Well, in Second Life I'd say I'm pretty much my RL self. Only blue and with a tail:-)
For example, just like in RL, it feels uncomfortable to stand too close to somebody. I talk about the same things, and behave nearly the same, with a few inhibitions.
Subversion works, but like Linus says, it's nothing wonderful. You can hardly point at some feature of it and say it was the product of a genius. It does CVS right, and that's about it.
But SVN is limiting. For example I have a fork of the Second Life source, and SVN was PAIN for that. I ended up switching to SVK because it was the first thing I found that could sync with a SVN repository (which is what LL hosts), but Git would probably be also a fine choice as well.
SVN's problem is that when you want to branch somebody's source but still follow it by merging improvements it becomes really painful. You have to use svn-load-dirs, which is a hack. You have to give it megabytes of source to process, which can suck really badly when you've got your SNV repository hosted externally so that other people can access it.
Why? Cryonics should preserve the body as it is, with all molecules frozen in place. When unfrozen, in theory, this molecular machinery would just resume working and you'd keep your memory.
Also, IIRC, there's been some progress with the ice crystals problem.
With signatures in place, and verification by default when packages are installed, you'd need more than just breaking into a server to cause serious damage.
Ubuntu seems to have something in place already, but from my look at it, doesn't seem nearly as insistent on security as it should be.
It doesn't seem to be very widely known, but at least on Linux, all of 127.0.0.0/8 is assigned to the loopback. So 127.85.31.97 would work just as well, in case you happen to find a script kiddie a bit smarter than average.
That'd be very unsurprising, but not terribly enlightening.
I don't remember ever seeing a product "Made in America". Nearly everything comes from China these days, including the vast majority of the things sold under american brands.
Re:Enough with the bullshit subscriber numbers
on
Bank Run in Second Life
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Just a little correction: The 20-30K number is the amount of people logged in right now.
Since people generally can't remain awake and logged into SL 24/7, there's got to be more active accounts than that.
Now, I think that Ginko is very likely to be a Ponzi scheme. Not necessarily intentionally though, I think they did try to invest that money to be able to provide that interest, but of course that sort of profit is awfully hard to make and we're seeing the result.
The thing about Ponzi schemes is that they work, for a while. The early investors DO get their interest. It's the later ones who get screwed. So if you're not terribly ethical, you could put money into something like that knowing you have a good chance of getting what they promise, so long you join early enough, and take your cash before the whole thing goes under.
There are 18,875 accounts. Right now there are 34,822 people logged in (see http://secondlife.com/ ). In the last 60 days, 1,646,830 people logged in. So the total Ginko userbase is not all that great compared to the amount of people who use SL.
Next, it's quite reasonable to assume that a good portion of those 18,875 are by people who put there L$1 (USD $.00370) as a test, then forgot about it.
Now, they say their deposits are L$94,441,798 = USD $349,784. But, Ginko's claims about the amount of deposits were cast into doubt by several people, and that number seems to include interest, that is money they would be expected to give, but which none of the users actually put there.
Average amount of money per account is $349,784 / 18,875 = $18.53
Looking at the SL statistics: US$ Spent Last 24h: $1,433,039 LindeX Activity Last 24h: $223,005
You can see that even the claimed amount of money isn't all that huge, and after years of operation at the enormous interest they claimed, most of that cash must be accumulated interest anyway.
While I bet some people will lose something quite significant, I don't think it's nearly as big as the article says.
Well, SL really isn't much of a game. You can implement games inside it, but it's not a game itself.
And while some people do have lots of fun there, others do business. Business is quite possibly to do successfully in SL, but just like in reality they go bankrupt as well when things don't go as planned.
Ginko is a resident run bank, which has nothing really special about it. You can it on their own a href="https://ginkofinancial.com/">website: They only claim to have 18,875 accounts, quite a few of which probably were created as a test. Nowhere near the 8.5 million claimed.
Ginko's problem was their insane interest rates, which IIRC varied somewhere between 100% and 30% per year. I think it was 70% for a quite long time. People accused it of being a Ponzi scheme, which given that enormous interest sounds likely. That's why I never put a cent in it:-)
Filling by a human means that there's a potential for an unclear choice. Given a tight race, somebody WILL start to argue what exactly constitutes a ballot with a clear vote, and how much deviation from a precise choice is acceptable.
Requiring your signature is bad. Many people sign with their own name. Not good for anonymity. Given the sequence number and handwriting the voter can be identified.
Official's signature is unneeded. What does it add, other than making participating in an election even more annoying for that worker?
Sequence number is unnecessary.
Receipt is unnecessary, what are you going to do with it? If you ever use it for any sort of verification, your vote isn't anonymous anymore.
The reason why I like the idea of a machine printing your ballot is because unlike a human, a machine has the ability of generating something that's 100% unambiguous, with absolutely no wiggle room. A machine could print a ballot in such a way that it's nearly impossible to scan it getting the wrong result and that a human can just throw a heap of them into a table and sort them visually.
Also, I imagine that in another few hundred years, radio will become nearly impossible to understand to anybody who happens to tune into it by chance.
The spectrum is unfortunately not an infinite resource, and as time goes on we'll have to resort to compressing everything to squeeze more useful data through. I wouldn't be surprised if in 200 years from now a standard AM/FM radio could only pick up noise coming from from transmitters that use frequency hopping and transmit compressed data, mixed with unintelligible random noise from whatever happens to leak it. Compressed data also happens to sound exactly like random noise to a listener who doesn't know how to decode it.
I would expect that other advanced civilizations would go along the same path.
Homeworld: You take the ships you got one level to the next. Could suck really badly if you didn't do one mission well, as you'd start the next and more difficult one in a disfavourable position. On the other hand, perfectly realistic given the setting.
Fallen Haven. Turns based strategy game where you could choose which territory to attack, produce and organize defence on territories that were already won, defend, etc.
Main machine consists of a screen, CPU and printer. It only prints ballots, and doesn't count anything. Ballots are printed in a human and computer readable format, in an easy to OCR font. No barcodes or anything hidden. Perhaps in different ink colors to make manual sorting easier.
Machine prints ballot and shows it to the voter. Voter approves or discards it.
Ballot is fed into an optical scanner, which scans it. Scanner is implemented as absolutely simply as possible, by for example measuring levels of reflected light. No software.
Both the machine printing the vote and the scanner transmit their results to a comparator. This would be implemented in very simple electronics -- resistors, capacitors, and standard chips implementing logical functions. No custom components, or anything capable of running any sort of software. Comparator compares what the terminal said it printed, and what the scanner said it scanned. The result makes a simple mechanical component move (with a magnet for instance) so that the ballot is either stored or discarded. Comparator also increments a tamper-evident, mechanical counter.
Counter is built in such a way that each increment produces an audible sound, so that increments at the wrong time can be noticed.
Mechanism contains safeguards to verify that moving components actually moved to the intended position.
Interactions and interfaces between components are standarized. Each component is fabricated by a different manufacturer. Manufacturers are not notified who is working on the other parts. For best security, multiple manufacturers are asked to implement a solution, then the ones that passs the test are chosen at random.
My point there is that as long as the initial setup consists of arcane incantations, it'll remain too unfriendly for most people to even try to use it. Sure, once you get Linux into an XBox you can apt-get software, but how do you get it there in the first place? To my knowledge (don't have an XBox) getting Linux there involves things like modchips and exploiting saved games, and that is the problem.
My point, again, is that there's not going to be any sort of revolution. The iPhone is exactly the wrong sort of thing that'd be needed for one to happen. The WRT54G access point was a "revolution". It's easy to play with it, and even normal people can benefit from the vastly improved feature set of alternate firmare. But the iPhone? It'll be even less of a revolution than Linux on the XBox where there's at least the angle of that the hardware is actually a PC and underpriced.
To add to that, if ( FrameBuffer != FALSE ) probably intends to check whether it's a NULL pointer, but NULL isn't guaranteed to be (void*)0. Probably harmless if it happens to work right on that particular architecture, but should they switch to something else it'd be trouble.
Because it's cool and geeky to hack a piece of hardware that's made to make it difficult. It's a challenge. Like with the XBox.
Now, how many normal people actually run Linux or something that's not games on one of those? I would guess that these markets have relatively few overlaps. People who buy an XBox to run Linux on it are geeks knowing that MS underpriced hardware and want to take advantage of that. They're FAR from normal users. I'm a geek, and I don't have use for such things, as the effort to get something to run would far outweight the cost of paying a bit more for say, a mini-ITX board. This is a TINY market.
For any sort of "revolution" to happen you need something like a PC: Standard, open hardware anybody can write something for. Otherwise only the very small percentage of people willing to jump through hoops will actually do something with it. People also need to know that they can install something on it, or nobody will use your creations.
IMO, people who want to develop for a mobile platform won't be messing with an iPod, they'll be making applications for Treo, Blackberry, OpenMoko, Zaurus, Windows CE based platforms, etc. There's no lack of these.
Now, if what you really want to do is to crack a piece of hardware and work around its restrictions, then yeah, the iPhone works nicely. But it's not going to be any sort of revolution, because very few people will ever find about it, and fewer still will give a damn.
It's a nice accomplishment that somebody managed to add a terminal to their iPhone, but unless they somehow manage to come up with a way of installing their app on an unmodified iPhone that doesn't require going through arcane incantations, there's not going to be much of a revolution. And if they find one, Apple may very well close that hole in the next firmware revision.
Nobody cares about the iPhone as a platform either.
With no official SDK who is going to make applications for it? Maybe a couple of geeks happy to mess with something that's not documented and for which there's absolutely zero support from the vendor, but nobody of much importance. They'll have exactly the same problem you say OpenMoko has: That very few people will ever hear that something can be installed into an iPhone, and fewer yet will install something.
Installing applications will probably not be just a matter of point and click on a standard phone either.
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Well, in Second Life I'd say I'm pretty much my RL self. Only blue and with a tail :-)
For example, just like in RL, it feels uncomfortable to stand too close to somebody. I talk about the same things, and behave nearly the same, with a few inhibitions.
Subversion works, but like Linus says, it's nothing wonderful. You can hardly point at some feature of it and say it was the product of a genius. It does CVS right, and that's about it.
But SVN is limiting. For example I have a fork of the Second Life source, and SVN was PAIN for that. I ended up switching to SVK because it was the first thing I found that could sync with a SVN repository (which is what LL hosts), but Git would probably be also a fine choice as well.
SVN's problem is that when you want to branch somebody's source but still follow it by merging improvements it becomes really painful. You have to use svn-load-dirs, which is a hack. You have to give it megabytes of source to process, which can suck really badly when you've got your SNV repository hosted externally so that other people can access it.
Religion discourages thinking.
If it didn't, we wouldn't have people talking about how the earth is 6000 years old because it says so in the Bible.
Spain uses , but has no TV license.
Why? Cryonics should preserve the body as it is, with all molecules frozen in place. When unfrozen, in theory, this molecular machinery would just resume working and you'd keep your memory.
Also, IIRC, there's been some progress with the ice crystals problem.
As far as I can tell, the check isn't done in a default install, you've got to install an apt package and the keyring package for it to work.
That's a problem in itself, 99% of people won't do that.
With signatures in place, and verification by default when packages are installed, you'd need more than just breaking into a server to cause serious damage.
Ubuntu seems to have something in place already, but from my look at it, doesn't seem nearly as insistent on security as it should be.
It doesn't seem to be very widely known, but at least on Linux, all of 127.0.0.0/8 is assigned to the loopback. So 127.85.31.97 would work just as well, in case you happen to find a script kiddie a bit smarter than average.
That'd be very unsurprising, but not terribly enlightening.
I don't remember ever seeing a product "Made in America". Nearly everything comes from China these days, including the vast majority of the things sold under american brands.
Just a little correction: The 20-30K number is the amount of people logged in right now.
Since people generally can't remain awake and logged into SL 24/7, there's got to be more active accounts than that.
Because 70% is a lot larger than 5%, of course.
Now, I think that Ginko is very likely to be a Ponzi scheme. Not necessarily intentionally though, I think they did try to invest that money to be able to provide that interest, but of course that sort of profit is awfully hard to make and we're seeing the result.
The thing about Ponzi schemes is that they work, for a while. The early investors DO get their interest. It's the later ones who get screwed. So if you're not terribly ethical, you could put money into something like that knowing you have a good chance of getting what they promise, so long you join early enough, and take your cash before the whole thing goes under.
Well, let's look at the stats, then.
There are 18,875 accounts. Right now there are 34,822 people logged in (see http://secondlife.com/ ). In the last 60 days, 1,646,830 people logged in. So the total Ginko userbase is not all that great compared to the amount of people who use SL.
Next, it's quite reasonable to assume that a good portion of those 18,875 are by people who put there L$1 (USD $.00370) as a test, then forgot about it.
Now, they say their deposits are L$94,441,798 = USD $349,784. But, Ginko's claims about the amount of deposits were cast into doubt by several people, and that number seems to include interest, that is money they would be expected to give, but which none of the users actually put there.
Average amount of money per account is $349,784 / 18,875 = $18.53
Looking at the SL statistics:
US$ Spent Last 24h: $1,433,039
LindeX Activity Last 24h: $223,005
You can see that even the claimed amount of money isn't all that huge, and after years of operation at the enormous interest they claimed, most of that cash must be accumulated interest anyway.
While I bet some people will lose something quite significant, I don't think it's nearly as big as the article says.
Well, SL really isn't much of a game. You can implement games inside it, but it's not a game itself.
And while some people do have lots of fun there, others do business. Business is quite possibly to do successfully in SL, but just like in reality they go bankrupt as well when things don't go as planned.
Ginko is a resident run bank, which has nothing really special about it. You can it on their own a href="https://ginkofinancial.com/">website: They only claim to have 18,875 accounts, quite a few of which probably were created as a test. Nowhere near the 8.5 million claimed.
:-)
Ginko's problem was their insane interest rates, which IIRC varied somewhere between 100% and 30% per year. I think it was 70% for a quite long time. People accused it of being a Ponzi scheme, which given that enormous interest sounds likely. That's why I never put a cent in it
I don't like it. Problems:
Filling by a human means that there's a potential for an unclear choice. Given a tight race, somebody WILL start to argue what exactly constitutes a ballot with a clear vote, and how much deviation from a precise choice is acceptable.
Requiring your signature is bad. Many people sign with their own name. Not good for anonymity. Given the sequence number and handwriting the voter can be identified.
Official's signature is unneeded. What does it add, other than making participating in an election even more annoying for that worker?
Sequence number is unnecessary.
Receipt is unnecessary, what are you going to do with it? If you ever use it for any sort of verification, your vote isn't anonymous anymore.
The reason why I like the idea of a machine printing your ballot is because unlike a human, a machine has the ability of generating something that's 100% unambiguous, with absolutely no wiggle room. A machine could print a ballot in such a way that it's nearly impossible to scan it getting the wrong result and that a human can just throw a heap of them into a table and sort them visually.
Also, I imagine that in another few hundred years, radio will become nearly impossible to understand to anybody who happens to tune into it by chance.
The spectrum is unfortunately not an infinite resource, and as time goes on we'll have to resort to compressing everything to squeeze more useful data through. I wouldn't be surprised if in 200 years from now a standard AM/FM radio could only pick up noise coming from from transmitters that use frequency hopping and transmit compressed data, mixed with unintelligible random noise from whatever happens to leak it. Compressed data also happens to sound exactly like random noise to a listener who doesn't know how to decode it.
I would expect that other advanced civilizations would go along the same path.
Not a new concept either.
Homeworld: You take the ships you got one level to the next. Could suck really badly if you didn't do one mission well, as you'd start the next and more difficult one in a disfavourable position. On the other hand, perfectly realistic given the setting.
Fallen Haven. Turns based strategy game where you could choose which territory to attack, produce and organize defence on territories that were already won, defend, etc.
Main machine consists of a screen, CPU and printer. It only prints ballots, and doesn't count anything. Ballots are printed in a human and computer readable format, in an easy to OCR font. No barcodes or anything hidden. Perhaps in different ink colors to make manual sorting easier.
Machine prints ballot and shows it to the voter. Voter approves or discards it.
Ballot is fed into an optical scanner, which scans it. Scanner is implemented as absolutely simply as possible, by for example measuring levels of reflected light. No software.
Both the machine printing the vote and the scanner transmit their results to a comparator. This would be implemented in very simple electronics -- resistors, capacitors, and standard chips implementing logical functions. No custom components, or anything capable of running any sort of software. Comparator compares what the terminal said it printed, and what the scanner said it scanned. The result makes a simple mechanical component move (with a magnet for instance) so that the ballot is either stored or discarded. Comparator also increments a tamper-evident, mechanical counter.
Counter is built in such a way that each increment produces an audible sound, so that increments at the wrong time can be noticed.
Mechanism contains safeguards to verify that moving components actually moved to the intended position.
Interactions and interfaces between components are standarized. Each component is fabricated by a different manufacturer. Manufacturers are not notified who is working on the other parts. For best security, multiple manufacturers are asked to implement a solution, then the ones that passs the test are chosen at random.
Ok, and how do you install that package manager?
My point there is that as long as the initial setup consists of arcane incantations, it'll remain too unfriendly for most people to even try to use it. Sure, once you get Linux into an XBox you can apt-get software, but how do you get it there in the first place? To my knowledge (don't have an XBox) getting Linux there involves things like modchips and exploiting saved games, and that is the problem.
My point, again, is that there's not going to be any sort of revolution. The iPhone is exactly the wrong sort of thing that'd be needed for one to happen. The WRT54G access point was a "revolution". It's easy to play with it, and even normal people can benefit from the vastly improved feature set of alternate firmare. But the iPhone? It'll be even less of a revolution than Linux on the XBox where there's at least the angle of that the hardware is actually a PC and underpriced.
To add to that, if ( FrameBuffer != FALSE ) probably intends to check whether it's a NULL pointer, but NULL isn't guaranteed to be (void*)0. Probably harmless if it happens to work right on that particular architecture, but should they switch to something else it'd be trouble.
Because it's cool and geeky to hack a piece of hardware that's made to make it difficult. It's a challenge. Like with the XBox.
Now, how many normal people actually run Linux or something that's not games on one of those? I would guess that these markets have relatively few overlaps. People who buy an XBox to run Linux on it are geeks knowing that MS underpriced hardware and want to take advantage of that. They're FAR from normal users. I'm a geek, and I don't have use for such things, as the effort to get something to run would far outweight the cost of paying a bit more for say, a mini-ITX board. This is a TINY market.
For any sort of "revolution" to happen you need something like a PC: Standard, open hardware anybody can write something for. Otherwise only the very small percentage of people willing to jump through hoops will actually do something with it. People also need to know that they can install something on it, or nobody will use your creations.
IMO, people who want to develop for a mobile platform won't be messing with an iPod, they'll be making applications for Treo, Blackberry, OpenMoko, Zaurus, Windows CE based platforms, etc. There's no lack of these.
Now, if what you really want to do is to crack a piece of hardware and work around its restrictions, then yeah, the iPhone works nicely. But it's not going to be any sort of revolution, because very few people will ever find about it, and fewer still will give a damn.
Standard iPhone I mean.
It's a nice accomplishment that somebody managed to add a terminal to their iPhone, but unless they somehow manage to come up with a way of installing their app on an unmodified iPhone that doesn't require going through arcane incantations, there's not going to be much of a revolution. And if they find one, Apple may very well close that hole in the next firmware revision.
Nobody cares about the iPhone as a platform either.
With no official SDK who is going to make applications for it? Maybe a couple of geeks happy to mess with something that's not documented and for which there's absolutely zero support from the vendor, but nobody of much importance. They'll have exactly the same problem you say OpenMoko has: That very few people will ever hear that something can be installed into an iPhone, and fewer yet will install something.
Installing applications will probably not be just a matter of point and click on a standard phone either.
My desktop uses one of these. Not sure what your point is supposed to be though.
Open hardware seems to have been manufactured
Never heard of this? LinuxBIOS
If you're going to say that hardware isn't open, that's solvable as well.