It's ridiculous that the RIAA is making it impossible to use the P2P services as a legitimate and reasonable way to preview music, do research, listen to alternate mixes, or save the trouble of ripping music we already own.
Personally, I buy whatever music I come across which I enjoy. I should be able to explore what's out there without having to feel like I'm taking a risk.
Well, at the very least, this news was the catalyst for me to get around to renewing my EFF membership.
BTW, if you call them, they have a monthly donation option, which is good for slackers like me who are lazy about renewing. =)
When people release popular applications on the internet, there is always a risk that somebody will take that application archive file (zip, tgz), open it, inject malicious changes, re-zip it, and then drop that file into a P2P network, or just hack into a mirror site and replace the valid copy with his own.
These "Hash" functions (MD5, SHA) can give the people who download archives a way to confirm that the files are exact copies of the original, and have not been tampered with.
They can confirm this by going to the original distributor, looking up the posted MD5, and comparing that to a check of their own downloaded copy. If it's the same, they are practically certian to be in the clear. If it's not, then it's likely that the file was corrupted in the transfer process, or someone changed it.
The thing is, these hashes are not unique to every concieveable random file that could ever be generated (since a hash is smaller than the files).
A single hash can describe many, many different files, however these algorithms (MD5, SHA) are supposed to make it very difficult to discover *other* files which would result in the same hash.
Here's what this article is about: this team has discovered that in the case of SHA-0, "very difficult" isn't as difficult as it theoretically should be (though it does presently remain quite difficult).
What worries the crypto people is that something like this can be a "crack in the dam" that could open wider as the weakness is better understood.
The implications aren't just for confirming the intact contents of your downloaded files; hashes also play a key part in most cryptography, including the algorithms in https.
Presently, it's not too much for most people to worry about. This is still very far off from being exploitable, since all it does is finds some random chunk of binary data which makes a matching hash. In this case, all you'd get opening the compromised download is random junk data that could neither infect your machine or do anything intentional.
The time to worry is when it's feasible to make an already existing, *useful* chunk of data generate a hash that matches another predefined hash. In this case, someone could take the archive, inject their modifications, then pad the archive with some specially-chosen data to make the final hash match.
But unless some sudden miraculous breakthroughs are discovered, that's still a long way off.
I'm still fairly new to understanding crypto, but I'm fairly certian this is an accurate explanation. However, I'll happily accept any corrections. =)
One possibility not mentioned is that we do live in a universe capable of evolving multiple instances of intelligent beings, but we are the first to survive to the technological level capable of transcieving signals.
It's kind of an egocentric view, but *someone* has to be first, and whoever they are must have wondered where the hell everyone else is, given that all indications are there should be others out there somewhere =)
The ISP would probably suspend her Internet account, giving Penquin the opportunity to seize the domain name.
Unless the ISP was also the domain registrar and there was a clause in the registration that said the domain actually belongs to the ISP, I don't see how the web hosting ISP can affect ownership of the domain name.
This reminds me of a good short sci-fi story called The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, where an evolving artificial intelligence used CPUs that communicated with each other via a "quantum tunnelling" type technology called the "Correlation Effect".
It's a neat story, which also incorporates Asimov's laws of robotics as a strong basis for the plot.
I live in South Florida and on a rare event when the shuttle was landing northbound, I took an opportunity to go outside to determine if it was possible to see anything on re-entry.
I didn't see any indication of it in the sky, but right about the time it should have passed over, I heard what must have been two sonic booms.
I recall it sounded like the booms you would hear from the big pyrotechnics shows on July 4th, if you heard them from several miles away.
After reading your post now I'm curious, why is it two booms instead of one?
I'm guessing that it not only helped with claustrophobia, but probably gave people a visual sense of their motion so they didn't get as much motion sickness.
This reminds me of the examples often given when discussing relativity experiments =)
The very idea behind those arts is that some things are inherent in the makeup of mankind.
You make an assumption that the inthernet aspects of mankind are incapable of change.
No, the author pretends that this humanity does not exist. Maybe the tone of the story itself demonstrates that our humanity is dynamic and is shifting to a darker shade?
Despite whether or not it was intentional, the story is a self-example.
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Just going by what you've said, you might consider doing some research on high functioning autism (ie Asperger's Syndrome) and see if the profile fits his behavior.
I agree. I think the people who complain that they would pay $15/month to only be able to log in for 5 hours a week have a legitimate claim.
MMORPGs aren't generally targetted to people who have a lot of expenses and a lot of things going on in their lives right now. Single-player games would be better suited to entertaining these people.
Seriously, if you don't have a lot of free time, MMORPGs aren't targetted to your demographic.
So it's really quite silly to argue, "I won't pay that because I don't have the time to get value out of it" because you're basically saying "I won't buy X becuase X isn't made for me".
It'd be like me going out and buying gardening tools, when I live on a 3rd floor apartment, and then complaining that gardening tools are useless for me and they cost too much.
All the mmrpgs I know release new content via expansion packs. The only thing they release monthly are bug fixes and balance issues.
You've not played City of Heroes then. The first update added levels 41-50, two new zones, the ability to change your costume, some new mobs, new social abilities, and some new missions/tilesets.
The next update will bring us the ability to re-assign our powers, new mission objective types, at least two new zones, new character customizations (capes, particles, etc), new mission art, new mob AI, customizable missions, instant trade ability, etc.
CoH is quite refreshing. They started right off from release with a very bug-free and highly playable game.
The box price for most MMOs usually drops after a few months from release, as it should.
The high cost at the beginning is used to recover the initial development costs, but once those costs are covered, it's usually more beneficial to drop the box price so you can draw in more people for the long run. From what I've seen, this is usually what happens.
MOAPI expounds on the idea that immortality and absolute control of reality somehow leads to a nebulous feeling of emptiness and futility leading to self-destructive decadence Have you ever played an MMORPG or MMO Virtual World? What happens when people start getting bored?
Now multiply this times, essentially, infinity, with the added concept that you can never leave the game.
I think it is, at the very least, a plausible possibility that billions of people immortalized in a your-every-wish-is-fulfilled "reality" would get a bit... nutty.
it looks alot the same as 'There' which i 'played' the trial version of
On the surface SL looks a lot like There and Active Worlds, but the difference is that SL is more geared to giving everyone tools and letting them create the content instead of feeding you with content created by the company itself.
And are they mostly 3d-modelers/ coders on there, or a more general mix of people
There are a lot of amateur and professional coders and 3d modelers in SL. I know of at least a few people who have admitted to me that they currently work with big 3d game companies and have shown me their real-life professional portfolio.
The tools are actually surprisingly good too for such an environment. Most technically-minded people seem to be impressed by what they've created.
- Building and linking models using 3d primitives - Scripting objects to interact, move, or exhibit certian behaviors. The syntax is much like event-modeled C and the API has over 200 function calls. - Custom texturing where you upload arbitrary TGA/JPG textures which you can place on any object or wear as clothing - Custom sounds where you upload arbitrary WAV files and can script them to play however you want - You can now also upload custom "poser" animations you can script or apply directly to your avatar
Of course with a lot of amateurs there will be varying degrees of quality for different builds. Some people are content with sticking with the default "plywood" texture that comes when you build, and others seem to remind me of the days of the netscape (blink) tag as they like to try to use every feature in the toolbox on their builds. But for the most part it's a trip to explore the world and quite easy to make things.
Admittedly the name of the world is quite cheesy, but the technical achievement is fairly impressive and worth taking a look at.
My sig contains a referral, but if that offends you, click here instead to go directly to the website.
Ignore the crappy screenshots and BS marketing crap on their website, it doesn't represent the in-world well, and you'll find it's a lot more impressive once you log in than the website will lead you to believe. =)
Running 300 simulators on 100 servers, by load-balancing the simulators so that currently-not-logged-in or currently-not-much-happening simulators get put 2-5 on one server while busy simulators get a full server like today.
SL does not use load balancing in this way.
Simply buying a more powerful server and run 2 simulators on it. With standard hardware-progress that'll happen at no increased price for them in something like a year or so.
It still costs money to add land. Halving the cost does not make it free.
Simply running two simulators on one server. I don't buy your "this would be obvious" for a second.
Then you are not a resident of SL. Why are there so many people here who speak like an authority who have no experience with the very subject of which they speak so confidently?
This would certainly be no more obvious than the difference between a busy and a non-busy server already is. Do *you* know *exactly* how busy your server should be
Yes.
that is, do you know exactly how many scripts and complex items your neighbours have running, and the exact resource-utilisation of each ?
You can throw the words "exact" and "exactly" in there and make my answer obvious, however I'll ignore these words so as to make my answer "Roughly, yes".
There is a very strong co-relation between the behavior of objects which you can see running in a simulator and the simulator's given performance numbers. This co-relation is strong enough to be quite intuitive once you've become familiar with the place.
Of course, no, it's not EXACT, but it will be OBVIOUS if everything is running half as slow as it should be that something's not right with that server.
As it is right now, you can't teleport to any arbitrary location in SL. You can only teleport to specific destinations, or be pulled to another person's location by that person.
In theory, the land around these "telehub" destinations should be higher in value. I haven't looked to see if this has indeed worked out in practice.
More than one region can be run on a single server, but it would be obvious since you'd get less than half the performance out of each.
Sigh. My original statement in this thread should probably have been written "Land can't be added without adding hardware because people would know they were being scammed", since that's the context it was written in response to.
Ok, technically the numbers can lie, but the performance difference will be obvious to most people who have been in SL for a while and know how a region behaves when it's being overutilized.
It's not as easy to change as you think. SL has an economy that includes selling content that you've made, including scripted objects.
All of the code that residents have written which works with the existing physics engine to move objects between regions would be broke. This would involve vehicles, data networks, objects which deliver other objects, etc.
I have at least a couple humble scripts that I wrote myself which would need updating. This would indeed be easy for me to do, especially since I never sold them to anyone. But that is not the case with a lot of objects.
So if this changed, not only would it piss off a lot of content developers, but it would also piss off their "customers" who bought content from them with a currency which has real-money value (thereby invoking the dissatisfied-customer mentality).
Admittedly, it is technically feasable to do. You got me on that logical flaw of my statement, congratulations. However, in practice, region sizes can't be changed in SL without starting on a brand new grid with a clean slate.
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It's ridiculous that the RIAA is making it impossible to use the P2P services as a legitimate and reasonable way to preview music, do research, listen to alternate mixes, or save the trouble of ripping music we already own.
Personally, I buy whatever music I come across which I enjoy. I should be able to explore what's out there without having to feel like I'm taking a risk.
Well, at the very least, this news was the catalyst for me to get around to renewing my EFF membership.
BTW, if you call them, they have a monthly donation option, which is good for slackers like me who are lazy about renewing. =)
When people release popular applications on the internet, there is always a risk that somebody will take that application archive file (zip, tgz), open it, inject malicious changes, re-zip it, and then drop that file into a P2P network, or just hack into a mirror site and replace the valid copy with his own.
These "Hash" functions (MD5, SHA) can give the people who download archives a way to confirm that the files are exact copies of the original, and have not been tampered with.
They can confirm this by going to the original distributor, looking up the posted MD5, and comparing that to a check of their own downloaded copy. If it's the same, they are practically certian to be in the clear. If it's not, then it's likely that the file was corrupted in the transfer process, or someone changed it.
The thing is, these hashes are not unique to every concieveable random file that could ever be generated (since a hash is smaller than the files).
A single hash can describe many, many different files, however these algorithms (MD5, SHA) are supposed to make it very difficult to discover *other* files which would result in the same hash.
Here's what this article is about: this team has discovered that in the case of SHA-0, "very difficult" isn't as difficult as it theoretically should be (though it does presently remain quite difficult).
What worries the crypto people is that something like this can be a "crack in the dam" that could open wider as the weakness is better understood.
The implications aren't just for confirming the intact contents of your downloaded files; hashes also play a key part in most cryptography, including the algorithms in https.
Presently, it's not too much for most people to worry about. This is still very far off from being exploitable, since all it does is finds some random chunk of binary data which makes a matching hash. In this case, all you'd get opening the compromised download is random junk data that could neither infect your machine or do anything intentional.
The time to worry is when it's feasible to make an already existing, *useful* chunk of data generate a hash that matches another predefined hash. In this case, someone could take the archive, inject their modifications, then pad the archive with some specially-chosen data to make the final hash match.
But unless some sudden miraculous breakthroughs are discovered, that's still a long way off.
I'm still fairly new to understanding crypto, but I'm fairly certian this is an accurate explanation. However, I'll happily accept any corrections. =)
Going by my experience on a treadmill, I'd say power walking starts a little lower than 5 mph and I highly doubt anyone can walk 12 mph =)
By enabling intergenetic breeding, the genes from a cocoa plant can be placed direclty into coffee beans, alongside genes from a cow.
Even better, how about doing research for gene therapy so that my body makes it's own caffiene =)
One possibility not mentioned is that we do live in a universe capable of evolving multiple instances of intelligent beings, but we are the first to survive to the technological level capable of transcieving signals.
It's kind of an egocentric view, but *someone* has to be first, and whoever they are must have wondered where the hell everyone else is, given that all indications are there should be others out there somewhere =)
Does this mean we may finally see blue laser pointers before too long, at a reasonable price?
The ISP would probably suspend her Internet account, giving Penquin the opportunity to seize the domain name.
Unless the ISP was also the domain registrar and there was a clause in the registration that said the domain actually belongs to the ISP, I don't see how the web hosting ISP can affect ownership of the domain name.
This reminds me of a good short sci-fi story called The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, where an evolving artificial intelligence used CPUs that communicated with each other via a "quantum tunnelling" type technology called the "Correlation Effect".
It's a neat story, which also incorporates Asimov's laws of robotics as a strong basis for the plot.
This sounds like the Amiga DEVS: directory, where each driver was a *.device file, IIRC.
I live in South Florida and on a rare event when the shuttle was landing northbound, I took an opportunity to go outside to determine if it was possible to see anything on re-entry.
I didn't see any indication of it in the sky, but right about the time it should have passed over, I heard what must have been two sonic booms.
I recall it sounded like the booms you would hear from the big pyrotechnics shows on July 4th, if you heard them from several miles away.
After reading your post now I'm curious, why is it two booms instead of one?
I'm guessing that it not only helped with claustrophobia, but probably gave people a visual sense of their motion so they didn't get as much motion sickness.
This reminds me of the examples often given when discussing relativity experiments =)
According to this page, it may be even more impressive than that.
The very idea behind those arts is that some things are inherent in the makeup of mankind.
You make an assumption that the inthernet aspects of mankind are incapable of change.
No, the author pretends that this humanity does not exist.
Maybe the tone of the story itself demonstrates that our humanity is dynamic and is shifting to a darker shade?
Despite whether or not it was intentional, the story is a self-example.
Just going by what you've said, you might consider doing some research on high functioning autism (ie Asperger's Syndrome) and see if the profile fits his behavior.
Take it one step further and you have a Traffic Circle =)
I agree. I think the people who complain that they would pay $15/month to only be able to log in for 5 hours a week have a legitimate claim.
MMORPGs aren't generally targetted to people who have a lot of expenses and a lot of things going on in their lives right now. Single-player games would be better suited to entertaining these people.
Seriously, if you don't have a lot of free time, MMORPGs aren't targetted to your demographic.
So it's really quite silly to argue, "I won't pay that because I don't have the time to get value out of it" because you're basically saying "I won't buy X becuase X isn't made for me".
It'd be like me going out and buying gardening tools, when I live on a 3rd floor apartment, and then complaining that gardening tools are useless for me and they cost too much.
All the mmrpgs I know release new content via expansion packs. The only thing they release monthly are bug fixes and balance issues.
You've not played City of Heroes then. The first update added levels 41-50, two new zones, the ability to change your costume, some new mobs, new social abilities, and some new missions/tilesets.
The next update will bring us the ability to re-assign our powers, new mission objective types, at least two new zones, new character customizations (capes, particles, etc), new mission art, new mob AI, customizable missions, instant trade ability, etc.
CoH is quite refreshing. They started right off from release with a very bug-free and highly playable game.
The box price for most MMOs usually drops after a few months from release, as it should.
The high cost at the beginning is used to recover the initial development costs, but once those costs are covered, it's usually more beneficial to drop the box price so you can draw in more people for the long run. From what I've seen, this is usually what happens.
MOAPI expounds on the idea that immortality and absolute control of reality somehow leads to a nebulous feeling of emptiness and futility leading to self-destructive decadence
Have you ever played an MMORPG or MMO Virtual World? What happens when people start getting bored?
Now multiply this times, essentially, infinity, with the added concept that you can never leave the game.
I think it is, at the very least, a plausible possibility that billions of people immortalized in a your-every-wish-is-fulfilled "reality" would get a bit... nutty.
On the surface SL looks a lot like There and Active Worlds, but the difference is that SL is more geared to giving everyone tools and letting them create the content instead of feeding you with content created by the company itself.
There are a lot of amateur and professional coders and 3d modelers in SL. I know of at least a few people who have admitted to me that they currently work with big 3d game companies and have shown me their real-life professional portfolio.
The tools are actually surprisingly good too for such an environment. Most technically-minded people seem to be impressed by what they've created.
- Building and linking models using 3d primitives
- Scripting objects to interact, move, or exhibit certian behaviors. The syntax is much like event-modeled C and the API has over 200 function calls.
- Custom texturing where you upload arbitrary TGA/JPG textures which you can place on any object or wear as clothing
- Custom sounds where you upload arbitrary WAV files and can script them to play however you want
- You can now also upload custom "poser" animations you can script or apply directly to your avatar
Of course with a lot of amateurs there will be varying degrees of quality for different builds. Some people are content with sticking with the default "plywood" texture that comes when you build, and others seem to remind me of the days of the netscape (blink) tag as they like to try to use every feature in the toolbox on their builds. But for the most part it's a trip to explore the world and quite easy to make things.
Admittedly the name of the world is quite cheesy, but the technical achievement is fairly impressive and worth taking a look at.
My sig contains a referral, but if that offends you, click here instead to go directly to the website.
Ignore the crappy screenshots and BS marketing crap on their website, it doesn't represent the in-world well, and you'll find it's a lot more impressive once you log in than the website will lead you to believe. =)
This will be great, however it seems like the trend in home internet access is a highly asymmetrical connection.
This does not lend itself well to a P2P metaverse =(
Running 300 simulators on 100 servers, by load-balancing the simulators so that currently-not-logged-in or currently-not-much-happening simulators get put 2-5 on one server while busy simulators get a full server like today.
SL does not use load balancing in this way.
Simply buying a more powerful server and run 2 simulators on it. With standard hardware-progress that'll happen at no increased price for them in something like a year or so.
It still costs money to add land. Halving the cost does not make it free.
Simply running two simulators on one server. I don't buy your "this would be obvious" for a second.
Then you are not a resident of SL. Why are there so many people here who speak like an authority who have no experience with the very subject of which they speak so confidently?
This would certainly be no more obvious than the difference between a busy and a non-busy server already is. Do *you* know *exactly* how busy your server should be
Yes.
that is, do you know exactly how many scripts and complex items your neighbours have running, and the exact resource-utilisation of each ?
You can throw the words "exact" and "exactly" in there and make my answer obvious, however I'll ignore these words so as to make my answer "Roughly, yes".
There is a very strong co-relation between the behavior of objects which you can see running in a simulator and the simulator's given performance numbers. This co-relation is strong enough to be quite intuitive once you've become familiar with the place.
Of course, no, it's not EXACT, but it will be OBVIOUS if everything is running half as slow as it should be that something's not right with that server.
As it is right now, you can't teleport to any arbitrary location in SL. You can only teleport to specific destinations, or be pulled to another person's location by that person.
In theory, the land around these "telehub" destinations should be higher in value. I haven't looked to see if this has indeed worked out in practice.
More than one region can be run on a single server, but it would be obvious since you'd get less than half the performance out of each.
Sigh. My original statement in this thread should probably have been written "Land can't be added without adding hardware because people would know they were being scammed", since that's the context it was written in response to.
Ok, technically the numbers can lie, but the performance difference will be obvious to most people who have been in SL for a while and know how a region behaves when it's being overutilized.
It's not as easy to change as you think. SL has an economy that includes selling content that you've made, including scripted objects.
All of the code that residents have written which works with the existing physics engine to move objects between regions would be broke. This would involve vehicles, data networks, objects which deliver other objects, etc.
I have at least a couple humble scripts that I wrote myself which would need updating. This would indeed be easy for me to do, especially since I never sold them to anyone. But that is not the case with a lot of objects.
So if this changed, not only would it piss off a lot of content developers, but it would also piss off their "customers" who bought content from them with a currency which has real-money value (thereby invoking the dissatisfied-customer mentality).
Admittedly, it is technically feasable to do. You got me on that logical flaw of my statement, congratulations. However, in practice, region sizes can't be changed in SL without starting on a brand new grid with a clean slate.