, he was stating that it's being manipulated to perform RPC, which is true. The theme of the artical was on how HTTP is bad for RPC, which you seem to also agree with.
Simply because this guy now works at Microsoft does not mean he has an agenda for evil. As a matter of fact before working for Microsoft Mr. Box started a little company called DevelopMentor, He's also written a few books One of which is concedered "The" book on COM, Essential COM, ask any COM developer worth their salt if they own a copy, they do.
I've known of Mr. Box for years now and trully recpect him as a technical writter and developer and I honestly don't think that he would shill for Microsoft.
-Jon
But ya i checked it out. The really impressive ones are the 8kbit comparisions. At 8bkit the kttech definatly sounded better. The 32kbit rate was more debatable.
Of course this comparision means nothing, every time i've been invited to listen and compare, whether it's for WMA, RM and MP3Plus the samples i'm given always sound better for the product the company is pushing, so what it really works and sounds like in real applications remains to be seen.
btw, they're "player", is a "strait off the template" SDI MFC application with no installer. The app opens with an empty document and the menu options File->Open, File->Stop and File->Close. Not even a play button!
-Jon
I think we have a winnner.
(personally i'm getting sick of it already)
-Jon
Well, it could still be true. For one this is a PR release, not really a product release. What you see on the website has probably been feature complete for some months now. If this is true then it means that the only thing the developers have been doing for the last few months is fixing bugs in RAID (MS's bug tracking software). being that it's an OS, i'm sure they we're also doing some security incedents as well.
-Jon
Jezz, not one yet. i'll give it a shoot.
if you goto the Smart Phone site. then click on the Developer link. You'll notice that this is a rebranded Pocket PC.
Which is what it looks like (and i'm 99% sure) it shares the exact same subset of the Win32 API that the current PocketPC/WinCE API does. Which means a relativly sophisticaed OS, capable of real internet browsing (complete with DOM, scripting, GIF animation, etc..). Windows Media player, so WMA and mp3 playback. MSN Messenger (for those who are into that kind of thing). But at the cost of high resources, like 32 megs of RAM min, not to mainstreem with cellphones at the moment.
and i'm not sure, but i'm guessing all of the current pocketpc apps including Quake, which is also shown in the SmartPhone Tour. Will be available for it, which would be pretty darn cool.
-Jon
I respectfully disagree. Laws that protect a business are not necessarily bad. Laws that protect business at the cost of the people are bad. Where you draw the line is where it gets fuzzy.
A law that outlawed cars to protect the horse and buggy industry is bad because it hurts the people, clearly. A law that protects Disney logo is not bad for the people. The prosperity that Disney enjoys employees millions of people, which is clearly good for the people. Also Disney creates entertainment and amusement parks, also for the peoples enjoyment. Stifling Disney's business by taking away their rights to there mascot is not clearly good for the people, as it is clearly good for other business and bad for Disney.
-Jon
The briefing a little to nebulas for me to grok, so i googled up this link on copyright extension, this one is regarding Disney.
I think the main problem with IP law is that it is too cut and dry. For example I agree that Disney should be able to hold it's copyright to Mickey Mouse, but disagree that movies made by MGM 70 years ago are still not public domain.
Mickey Mouse is a very important piece of Disneys brand, and Disney is a brand based company, so it's essential to their survival. Where movies from 70 years ago are simply rotting away, and will probably vanish.
I think IP law needs to be based of need. A auction system would work better. Where after a relatively short period, say 20 years. the rights to the IP would become public domain, but are then up for auction. Disney would only have to be the highest bidder, which they could probably do, being that it's more important to them then to anyone else. The public needs to set a price however on buying it back, in case no-one else shows up to bid. I don't know how that would work exactly, but i imagine something based of it's past worth like 20% of the generated revenue from the IP. Of course calculating revenue from an IP isn't cut and dry either.
While IP that companies don't care about are not worth the time or money to renew, and then become public domain. A good example would be old video games, the company that holds the IP have essentially forgotten about them. When the time is up, they either have to buy it back from the public, or give it away.
-Jon
Freenet does not scale any better then gnutella. It has the same problem, which is flat decentraliztion. Meaning that every node has to pass trafic for every other node.
Freenet only does this for hash query matchs, where Gnutella does it for search strings, so it might be slightly more efficiant. Freenets real problem is the way it keeps data anonymous. For data to get from point D to point A it needs to copy all the data from D->C->B->A which uses all the bandwidth of C->B. It also limits the download speed to the slowest of C and B. On the other hand it distributes the traffic, so while A is getting data slowly from D->C->B, it's also getting it from X->Y->Z and maybe N->O->P. Multiplexing the download would be faster for A, but looking at the whole picture a lot of traffic is passing through nodes.
I think the biggest problem with FreeNET is that people compare it (unfairly) to Napster or Gnutella. I don't think it is trying to be these things, at least the design in it self doesn't speak that way. To me is seems like a robust system for keeping anonymous safe data, at the cost of speed and ease of use and resources.
-Jon
I can't really comment on mojonation as last time i checked they didn't have any real documenation on how it actually worked, but Gnutella is way simpler then Freenet.
I wrote a gnutella client in one night, when gnutella first hit the net people had already figured out the protocol and we're writing clients for it within days. There are only about 5 different commands in Gnutella, i have no idea how many freenet is. But i have attempted to understand more then just a high level concept and found the details to be confusing as all hell.
anyway,
-Jon
You'll notice that Microsofts response was to turn off the SNMP service until they get a patch ready.
-Jon
first off let me state for the record that i don't think could entirly belive what you we're saying, unless maybe you other handle is Jon Katz.
to start let me list some differences:
In the real world there is no active god, and if there is one he truly works in cryptic ways. With a virtual world this is a very definable god, the oraniztion that runs the world. Unless a virtual world can be run without people in the real world controling what happens it is very hard to even compare the two.
Current virtual worlds are very static, the player can do very little to change the world. In EverQuest and DAoC a player can not start a even start a shop or build a hut. The only thing your avatar can do is kill monsters and sometimes other players. This should be exanded a bit when Shadowbane comes out (if it ever does).
whats keeping it from working:
The god of the world is also the ultimate dictator, if the people disagree with what is happening, the god can simply stop it. This elimates any freedom the players might have. The players can not topple the goverment, throw out the dictator and put a new goverment in place.
The people can not defend themselfs from other nations. In this context "other nations" is the real world, and the border is the server farm. still is it a border (in a sence). but in the virtual world there is no means of self defence.
Being as i don't like to be a complete pesimiest i'm forming a very vague idea on how it may actually work.
Think of a completly decentralized network as the server farm, some type of p2p system. This elimates the problem of the server farm being raided. Think Everquest meets Gnutella. How would this work? I'm not to sure it it would. But the idea that came to mind was that the world could be zoned of into areas, where each area is a computer on the network. The size of the area is in relation to the power/connection speed of the host computer. Of course the problem with this is that that part of the world goes down with that computer, So maybe a redunt caching scheme like freenet uses would help out with that.
People must be able to add code to the world. Perhapes making it open source would work. Where a group of people check a vworld 'plugin' (whathaveyou) for expliots and correctness and it is added to the 'hive'. So if a player thought it would be a nice idea to add a new longsord to the game he could make a 'weapon' plugin, submit it to the vworld group where it's checked by peers where it is then allowed to enter the world. Since there is no central server to proprogate the new plugins maybe some type of encrption scheme could be used to 'sign' a plugin. Of couse this adds some realworld dictator to the game, but it could at least it could be a democratic one.