Engineers do actually consider redundancy when designing these things. Take, for example, TAT-14. They have a northern route that goes up to Denmark, and a southern route that lands in England. And that's just one of many fiber optic connections across the Atlantic.
You joke about it, but honestly, as a parent of a young child, something like this would be very nice. Try spending the past few days with kids cramped inside your car because you can't find any open hotels, with several more days to look forward to. You'll be glad for the opportunity to give them something to do.
Your CCNA is going to be a very basic written test. If you've got a basic knowledge of networking (can you subnet?), you can probably read some documentation and pass without a problem. The CCNP is going to be harder. You've got four exams to pass, each getting pretty detailed in a specific area of routing or switching. You can still pass it through books only, but it's going to really help if you've got experience with the equipment.
The CCIE, on the other hand, is a written exam as well as a lab exam. And the pass rate for successfully completing the lab on your first attempt is pretty low. Most people who pass the lab require two or three attempts. There's fewer than 7000 active CCIEs around the world right now.
As for access to Cisco documentation, just hit http://www.cisco.com/ and look around. They have a lot available for free.
Sprint and Nextel haven't merged yet. They're still waiting on approval from the government, as well as the share holders. On the off-chance that the merger falls through, it's going to be necessary for Nextel to have a higher speed data solution.
However, on the flip side, how many people will buy them?
Okay, just because you already have a PS2 doesn't mean that the market is stagnant. Anyone who has kids knows that things change quite a bit in three years. A child of 7 might not really be into video games the same way that a child of 10 is. And there's millions of kids out there.
Not quite true. Many of the larger players support multicast (Sprint, Level3, Verio, etc.). The big problem is that very few of the smaller guys, the ones that actually connect up people's homes, support multicast. AOL, MSN, and Earthlink certainly don't. You might get lucky and have a clueful person running the local cable modem network (DOCSIS 1.0 and later all support multicast!), and it certainly works for DSL as well, although my own provider doesn't even know what I'm talking about when I call them up monthly about getting it.
Re:What is with PDI/Dreamworks?
on
Shrek 2 How-To
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· Score: 1
How is it that we'll be seeing two Alexander the Great movies, one with Colin Farrell and the other with Leonardo DiCaprio. Or the two movies about the daughter of the President breaking free from Secret Service protection and finding romance ("First Daughter", "Chasing Liberty").
People have similar ideas at similar times. It happens. Get used to it.
Right now. Read the article, because it's obvious a great number of people haven't. This isn't running over Internet2 (which it seems a lot of people think is happening), because as far as I know, Sprint doesn't connect to Internet2. You can find the list of corporate sponsers here, and Sprint isn't one of them. The article shows that it went from the SUNET core to the Sprintlink network (which is Sprint's dedicated IP network, so if you connect to AS1239, you're connected to it). If you've got OC192 capabilities at your site (and trust me, there's a number of people who do), you too can enjoy these benefits.
As for limitations and vulnerabilities... It's IPv4. They went for speed. I doubt they tried to encrypt the data, they didn't put it in a VPN, and AS1239 is a major backbones of the Internet, so it's out there for all to see. Combating the limitations of IPv4 wasn't really the point of all this.
Starring Tom Hanks, so you know it must be good! If you can find a copy of this at your favorite rental store, pick it up. Full of all that wonderful fear that playing "Monsters and Mazes" would destroy the youth of America.
MMDS was going to be the next big thing in the 90's - Sprint, in particular, was active in MMDS (you might remember it was called Sprint ION).
Actually, Sprint's MMDS offering was (is) called Sprint Wireless Broadband Direct. While they are not going after new customers, this service is still available in a few cities to existing customers. Sprint ION was more of a DSL/ATM/Voice combo. As far as I know, it had nothing to do with wireless service.
Because few people have an ISP that allows them to use global multi-cast, so what's the point?
So, a good tool exists, but because your ISP is backwards and doesn't support something that's been around since the mid-80s, we should just give up? How do you feel about a end-user ISP that doesn't news servers, or mail servers? To me, that seems like a crappy ISP who doesn't really deserve my business. I expect certain services to be provided when I get Internet service, and I frown on any ISP that rightly deserves to only be called a Web Service Provider.
Now, from the business side of things, you need to shop around for someone who actually provides multicast service. Trust me, there's quite a few of them out there. Off the top of my head, I'll mention Sprint, Verio, Qwest, Cable & Wireless, Global Crossing, and Level 3.
On the residential side of things, I know that multicast works on dial-up. You just need to get your provider to actually enable it. Multicast is also a part of the DOCSIS 1.1 standard, so your cable modem ISP shouldn't have a problem providing service. I know of a few DSL providers that offer multicast service, so it should be possible there as well.
Finally, just because you offer multicast doesn't meant that you can't fall back to unicast if multicast doesn't work. That's exactly what Windows Media Player does, and Quicktime, and Real Player. They all try to multicast first, and fall back to unicast if they can't join the multicast group.
The application uses multicast DNS to FIND the service, but then reverts to unicast for actual USE of the service. It'd be quite silly to send all of that information all over the network.
I think you're confusing multicast with broadcast (Which, admittedly, a number of dumb switches tends to do as well. And of course, a hubbed network treats them the same as well). Multicast traffic only goes to those hosts that have actually joined the multicast group. In this particular case, that'd be anyone who's collaborating on a given editing process. Multicast would be a rather good way to go for this sort of project. In fact, a couple of multicast tools (wb for "whiteboard", nt for text editing) were created for just that purpose. And the great thing about doing something that way is that you could be working on a file in California, I could be working on it in Virginia, and twenty other people could be working on it elsewhere, and I'm only sending out a single copy of my packets, and only to the twenty-one people who actually are working on it as well.
If they're not using multicast for Hydra, it's a shame, because multicast would really be a great way to perform this type of operation.
the only "feature" I can see that remotely benefits anyone is the ability to have more than four desktops (Gnome 6, CDE 4).
I'll be picky and point out that you can definately have more than four workspaces with CDE. I'm not sure about an upper limit, but you can have at least nine, since that's what I've got set up on a Solaris workstation. Sun's got documentation to show you how to add more workspaces.
If your only reason for using Gnome on Solaris is to get more workspaces/desktops, then you really have no reason to be using Gnome.
The internet is not meant to be a broadcast medium, nor is it very good as one. Ask online radio stations that not only must now pay high license fees, but also must buy lost of servers and bandwidth to stream audio to a few listeners, nothing like traditional broacast mediums (radio, tv, even broadcast cable and satelite) which scale much better.
That's absolutely true, if you look at unicast streaming methods. But there's definately technologies out there to get around that. Multicast is an excellent way to get over that nasty bottleneck that expensive bandwidth creates. The main problem with multicast? Not everyone has it. Its one requirement is that every device in the path be multicast enabled.
Check out this FAQ for a starter on multicast. Read up on PIM-SM, the dominant multicast protocol, and the future of multicast which is SSM. These are protocols that are designed specifically for one-to-many applications, which is ideal for things like audio and video streaming. Unfortunately, the only major OS with built-in SSM support is Windows XP. There's patches out there for specific Linux and FreeBSD kernels to add the necessary IGMP v3 support, but you won't see it in the main builds. Why? I wish I knew.
If your cable modem is DOCSIS 1.1 compliant, then it's capable of multicast. But most ISPs don't want to enable multicast. A lot of the time, they've never even heard of it, even though it's been around since the mid-80s. It's a requirement for IPv6, but Juniper and Cisco routers don't support it yet. I definately haven't seen any IPv6 multicast enabled applications.
Multicast is out there, and it's exactly the type of communication model that we need in order to scale audio and video streaming applications on the Internet. On 9/11, an audience of 2000 was watching CNN Headline News over a multicast feed from the University of Chicago. It was a single 300 kbps video stream that never ran into the issue of a bandwidth bottleneck that CNN's own website had. And quite frankly, that audience could have grown to over a million, and the University of Chicago's server never would have known it. It still would have been sending out a single 300 kbps stream, and still reached all those people.
Not entirely true. The large ISPs (i.e. Sprint, Qwest, and the like) do have multicast in the network. And most of them talk to each other (although UUNET is a bit odd...they don't peer multicast with anyone it seems). The big problem is the smaller ISPs that deal with residential users. If the cable modem and DSL providers would jump on this technology, the Internet would be a far more interesting place. (I suppose the Dial ISPs as well, but a lot of the cool things that multicast can do, like efficient video streaming, wouldn't be so hot as the lower bandwidths.) Imagine being able to get a 700k stream (which is pretty good video quality in my experience) of the baseball game you missed because you were at work. Or an episode of "Survivor" that you missed because you were stuck in traffic. Or an episode of your favorite anime that's showing in Japan, but hasn't quite made it to anywhere else in the world yet.
Multicast is pretty cool stuff (I use it every day at work) but it's not really going to make an impact until the home user can reap its benefits.
Although most of your current multicast applications are for streaming audio and video, multicast can do SOOOOOOOO much more.
Any application where you basically have one system sending identical information to a bunch of other systems at the same time is a potential multicast application. Right now, the common perception is for audio and video technologies. Makes sense...that's what broadcast radio and television is all about. And streaming media does work very well over multicast. But here's a few other apps that also could work well with multicast:
Online games. Especially games which have hundreds, if not thousands of people interacting together. How do you really know where everyone is in a game? You don't, because most online games can't spare the bandwidth to tell you where everyone is. With multicast, a server would be sending a single update on the world to everyone playing. Big bandwidth savings. Also, think about the little guys making games. They might not be able to support the kind of games they want to make, because they can't afford the bandwidth necessary. Multicast saves on bandwidth. You could end up with a couple of guys in their basement hosting games to thousands of people.
Pushing data to cache servers. Think about a company like Akamai, that's got hundreds of these web caching servers all over the country. Reuters comes out with a news flash. They could push out that flash to all these cache boxes out there with multicast. Every cache server gets it at the same time, so whomever hits that cache box sees the story when everyone else does. Also useful for...
Stock market tickers. Everyone wants to see how their stocks are doing, and they want to see it in real-time. You don't want to give an advantage to someone just because they know information sooner than you do. That's where multicast comes in. Using 5 kbps or less of bandwidth, a brokerage company can update millions of people with the stock ticker.
Sys admin. Ever want to deploy new software in your company, but dread having to install it on 500 workstations. You could multicast the files, without completely bringing the LAN to its knees, and it would only take as long as it does to transfer one file.
Popular application updates. Linux kernel 2.6.0 gets released, and instantly FTP servers around the world are hit. They could multicast the software, using a couple of different bandwidth streams to hit modem and T3 users alike, and do it with a reliable multicast protocol that makes sure everyone gets the entire file without loss. Big bandwidth savings, and much happier users who won't have to wait several days for the initial burst of traffic to subside.
Multicast can do a lot of things. Streaming media is just a small part of what multicast can do.
The whole point of multicast is that it requires very little in terms of resources. Having a high performance computing cluster isn't going to do much if you're trying to test out multicast.
More likely, you'll want a sniffer, or else access to routers, either directly or through SNMP. Because what you're really going to want to find out is bandwidth utilization. That's where you're going to see gains going with multicast.
You should head over to IETF's website and start looking at RFCs about multicast. RFCs are usually boring to read, but very insightful.
A better question to ask the Slashdot crowd would be: "Which multicast protocol should I be using?". (FWIW, I recommend going with PIM sparse-mode. See also SSM.) In terms of apps, you haven't really told us much... Are you looking for UNIX, Mac, NT? Audio, video, text, file transfer? High bandwidth, low bandwidth, reliable transport?
Without this information, the question posed is so open as to be unanswerable.
The MBone is still out there. Sorta. It's not really the same MBone that most of those web pages talk about, created with DVMRP tunnels and all. A lot of the major ISPs are starting to natively enable their networks for multicast with new protocols like PIM-SM, MSDP, and MBGP. With PIM-SSM coming up, it looks like we might finally have a really workable protocol to get multicast out there to the masses. Here's some sites for multicast information regarding ISPs.
IP Multicast Initiative. Other ISPs that are doing multicast will be listed here along with contact information.
Most people who are doing video streaming via multicast end up going with Windows Media Server or Real Server. I think QuickTime is also multicast-enabled, but I haven't seen it used much. Another option is to go with Cisco IP/TV. Although most of their stuff says to use it in an enterprise network, I've seen it used for multicast video streaming on the MBone/Internet. Pretty good quality stuff... I've seen demos of DVDs streamed using it, and the quality was at least that of VHS.
The big difference between any game console and your Linux box with a kick-ass video card is that consoles are standard equipment. A developer knows from the very beginning that everyone playing the game has the same hardware. Much easier to develop than to have to base everything on different vendors producing seperate drivers that may or may not be compatible with your game.
Ease of use, for both the developer as well as the end user, is a quality to be admired.
I think RMS read "Atlas Shrugged" and got the wrong message from the book. It seems like he's incapable of understanding why a company would want to make money for itself.
I myself would not sign an NDA for useful technical information; I think it is immoral. But I could imagine that a PS2 wrapper that supports some standard interface used on other machines might make SONY extremely unhappy, because of encouraging people to write their software portably instead of writing it specifically for the PS2. Making them unhappy seems like a good thing given the circumstances.
Listed with the characters of James Taggart and Orren Boyle, etc., we might as well include RMS. Everything done should be for the well-being of everyone else. And cursed be the man who tries to make a profit for himself. Do whatever it takes to bring him down to the same level as everyone else.
What a shame that a company like Sony wants to make money for itself. And to protect itself, it requires people to sign an NDA. RMS thinks its immoral to sign the NDA to get technical data. I guess it's also wrong for every other company out there that doesn't bother to announce to the world how it makes stuff. It's time to boycott Coca-Cola, because they haven't told us their recipe for soda. Boycott KFC, because we don't know what the Colonel's original recipe is. It's immoral to eat a Big Mac, because you don't really know what's in the secret sauce. McDonald's should freely give out that information, so that other restaurants can recreate it and distribute it to the masses.
RMS's ideas might work in an ideal, Utopian society. But the world isn't made up that way. It's not immoral to think up a solution, share it with the world, but keep certain details secret. Not every idea in the world needs to be shared with everyone else. I have a feeling that, if pressed, RMS would argue that there isn't a need for privacy because you should never have a reason to keep information away from everyone else in the world. It's not really Free Software that RMS is selling. It's Free Ideas. The only problem is that his view of Free Ideas is for a collective mind that has access to every idea. Slashdot probably needs to make up a new icon that has RMS Borged out, instead of Gates.
Slashdot Mirror
Engineers do actually consider redundancy when designing these things. Take, for example, TAT-14. They have a northern route that goes up to Denmark, and a southern route that lands in England. And that's just one of many fiber optic connections across the Atlantic.
Distance is important, but so is redundancy.
You joke about it, but honestly, as a parent of a young child, something like this would be very nice. Try spending the past few days with kids cramped inside your car because you can't find any open hotels, with several more days to look forward to. You'll be glad for the opportunity to give them something to do.
It depends on which Cisco certification you're talking about. They have quite a few now. See http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/le3/learning_car eer_certifications_and_learning_paths_home.html for details.
Your CCNA is going to be a very basic written test. If you've got a basic knowledge of networking (can you subnet?), you can probably read some documentation and pass without a problem. The CCNP is going to be harder. You've got four exams to pass, each getting pretty detailed in a specific area of routing or switching. You can still pass it through books only, but it's going to really help if you've got experience with the equipment.
The CCIE, on the other hand, is a written exam as well as a lab exam. And the pass rate for successfully completing the lab on your first attempt is pretty low. Most people who pass the lab require two or three attempts. There's fewer than 7000 active CCIEs around the world right now.
As for access to Cisco documentation, just hit http://www.cisco.com/ and look around. They have a lot available for free.
Sprint and Nextel haven't merged yet. They're still waiting on approval from the government, as well as the share holders. On the off-chance that the merger falls through, it's going to be necessary for Nextel to have a higher speed data solution.
There isn't even a way to delete emails from your account: you can only "Archive" them.
Not true. You can move a message to the Trash folder, and once it's in there, you can choose "Delete Forever" to get rid of it for good.
However, on the flip side, how many people will buy them?
Okay, just because you already have a PS2 doesn't mean that the market is stagnant. Anyone who has kids knows that things change quite a bit in three years. A child of 7 might not really be into video games the same way that a child of 10 is. And there's millions of kids out there.
Not quite true. Many of the larger players support multicast (Sprint, Level3, Verio, etc.). The big problem is that very few of the smaller guys, the ones that actually connect up people's homes, support multicast. AOL, MSN, and Earthlink certainly don't. You might get lucky and have a clueful person running the local cable modem network (DOCSIS 1.0 and later all support multicast!), and it certainly works for DSL as well, although my own provider doesn't even know what I'm talking about when I call them up monthly about getting it.
How is it that we'll be seeing two Alexander the Great movies, one with Colin Farrell and the other with Leonardo DiCaprio. Or the two movies about the daughter of the President breaking free from Secret Service protection and finding romance ("First Daughter", "Chasing Liberty").
People have similar ideas at similar times. It happens. Get used to it.
Right now. Read the article, because it's obvious a great number of people haven't. This isn't running over Internet2 (which it seems a lot of people think is happening), because as far as I know, Sprint doesn't connect to Internet2. You can find the list of corporate sponsers here, and Sprint isn't one of them. The article shows that it went from the SUNET core to the Sprintlink network (which is Sprint's dedicated IP network, so if you connect to AS1239, you're connected to it). If you've got OC192 capabilities at your site (and trust me, there's a number of people who do), you too can enjoy these benefits.
As for limitations and vulnerabilities... It's IPv4. They went for speed. I doubt they tried to encrypt the data, they didn't put it in a VPN, and AS1239 is a major backbones of the Internet, so it's out there for all to see. Combating the limitations of IPv4 wasn't really the point of all this.
Starring Tom Hanks, so you know it must be good! If you can find a copy of this at your favorite rental store, pick it up. Full of all that wonderful fear that playing "Monsters and Mazes" would destroy the youth of America.
Actually, Sprint's MMDS offering was (is) called Sprint Wireless Broadband Direct. While they are not going after new customers, this service is still available in a few cities to existing customers. Sprint ION was more of a DSL/ATM/Voice combo. As far as I know, it had nothing to do with wireless service.
Umm, you can download Netscape 7.0 and Mozilla 1.2.1 from Sun here. Give them time, and you might even find Netscape 7.1 now that it's been released.
You'd think a true geek would know the next version is X100. Four naturally follows three.
Go hawkeyes?
C'mon, Des Moines is a lot closer to Ames than it is to Iowa City. You meant, go Cyclones!
Because few people have an ISP that allows them to use global multi-cast, so what's the point?
So, a good tool exists, but because your ISP is backwards and doesn't support something that's been around since the mid-80s, we should just give up? How do you feel about a end-user ISP that doesn't news servers, or mail servers? To me, that seems like a crappy ISP who doesn't really deserve my business. I expect certain services to be provided when I get Internet service, and I frown on any ISP that rightly deserves to only be called a Web Service Provider.
Now, from the business side of things, you need to shop around for someone who actually provides multicast service. Trust me, there's quite a few of them out there. Off the top of my head, I'll mention Sprint, Verio, Qwest, Cable & Wireless, Global Crossing, and Level 3.
On the residential side of things, I know that multicast works on dial-up. You just need to get your provider to actually enable it. Multicast is also a part of the DOCSIS 1.1 standard, so your cable modem ISP shouldn't have a problem providing service. I know of a few DSL providers that offer multicast service, so it should be possible there as well.
Finally, just because you offer multicast doesn't meant that you can't fall back to unicast if multicast doesn't work. That's exactly what Windows Media Player does, and Quicktime, and Real Player. They all try to multicast first, and fall back to unicast if they can't join the multicast group.
The application uses multicast DNS to FIND the service, but then reverts to unicast for actual USE of the service. It'd be quite silly to send all of that information all over the network.
I think you're confusing multicast with broadcast (Which, admittedly, a number of dumb switches tends to do as well. And of course, a hubbed network treats them the same as well). Multicast traffic only goes to those hosts that have actually joined the multicast group. In this particular case, that'd be anyone who's collaborating on a given editing process. Multicast would be a rather good way to go for this sort of project. In fact, a couple of multicast tools (wb for "whiteboard", nt for text editing) were created for just that purpose. And the great thing about doing something that way is that you could be working on a file in California, I could be working on it in Virginia, and twenty other people could be working on it elsewhere, and I'm only sending out a single copy of my packets, and only to the twenty-one people who actually are working on it as well.
If they're not using multicast for Hydra, it's a shame, because multicast would really be a great way to perform this type of operation.
I'll be picky and point out that you can definately have more than four workspaces with CDE. I'm not sure about an upper limit, but you can have at least nine, since that's what I've got set up on a Solaris workstation. Sun's got documentation to show you how to add more workspaces.
If your only reason for using Gnome on Solaris is to get more workspaces/desktops, then you really have no reason to be using Gnome.
In other news, shares of Hormel climbed 85% today...
The internet is not meant to be a broadcast medium, nor is it very good as one. Ask online radio stations that not only must now pay high license fees, but also must buy lost of servers and bandwidth to stream audio to a few listeners, nothing like traditional broacast mediums (radio, tv, even broadcast cable and satelite) which scale much better.
That's absolutely true, if you look at unicast streaming methods. But there's definately technologies out there to get around that. Multicast is an excellent way to get over that nasty bottleneck that expensive bandwidth creates. The main problem with multicast? Not everyone has it. Its one requirement is that every device in the path be multicast enabled.
Check out this FAQ for a starter on multicast. Read up on PIM-SM, the dominant multicast protocol, and the future of multicast which is SSM. These are protocols that are designed specifically for one-to-many applications, which is ideal for things like audio and video streaming. Unfortunately, the only major OS with built-in SSM support is Windows XP. There's patches out there for specific Linux and FreeBSD kernels to add the necessary IGMP v3 support, but you won't see it in the main builds. Why? I wish I knew.
If your cable modem is DOCSIS 1.1 compliant, then it's capable of multicast. But most ISPs don't want to enable multicast. A lot of the time, they've never even heard of it, even though it's been around since the mid-80s. It's a requirement for IPv6, but Juniper and Cisco routers don't support it yet. I definately haven't seen any IPv6 multicast enabled applications.
Multicast is out there, and it's exactly the type of communication model that we need in order to scale audio and video streaming applications on the Internet. On 9/11, an audience of 2000 was watching CNN Headline News over a multicast feed from the University of Chicago. It was a single 300 kbps video stream that never ran into the issue of a bandwidth bottleneck that CNN's own website had. And quite frankly, that audience could have grown to over a million, and the University of Chicago's server never would have known it. It still would have been sending out a single 300 kbps stream, and still reached all those people.
Not entirely true. The large ISPs (i.e. Sprint, Qwest, and the like) do have multicast in the network. And most of them talk to each other (although UUNET is a bit odd...they don't peer multicast with anyone it seems). The big problem is the smaller ISPs that deal with residential users. If the cable modem and DSL providers would jump on this technology, the Internet would be a far more interesting place. (I suppose the Dial ISPs as well, but a lot of the cool things that multicast can do, like efficient video streaming, wouldn't be so hot as the lower bandwidths.) Imagine being able to get a 700k stream (which is pretty good video quality in my experience) of the baseball game you missed because you were at work. Or an episode of "Survivor" that you missed because you were stuck in traffic. Or an episode of your favorite anime that's showing in Japan, but hasn't quite made it to anywhere else in the world yet.
Multicast is pretty cool stuff (I use it every day at work) but it's not really going to make an impact until the home user can reap its benefits.
Although most of your current multicast applications are for streaming audio and video, multicast can do SOOOOOOOO much more.
Any application where you basically have one system sending identical information to a bunch of other systems at the same time is a potential multicast application. Right now, the common perception is for audio and video technologies. Makes sense...that's what broadcast radio and television is all about. And streaming media does work very well over multicast. But here's a few other apps that also could work well with multicast:
Online games. Especially games which have hundreds, if not thousands of people interacting together. How do you really know where everyone is in a game? You don't, because most online games can't spare the bandwidth to tell you where everyone is. With multicast, a server would be sending a single update on the world to everyone playing. Big bandwidth savings. Also, think about the little guys making games. They might not be able to support the kind of games they want to make, because they can't afford the bandwidth necessary. Multicast saves on bandwidth. You could end up with a couple of guys in their basement hosting games to thousands of people.
Pushing data to cache servers. Think about a company like Akamai, that's got hundreds of these web caching servers all over the country. Reuters comes out with a news flash. They could push out that flash to all these cache boxes out there with multicast. Every cache server gets it at the same time, so whomever hits that cache box sees the story when everyone else does. Also useful for...
Stock market tickers. Everyone wants to see how their stocks are doing, and they want to see it in real-time. You don't want to give an advantage to someone just because they know information sooner than you do. That's where multicast comes in. Using 5 kbps or less of bandwidth, a brokerage company can update millions of people with the stock ticker.
Sys admin. Ever want to deploy new software in your company, but dread having to install it on 500 workstations. You could multicast the files, without completely bringing the LAN to its knees, and it would only take as long as it does to transfer one file.
Popular application updates. Linux kernel 2.6.0 gets released, and instantly FTP servers around the world are hit. They could multicast the software, using a couple of different bandwidth streams to hit modem and T3 users alike, and do it with a reliable multicast protocol that makes sure everyone gets the entire file without loss. Big bandwidth savings, and much happier users who won't have to wait several days for the initial burst of traffic to subside.
Multicast can do a lot of things. Streaming media is just a small part of what multicast can do.
The whole point of multicast is that it requires very little in terms of resources. Having a high performance computing cluster isn't going to do much if you're trying to test out multicast.
More likely, you'll want a sniffer, or else access to routers, either directly or through SNMP. Because what you're really going to want to find out is bandwidth utilization. That's where you're going to see gains going with multicast.
You should head over to IETF's website and start looking at RFCs about multicast. RFCs are usually boring to read, but very insightful.
A better question to ask the Slashdot crowd would be: "Which multicast protocol should I be using?". (FWIW, I recommend going with PIM sparse-mode. See also SSM.) In terms of apps, you haven't really told us much... Are you looking for UNIX, Mac, NT? Audio, video, text, file transfer? High bandwidth, low bandwidth, reliable transport? Without this information, the question posed is so open as to be unanswerable.
The MBone is still out there. Sorta. It's not really the same MBone that most of those web pages talk about, created with DVMRP tunnels and all. A lot of the major ISPs are starting to natively enable their networks for multicast with new protocols like PIM-SM, MSDP, and MBGP. With PIM-SSM coming up, it looks like we might finally have a really workable protocol to get multicast out there to the masses. Here's some sites for multicast information regarding ISPs.
Most people who are doing video streaming via multicast end up going with Windows Media Server or Real Server. I think QuickTime is also multicast-enabled, but I haven't seen it used much. Another option is to go with Cisco IP/TV. Although most of their stuff says to use it in an enterprise network, I've seen it used for multicast video streaming on the MBone/Internet. Pretty good quality stuff... I've seen demos of DVDs streamed using it, and the quality was at least that of VHS.
The big difference between any game console and your Linux box with a kick-ass video card is that consoles are standard equipment. A developer knows from the very beginning that everyone playing the game has the same hardware. Much easier to develop than to have to base everything on different vendors producing seperate drivers that may or may not be compatible with your game.
Ease of use, for both the developer as well as the end user, is a quality to be admired.
I think RMS read "Atlas Shrugged" and got the wrong message from the book. It seems like he's incapable of understanding why a company would want to make money for itself.
Listed with the characters of James Taggart and Orren Boyle, etc., we might as well include RMS. Everything done should be for the well-being of everyone else. And cursed be the man who tries to make a profit for himself. Do whatever it takes to bring him down to the same level as everyone else.
What a shame that a company like Sony wants to make money for itself. And to protect itself, it requires people to sign an NDA. RMS thinks its immoral to sign the NDA to get technical data. I guess it's also wrong for every other company out there that doesn't bother to announce to the world how it makes stuff. It's time to boycott Coca-Cola, because they haven't told us their recipe for soda. Boycott KFC, because we don't know what the Colonel's original recipe is. It's immoral to eat a Big Mac, because you don't really know what's in the secret sauce. McDonald's should freely give out that information, so that other restaurants can recreate it and distribute it to the masses.
RMS's ideas might work in an ideal, Utopian society. But the world isn't made up that way. It's not immoral to think up a solution, share it with the world, but keep certain details secret. Not every idea in the world needs to be shared with everyone else. I have a feeling that, if pressed, RMS would argue that there isn't a need for privacy because you should never have a reason to keep information away from everyone else in the world. It's not really Free Software that RMS is selling. It's Free Ideas. The only problem is that his view of Free Ideas is for a collective mind that has access to every idea. Slashdot probably needs to make up a new icon that has RMS Borged out, instead of Gates.