I think there just isn't a lot of room on the market for subscription-based games. I suspect most people will have a budget for one or so, and they will have invested quite a bit of time in it - so there's very little incentive to switch.
I think the Guild Wars model is much better: you pay for the game, you play for free. If you decide to stop for a few months, and pick it up later - no problem. If you decide you like the game and want access to more content, you buy the expansion packs.
Raw network latency would not be the only contributing factor to the overall latency. Just imagine the latency introduced by the audio and video encoding (their infrastructure) and decoding (the minimal hardware at home). Plus all the tricks they'll have to pull to scale their infrastructure, etc. I'd be surprised if they can pull it all off.
But who knows, maybe they really have some clever ideas; I'm genuinely curious as to how they'll try and tackle the technical issues.
Yep I meant the latter;) Let's just bypass everything IE and render with another engine like webkit (triggered by a content-type or meta tag or something). Would people notice?
If I look at my linux install, webkitgtk used by midori takes about 14M, while the flash 10 plugin takes around 10M.
The alternative is waiting until IE8 support can be dropped, around the time IE10 gets well established. I guess poor web developers have a long wait ahead of them still.
Theora could really take off if a Flash-based decoder could be made for it, so that no codec download was required, and any video site could use it transparently. But how much of the video decoding for Youtube is actually written in Flash, and how much is done by a H264 accelerator in the Flash virtual machine?
All of it is done by the VM. However these days AVM2 in the flash player is decent enough to have a complete bytecode based Vorbis decoder. It's most likely too slow for Theora though.
On the other hand, there's Cortado - a java applet able to play Theora. Good enough?
To play H.264 content you also need to install extra software (on Windows). Installing a Theora codec in addition to a H.264 codec isn't really a big deal is it?
I think the fundamental issue is that the DMCA and DRM allows the "industry" to write their own laws.
With the DMCA and the anti-circumvention provisions, the restriction code has the power of law - circumventing it is illegal.
So they can ignore whatever fair use privilege we used to enjoy, because fair use privileges aren't guaranteed rights: if you can't make use of it for whatever reason - tough; they're not required to provide you with tools or systems to give you what you want, even if it could be legal.
So this all boils down to the fact that we've lost all fair use in copyright law (maybe not in theory, but definitely in practice), and as such, copyright has become completely unbalanced in favour of the copyright owners.
The tradeoff was: a temporary monopoly on distribution with some fair use exceptions, in return for a rich public domain later on.
Not only have we lost fair use, we've also lost the public domain part later on. Because the DRM on copyrighted works that end up in the public domain isn't going to magically disappear.
All we're left with is "a monopoly on distribution" - that's not what copyright was supposed to be.
Maybe not exactly the answer you're looking for, seeing as Samba4 is not out yet; however samba4 includes, among other things:
* Internal LDAP server, with AD semantics * Internal Kerberos server, including PAC support
You can, but don't have to hook it up to an external LDAP server. You can use MMC consoles to manage it. They're even building real Outlook compatible Exchange functionality on top of it (see openchange.org). Not that I'd ever want to run Outlook though.
Trying to find drivers on some website, and running some installer hoping it won't clobber over files managed by apt/dpkg is not my idea of family fun.
Yes, and to explain something in a forum or by email, you'll need to take 50 screenshots. Worse, by phone it's nearly impossible to explain on which button to icon to click and which tab or window to select. Give me a command-line any day to explain something to people.
I'm not saying a good GUI isn't worthwhile. However I think people are probably less intimidated by the command line than you imagine.
While btrfs looks quite cool, I'm even more interested to see whether http://tux3.org/ will go anywhere.
Let's hope both will materialise and mature soon.
Actually, you're a bit behind the times. Check what David Zeuthen has to say about it:
Today I committed a patch to GIO to ensure that GIO applications launching applications (such as the Nautilus file manager or the Evolution mailer) will always pass a FUSE path instead of the GIO URI. One implication of this is that if you launch a non-GIO application (such as mplayer or a KDE application) from Nautilus, that application will Just Work(tm) even if the file lives on a GVfs share.
His blog post also touches on why a POSIX-only API for user space filesystems isn't good enough for modern desktops. That's one of the reasons why Gnome doesn't implement all these goodies as FUSE-only filesystems or even kernel-based filesystems. However with the FUSE bridge you can actually have POSIX-only applications access files on those GVFS filesystems - but GVFS isn't limited by it.
Encrypt a bunch of data, bury the key - printed on a sheet of paper, plastic, or carved in a stone tablet - and then distribute the encrypted data as far and wide as possible.
I currently have data on my harddrive that's over 15 years old. It should be relatively easy to keep the data intact on your own harddrives at least, as you upgrade disks. The only thing you should do is 1) destroy the encryption key to prevent yourself from "peeking" at it, and 2) have a checksum of the encrypted data, so you can verify over time which copies of the encrypted data are still intact.
"The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:" This does _not_ mean they're going to be removed.
"The following packages will be REMOVED:" Only that specific convenience meta-package gets removed.
To further illustrate this, check this line: "After this operation, 41.0kB disk space will be freed." Somehow I think KDE takes more than 41.0kB, don't you?
If you really wanted to remove the kde meta-package together with all the dependencies that it pulled in (so all the things you didn't explicitly apt-get install yourself), you'd use "apt-get autoremove kde".
Really? Actually, the constitution would have transferred more power to the directly elected European Parliament. The EP would be put on equal footing with the Council, and get final say over the budget.
While it's true that the constitution would have failed to reduce the powers of the European Commision, at least it didn't get any more. And there would have been quite a bit more transparency in both the Commission and the Counsil.
So, it was an improvement.
If anything, I think the media has not been doing their job. Even though people directly elect the EP, you'd hardly ever know it, because the media hardly discusses what's going on in the EP - good or bad. How are we supposed to keep our MEPs accountable if we have to make such an effort to know what's going on.
Properly explaining and digesting the treaties and constitution would also have helped. The constitution was ridiculously long compared to the the US one for instance, but it would have helped if it was properly distilled and discussed in the media.
I think they should've probably made a small document with the spirit and general principles of the constitution in human language on a few pages, with appropriate references to the details in a separate document that simplify and retake all the old, existing treaties.
I guess it's too late for that now. It'll be death by a million treaties now.
Well, Tamarin is completely open source (MPL/GPL/LGPL triple licensed - see http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/faq.html#license). The Flash specs are completely open now, see http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/. The Flex SDK has an open source compiler for your actionscript to swf bytecode needs. You can also check http://opensource.adobe.com/ for more projects under a variety of licenses like MIT, LGPL3, etc.
So what exactly are you complaining about? Air and the flash plugin are closed yes, but the specs and compilers and vm have been opened up by them. And there's already a lot of open source projects making use of these.
Not that I think Adobe are the greatest thing since sliced bread; but I don't think they're "about as hostile to open source as possible", especially if you compare them to other companies their size/field.
However what happens to latency? Is the "home router" configured that for certain types of traffic that are latency-sensitive and not bandwidth-sensitive, the connection does not get tunneled and just gets dumped on one of the dsl lines?
I've often thought of doing the same - I wouldn't mind sharing my bandwidth, being neighbourly and all. The only thing stopping me is that someone could do something clearly illegal using my IP address as a starting point. If the cops show up at my door one day, I'm not sure I'd like to deal with the hassle of trying to explain it all away using some DHCP logs or something.
How do you deal with this risk - do you consider the risk nearly nonexistent, or do you have some other safeguards?
Well, what are we talking about here - about security issues, or about its use for advertisement?
If you're talking about 0-day exploits, my point still stands: any decoder can potentially have exploits, and the only solution is to either keep your software (whether it's an image library or a flash plugin) up to date, or to simply stop using it (browse with no images, no flash).
If you're problem with Flash is that it's a pain for users, you can argue the same way about a lot of other things. For instance, I haven't seen functionality by default to "selectively" stop animated gifs, even though their only use these days is ads.
Personally, from a technical standpoint I find flash pretty nice. While there's a lot of people using Flash to make another silly "skip intro"-site, I've seen others making good use of Flash's capabilities to actually make a better user interface. You can try to do similar things with html, css and "ajax", but the results I've seen out there are often very messy (but again, sometimes it really works well).
In both cases, the technologies are just tools. Blame the people who bombard people with advertisement, or make crappy websites. Not the tools that are (ab)used.
My only qualm with Flash was that until recently it wasn't open at all, and I don't trust Adobe. With the specs now being fully open, and two independent open-source Flash runtime implementations, that issue has been solved too.
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I think there just isn't a lot of room on the market for subscription-based games. I suspect most people will have a budget for one or so, and they will have invested quite a bit of time in it - so there's very little incentive to switch.
I think the Guild Wars model is much better: you pay for the game, you play for free. If you decide to stop for a few months, and pick it up later - no problem. If you decide you like the game and want access to more content, you buy the expansion packs.
Raw network latency would not be the only contributing factor to the overall latency. Just imagine the latency introduced by the audio and video encoding (their infrastructure) and decoding (the minimal hardware at home). Plus all the tricks they'll have to pull to scale their infrastructure, etc. I'd be surprised if they can pull it all off.
But who knows, maybe they really have some clever ideas; I'm genuinely curious as to how they'll try and tackle the technical issues.
Yep I meant the latter ;) Let's just bypass everything IE and render with another engine like webkit (triggered by a content-type or meta tag or something). Would people notice?
If I look at my linux install, webkitgtk used by midori takes about 14M, while the flash 10 plugin takes around 10M.
The alternative is waiting until IE8 support can be dropped, around the time IE10 gets well established. I guess poor web developers have a long wait ahead of them still.
Now all we need is a webkit plugin for IE8 and below. ... only half serious.
Here is what you want: Atom 330 + ION + PCI-E/16
http://www.techpowerup.com/93687/Point_of_View_Releases_its_First_NVIDIA_ION_Mainboards.html
http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13577&Itemid=37
139.00 EUR it says.
Well, drugs most definitely are illegal in Germany. By your reasoning, Germany's murder rate should be the same as in the US?
Theora could really take off if a Flash-based decoder could be made for it, so that no codec download was required, and any video site could use it transparently. But how much of the video decoding for Youtube is actually written in Flash, and how much is done by a H264 accelerator in the Flash virtual machine?
All of it is done by the VM. However these days AVM2 in the flash player is decent enough to have a complete bytecode based Vorbis decoder. It's most likely too slow for Theora though.
On the other hand, there's Cortado - a java applet able to play Theora. Good enough?
To play H.264 content you also need to install extra software (on Windows). Installing a Theora codec in addition to a H.264 codec isn't really a big deal is it?
I think the fundamental issue is that the DMCA and DRM allows the "industry" to write their own laws.
With the DMCA and the anti-circumvention provisions, the restriction code has the power of law - circumventing it is illegal.
So they can ignore whatever fair use privilege we used to enjoy, because fair use privileges aren't guaranteed rights: if you can't make use of it for whatever reason - tough; they're not required to provide you with tools or systems to give you what you want, even if it could be legal.
So this all boils down to the fact that we've lost all fair use in copyright law (maybe not in theory, but definitely in practice), and as such, copyright has become completely unbalanced in favour of the copyright owners.
The tradeoff was: a temporary monopoly on distribution with some fair use exceptions, in return for a rich public domain later on.
Not only have we lost fair use, we've also lost the public domain part later on. Because the DRM on copyrighted works that end up in the public domain isn't going to magically disappear.
All we're left with is "a monopoly on distribution" - that's not what copyright was supposed to be.
wow - I've been using nc/mc since forever, but I'm still discovering cool features.
thanks
Maybe not exactly the answer you're looking for, seeing as Samba4 is not out yet; however samba4 includes, among other things:
* Internal LDAP server, with AD semantics
* Internal Kerberos server, including PAC support
You can, but don't have to hook it up to an external LDAP server. You can use MMC consoles to manage it. They're even building real Outlook compatible Exchange functionality on top of it (see openchange.org). Not that I'd ever want to run Outlook though.
Really? How hard is the following:
... or if you really must recompile your kernel module yourself:
# apt-get install nvidia-kernel-2.6-amd64 nvidia-glx nvidia-settings
# apt-get install module-assistant
# m-a a-i nvidia
# apt-get install nvidia-glx nvidia-settings
Trying to find drivers on some website, and running some installer hoping it won't clobber over files managed by apt/dpkg is not my idea of family fun.
Yes, and to explain something in a forum or by email, you'll need to take 50 screenshots. Worse, by phone it's nearly impossible to explain on which button to icon to click and which tab or window to select. Give me a command-line any day to explain something to people.
I'm not saying a good GUI isn't worthwhile. However I think people are probably less intimidated by the command line than you imagine.
Maybe this article will shed some light: http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Comparing_HAMMER_And_Tux3
While btrfs looks quite cool, I'm even more interested to see whether http://tux3.org/ will go anywhere. Let's hope both will materialise and mature soon.
http://blog.fubar.dk/?p=104
His blog post also touches on why a POSIX-only API for user space filesystems isn't good enough for modern desktops. That's one of the reasons why Gnome doesn't implement all these goodies as FUSE-only filesystems or even kernel-based filesystems. However with the FUSE bridge you can actually have POSIX-only applications access files on those GVFS filesystems - but GVFS isn't limited by it.
Encrypt a bunch of data, bury the key - printed on a sheet of paper, plastic, or carved in a stone tablet - and then distribute the encrypted data as far and wide as possible.
I currently have data on my harddrive that's over 15 years old. It should be relatively easy to keep the data intact on your own harddrives at least, as you upgrade disks. The only thing you should do is 1) destroy the encryption key to prevent yourself from "peeking" at it, and 2) have a checksum of the encrypted data, so you can verify over time which copies of the encrypted data are still intact.
Read what apt says.
"The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:"
This does _not_ mean they're going to be removed.
"The following packages will be REMOVED:"
Only that specific convenience meta-package gets removed.
To further illustrate this, check this line:
"After this operation, 41.0kB disk space will be freed."
Somehow I think KDE takes more than 41.0kB, don't you?
If you really wanted to remove the kde meta-package together with all the dependencies that it pulled in (so all the things you didn't explicitly apt-get install yourself), you'd use "apt-get autoremove kde".
Really? Actually, the constitution would have transferred more power to the directly elected European Parliament. The EP would be put on equal footing with the Council, and get final say over the budget.
While it's true that the constitution would have failed to reduce the powers of the European Commision, at least it didn't get any more. And there would have been quite a bit more transparency in both the Commission and the Counsil.
So, it was an improvement.
If anything, I think the media has not been doing their job. Even though people directly elect the EP, you'd hardly ever know it, because the media hardly discusses what's going on in the EP - good or bad. How are we supposed to keep our MEPs accountable if we have to make such an effort to know what's going on.
Properly explaining and digesting the treaties and constitution would also have helped. The constitution was ridiculously long compared to the the US one for instance, but it would have helped if it was properly distilled and discussed in the media.
I think they should've probably made a small document with the spirit and general principles of the constitution in human language on a few pages, with appropriate references to the details in a separate document that simplify and retake all the old, existing treaties.
I guess it's too late for that now. It'll be death by a million treaties now.
There's probably more drivers for current Linux than for current Windows.
I even vaguely remember some Microsoft people stating this.
Well, Tamarin is completely open source (MPL/GPL/LGPL triple licensed - see http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/faq.html#license). The Flash specs are completely open now, see http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/. The Flex SDK has an open source compiler for your actionscript to swf bytecode needs. You can also check http://opensource.adobe.com/ for more projects under a variety of licenses like MIT, LGPL3, etc.
So what exactly are you complaining about? Air and the flash plugin are closed yes, but the specs and compilers and vm have been opened up by them. And there's already a lot of open source projects making use of these.
Not that I think Adobe are the greatest thing since sliced bread; but I don't think they're "about as hostile to open source as possible", especially if you compare them to other companies their size/field.
Looks interesting.
However what happens to latency? Is the "home router" configured that for certain types of traffic that are latency-sensitive and not bandwidth-sensitive, the connection does not get tunneled and just gets dumped on one of the dsl lines?
I've often thought of doing the same - I wouldn't mind sharing my bandwidth, being neighbourly and all. The only thing stopping me is that someone could do something clearly illegal using my IP address as a starting point. If the cops show up at my door one day, I'm not sure I'd like to deal with the hassle of trying to explain it all away using some DHCP logs or something.
How do you deal with this risk - do you consider the risk nearly nonexistent, or do you have some other safeguards?
Well, what are we talking about here - about security issues, or about its use for advertisement?
If you're talking about 0-day exploits, my point still stands: any decoder can potentially have exploits, and the only solution is to either keep your software (whether it's an image library or a flash plugin) up to date, or to simply stop using it (browse with no images, no flash).
If you're problem with Flash is that it's a pain for users, you can argue the same way about a lot of other things. For instance, I haven't seen functionality by default to "selectively" stop animated gifs, even though their only use these days is ads.
Personally, from a technical standpoint I find flash pretty nice. While there's a lot of people using Flash to make another silly "skip intro"-site, I've seen others making good use of Flash's capabilities to actually make a better user interface. You can try to do similar things with html, css and "ajax", but the results I've seen out there are often very messy (but again, sometimes it really works well).
In both cases, the technologies are just tools. Blame the people who bombard people with advertisement, or make crappy websites. Not the tools that are (ab)used.
My only qualm with Flash was that until recently it wasn't open at all, and I don't trust Adobe. With the specs now being fully open, and two independent open-source Flash runtime implementations, that issue has been solved too.
It's not as if there never have been any exploits for the JPG or PNG decoders in common browsers. Will you now browse the web with images blocked too?