HotOrNot is interesting in that it is a successful application of distributed trust metrics. In otherwords, how do you get authoritative answers (to the question "am I hot or not?") when there is no single authority.
However, HotOrNot is a "context free" metric. You look at a single picture and decide that the person is hot or not. Unfortunately, this isn't all that useful as the answers tend to be very close to either "1" or "10" A much better implementation would be just "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." K5 also suffers from this problem when it asks users to rate comments on a scale of 1 to 5. Keeping it simple would make the ratings much more effective.
Pick the Hottie on the other hand implements a contextual metric. Instead of rating a picture on it's own you look at two pictures and click the one you think is hotter. It's much easier to decide between coffee or tea than it is to rate coffee on a scale of 1 to 10. Effectively the site is sorting pictures using human judgement for the comparison function. This way you get much more useful results. With this system you can get the "Top 10 Hotties." With HotOrNot there are probably thousands of images that are 10.0 or 9.9.
Justin Chapweske of Open Cola gets the credit for pointing out this one.
From what I understand your X-mhz box does not run at precisely X-mhz. The clock actually oscillates slightly around the stated frequency. This is of course to prevent a huge spike of RF emissions at the clock frequency, which makes it way easier to get FCC certification.
You claim to have some philosophy education. Well, I do to. That is my primary field of study.
What exactly is it that reeks of beginner philosophy? Obviously, the whole movie is a variation on
the "Brain in a Vat" hypothesis, which is really just a rehash of Descartes "Deceptive Demon".
Are you kidding? The movie is just "Plato's Cave Meets Terminator" Philosophy hardly gets more beginner than Plato. So much for your hard studying...
so why is it unfinished? well first of all the UI is quite slow for certain functions. mostly it's the
transparencies and other Aqua-isms that can't be accelerated with a typical 2D graphics card, so the
CPU is working overtime to render the screen under heavy loads. many of the slow downs can be
directly seen in the Mac's most important application, the Finder, which is why you'll hear the Mac folk
screaming bloody murder. many have suggested that as Quartz (the UI rendering engine) is optimized
for 3D cards, the interface will speed up substantially.
The reviewer did most of his tests on a G3 though he did mention that window resizing was still unbearably slow on his G4.
The Quartz engine has some Altivec enhancements that should give significant performance boosts on the G4.
It's important to note that application specific drawing implementation can have sizeable effect on drawing performance. Back in the NeXT days, an Adobe employee would tweak the drawing code for open source screensaver modules and games and end up making them an order of magnitude faster. Intelligent drawing or lack thereof can make or brake the performance of an app.
Finally, let us not forget that the new Finder, which is the source of most of the OSX bashing, is not even a native Cocoa app and is written in Carbon. Give a nice native app like Stone Design Create a whirl and see what a difference it is. BTW, Create is a badass drawing program and the only 3rd party app that has run on EVERY version of NeXT ever released, all the way back to the early days and including OpenStep for Solaris and HP Gecko.
In any event, everyone knows that operating systems are never "finished" and 1.0's are always euphemisms for Beta software. NT 3.1 anyone? OS-X is a very ambitious project and it's amazing that the thing works as well as it does with backwards compatibility.
By adding a complaint about AOLs development of Gnutella to the lawsuit, Harlan is essentially suing printing press manufacturers because people use their presses to rip him off. This makes Harlan a Fool (with a capital F) no matter what else he has written.
Try this one, it's a full concert. "TJ Kirk" who takes the music of James Brown, Thelonious Monk, and Roland Kirk and mixes it all up and rearranges it in the new school jazz funk sound. Featuring Charlie Hunter who plays bass and guitar simultaneously on an 8-stringed instrument.
When you open that (youll need to have Mojo Nation running on your box) you'll get an html page with info about the show and links to the individual tracks. This is freely redistributable music.
Something must be wrong you should be able to download mp3 files and they should have the extension.
As far as not having the artist in the mp3 file name; Mojo Nation has seperate XML metadata describing files and for Audio that includes Title, Artist, Genre, and others. There is no need to put all of this information in the file name with Mojo Nation.
(its independence certainly hasn't been
recognised by anyone that I know of)
Ever hear of a little country called Germany (Deutchland to it's natives)? Germany sent a diplomat to Sealand to negotiate for the release of one of it's citizens who was being held prisoner on Sealand. If Germany didn't recognize Sealand's independence they wouldn't have sent a diplomat, they would have appealed to British authorities. After all, kidnapping is a serious crime in the UK. Perhaps Germany did appeal to Britain first, who told them what Sealand wasn't any of their business.
I don't like MS as much as the next slashdotter, but MS SQL Server is based on Sybase. So it might be a much better deal than you think.
Also keep in mind that Sybase offers Linux x86 binaries of it's previous major release for free for any use (deployed commercial use okay!). They offer the current version free for development purposes. The previous major version is plenty good enough for most applications. There is no comparison between MySQL and a real industrial strength database like Sybase. Maybe one day MySQL will be up to snuff and then we'll all use it, but Sybase and Oracle have been working on this stuff for a long time.
Zooko of Mojo Nation and Raph of Advogato gave a talk at the O'Reilly P2P conference on "Attack Resistant Metadata" Essentially, you use something not unlike the PGP web of trust to automatically evaluate a particular piece of metadata according to some criteria such as "how accurately this entity describes data." The further away from you in the graph an entity is, the less you trust their opinion. It's known as "Distributed Trust Metrics" Advogato is a working but centralized example; trusted members of the community can post to the front page, for instance. However, you can't just create a bunch of identities that all certify yourself and get very far - you'll still be outside of the main web.
1. Cost of backbone connectivity per user keeps getting cheaper (all that OC192/768
equipment on DWDM fiber makes adding capacity way cheap)
sure, bandwidth is getting cheaper but as it gets cheaper and people's connections get faster they want to transfer richer media. First it was just JPG's and GIFs. Now it's MP3s and DiVX is starting up. Next it'll be higher res, less compression. Maybe after that it'll be teledildonics or something. Oh, and don't forget there's many decades of video history that has yet to be ripped and shared.
It's just like when you buy a new hard drive. Every time I've gotten a new disk in the last 10 years I've though "damn, this drive is so huge I'll never fill it up." but I eventually do, sooner than later.
Disk space, CPU, and RAM have been increasing by the same ridiculous amounts that bandwidth but we manage to fill them up. A 700mhz G4 is many many orders of magnitude faster than the 68000 in the first Mac but a Mac OSX on a G4 feels slower than an old OS running on the old Mac. That's because software engineers do new, more complex things with the increased available power and memory. Users do new, more bandwidth intensive things given increased bandwidth.
The complementary law to Moore's law and it's memory/bandwidth equivalents are that usage increases at the same rate. The idea that after a couple more upgrades of the backbone we'll have plenty of excess bandwith for every user to do whatever they want at a low flat rate is just naive.
What's going to happen is ISP's who have structured pricing on users with intermittent, spiky bandwidth usage are going to keep their bandwidth offerings and prices the same for longer than they would have without people using P2P apps, until their profits are back. Basically they will raise their prices without actually raising prices that consumers pay, just like the way consumer product manufacturers raise prices by giving you less product in the same sized and priced container.
uh, there have been second class non-peer folks on the 'Net for a long, long time. They used to be called "UCCP nodes." When SLIP and then PPP came out, it was a godsend; the folks who weren't at a university or a high-tech company could finally be directly connected to the net (albiet slowly and with high latency). I remember upgrading from UUCP to SLIP and it was the greatest thing ever. They gave me a whole freakin' class C for my 14.4k SLIP connection. I could play MUDs! I guess that actually made it disasterous from a getting-anything-done point of view.
We just need payments. Quick and easy, as simple as clicking a single button on your browser, mp3 player, movie player, etc... The key is that it should be voluntary If you read/listen/watch something and you hate it, you shoudn't have to pay for it. That's part of why Napster is such a success. The current model of selling music where you can't listen to it before you plunk down your money (or you only get to listen to a small part of it, only to find that the rest sucks) is what people are rebelling against. Sometimes it takes a while before a work sinks in and becomes enjoyable. How many times have you bought an album that you thought sucked on first listen but eventually grew to like considerably? There needs to be a system in place so when that moment of comprehension hits you and you think "Wow, this is great stuff, I want the artist to produce more" you can just click that button and enrich them. No matter where you got the work from, especially if you got it from your buddies or off something like Napster.
The problem that "Micropayments" have is the name carries a lot of baggage. Usually people interpret it to mean metered compulsory payment (albiet a small payment) of every page you hit. This will never work because people just don't like to pay for anything before they know if it's worth paying for or not. In a world where infinite copies can be made for nothing it just doesn't make sense to pay for information up front.
Voluntary payments are the revenue model of the future. It's how artists were compensated before Copyright, it's how it'll work after copyright. The difference now is the entire world can potentially toss coins into your hat and you don't have to actually stand on a street corner performing to collect the tips.
Artists will find that the most revenue will be made by letting your work spread as far and wide as possible while at the same time making it as easy as possible for your fans to enrich your no matter where they get your work from. The ones that try to lock up their work and force people to pay for it in advance will fail.
Actually, Freenet and Mojo Nation are not as susceptible as Gnutella. Unlike Gnutella, data in MojoNation and Freenet is identified by it's cryptographic hash. Corrupted or poisoned data is different data with a different hash.
You are quite right about trust. The term is "Distributed Trust Metrics"... At the O'Reilley P2P conference, Zooko of Mojo Nation and Raph of Advogato gave a presentation on "Attack Resistant Metadata." Presumably a system of that sort will be integrated into Mojo Nation in the near future. For it to work your system needs hash based identification of data and signed metadata.
Napster has legal uses, there is tons of music out there that the Copyright holder has granted permission to redistribute (for instance, Grateful Dead, Phish, Dave Matthews, and Metallica concert recordings along with tons of other music). Part of Napster's problem was all the evidence that the executives knew about infringing uses and actually used Napster to infringe on Copyright. There were e-mails where Napster executives were bragging about having gigabytes of infringing material at home that they aquired through Napster. Napster didn't keep their nose clean and now they will pay the piper.
Sorry, but any work of authorship that is affixed in a tangible medium is automatically Copyrighted. This was one of the changes in the '76 Copyright Act IIRC. You gain extra protections by putting a Copyright notice on the work. The author has to explicitly declare that the work is in the Public Domain for it to not have a Copyright. Practically all 'bootlegs' and other live recordings are Copyrighted but many Copyright holders (Grateful Dead, Phish, Dave Matthews, Metallica, etc...) have granted permission for noncommercial redistribution of their Copyrighted concert recordings.
Finally some big players are moving towards building a viable voluntary payment system. After all, we know that the barriers to building this system are more political than technical.
In a world where you can't stop people from copying your work (unless you never release it), I think artists and authors will find that they make the most money by letting their work spread into as many hands as possible and make it as easy as possible for people to tip the artist, no matter where they get the work from.
The Grateful Dead pioneered this model by giving away their live performances. Phish showed that anyone could become successful this way, it was not something unique to the Grateful Dead. Now there are a bazillion Jam Bands that allow recording and trading of their concerts. Pretty soon they will be able to actually get income directly from tape trading as well!
This is a great idea. Now you can have easily special handling for URLs into distributed filesystems like Mojo Nation or Freenet without having to add another proxy to your long chain. Instead you have a special url like mojo: or freenet: and only those URLs are sent to your proxy, instead of every URL. This is a blessing because now there is much less chance that an added service will disrupt a users regular web browsing (which can happen if you chain your proxy in with all the others and it turns out to be flaky). Users are willing to try new things but they get very unhappy if their regular web browsing gets disturbed.
This whole thing shows how unimaginative the Verant/Sony people are. Instead of changing the game to punish the folks who camp out for items (and subsequently "ruin" it for others), they just try to sue. There are many things they could do to alleviate the "problem" but they are going for the most brutish, least creative way. For instance, a lot of MUDs don't have limited items specifically because some people don't like to play with "power gamers"... Verant could create a bunch of hossed out vigilantes in the game to kick the asses of the campers but the penalty for death is too trivial in the game (and I don't think player killing is even allowed). In other words, Verant could create solutions within the game to, at the very least, prevent the people who do this "professionally" from runing the fun of the other customers. Instead they try to get their way through force of law (hint it just drives the practice underground but doesn't do anything to stop it)
Why does everyone think it was the copy protection and copyright holders that killed DAT? I think DAT failed because it had all the disadvantages of tape: no instant random track access, delicate media that geats eaten by complicated expensive transports, little high speed duplication capability, etc... That made DAT pretty lousy compared to the CD's that people wanted to duplicate and make mixes of. Note that MiniDisc is much more sucessful than DAT in the consumer market even though it has all the same copy protection AND serial generation degredation from the lossy compression (i.e. it's even worse for copying from a consumer wanting to pirate things perspective). CD-R will eventually win out because it plays in many/most of the bazillion CD players already out there, it works in harmony with a computer, the blanks are closing in on dirt cheap, and you can burn at 8X. Yeah, it sure doesn't hurt CD-R that copy protection is non existent on the computer burners, but it isn't the only factor.
Slashdot Mirror
Life imitates art?
However, HotOrNot is a "context free" metric. You look at a single picture and decide that the person is hot or not. Unfortunately, this isn't all that useful as the answers tend to be very close to either "1" or "10" A much better implementation would be just "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." K5 also suffers from this problem when it asks users to rate comments on a scale of 1 to 5. Keeping it simple would make the ratings much more effective.
Pick the Hottie on the other hand implements a contextual metric. Instead of rating a picture on it's own you look at two pictures and click the one you think is hotter. It's much easier to decide between coffee or tea than it is to rate coffee on a scale of 1 to 10. Effectively the site is sorting pictures using human judgement for the comparison function. This way you get much more useful results. With this system you can get the "Top 10 Hotties." With HotOrNot there are probably thousands of images that are 10.0 or 9.9.
Justin Chapweske of Open Cola gets the credit for pointing out this one.
burris
Burris
The Quartz engine has some Altivec enhancements that should give significant performance boosts on the G4.
It's important to note that application specific drawing implementation can have sizeable effect on drawing performance. Back in the NeXT days, an Adobe employee would tweak the drawing code for open source screensaver modules and games and end up making them an order of magnitude faster. Intelligent drawing or lack thereof can make or brake the performance of an app.
Finally, let us not forget that the new Finder, which is the source of most of the OSX bashing, is not even a native Cocoa app and is written in Carbon. Give a nice native app like Stone Design Create a whirl and see what a difference it is. BTW, Create is a badass drawing program and the only 3rd party app that has run on EVERY version of NeXT ever released, all the way back to the early days and including OpenStep for Solaris and HP Gecko.
In any event, everyone knows that operating systems are never "finished" and 1.0's are always euphemisms for Beta software. NT 3.1 anyone? OS-X is a very ambitious project and it's amazing that the thing works as well as it does with backwards compatibility.
Burris
Burris
When you open that (youll need to have Mojo Nation running on your box) you'll get an html page with info about the show and links to the individual tracks. This is freely redistributable music.
Burris
As far as not having the artist in the mp3 file name; Mojo Nation has seperate XML metadata describing files and for Audio that includes Title, Artist, Genre, and others. There is no need to put all of this information in the file name with Mojo Nation.
Burris
Burris
Burris
Also keep in mind that Sybase offers Linux x86 binaries of it's previous major release for free for any use (deployed commercial use okay!). They offer the current version free for development purposes. The previous major version is plenty good enough for most applications. There is no comparison between MySQL and a real industrial strength database like Sybase. Maybe one day MySQL will be up to snuff and then we'll all use it, but Sybase and Oracle have been working on this stuff for a long time.
Burris
Burris
It's just like when you buy a new hard drive. Every time I've gotten a new disk in the last 10 years I've though "damn, this drive is so huge I'll never fill it up." but I eventually do, sooner than later.
Disk space, CPU, and RAM have been increasing by the same ridiculous amounts that bandwidth but we manage to fill them up. A 700mhz G4 is many many orders of magnitude faster than the 68000 in the first Mac but a Mac OSX on a G4 feels slower than an old OS running on the old Mac. That's because software engineers do new, more complex things with the increased available power and memory. Users do new, more bandwidth intensive things given increased bandwidth.
The complementary law to Moore's law and it's memory/bandwidth equivalents are that usage increases at the same rate. The idea that after a couple more upgrades of the backbone we'll have plenty of excess bandwith for every user to do whatever they want at a low flat rate is just naive.
What's going to happen is ISP's who have structured pricing on users with intermittent, spiky bandwidth usage are going to keep their bandwidth offerings and prices the same for longer than they would have without people using P2P apps, until their profits are back. Basically they will raise their prices without actually raising prices that consumers pay, just like the way consumer product manufacturers raise prices by giving you less product in the same sized and priced container.
Burris
Burris
burris
The problem that "Micropayments" have is the name carries a lot of baggage. Usually people interpret it to mean metered compulsory payment (albiet a small payment) of every page you hit. This will never work because people just don't like to pay for anything before they know if it's worth paying for or not. In a world where infinite copies can be made for nothing it just doesn't make sense to pay for information up front.
Voluntary payments are the revenue model of the future. It's how artists were compensated before Copyright, it's how it'll work after copyright. The difference now is the entire world can potentially toss coins into your hat and you don't have to actually stand on a street corner performing to collect the tips. Artists will find that the most revenue will be made by letting your work spread as far and wide as possible while at the same time making it as easy as possible for your fans to enrich your no matter where they get your work from. The ones that try to lock up their work and force people to pay for it in advance will fail.
burris
You are quite right about trust. The term is "Distributed Trust Metrics" ... At the O'Reilley P2P conference, Zooko of Mojo Nation and Raph of Advogato gave a presentation on "Attack Resistant Metadata." Presumably a system of that sort will be integrated into Mojo Nation in the near future. For it to work your system needs hash based identification of data and signed metadata.
Burris
Burris
Burris
(live concert taper)
Burris
Google to the rescue: A Crash Course in the Mathematics Of Infinite Sets.
In a world where you can't stop people from copying your work (unless you never release it), I think artists and authors will find that they make the most money by letting their work spread into as many hands as possible and make it as easy as possible for people to tip the artist, no matter where they get the work from.
The Grateful Dead pioneered this model by giving away their live performances. Phish showed that anyone could become successful this way, it was not something unique to the Grateful Dead. Now there are a bazillion Jam Bands that allow recording and trading of their concerts. Pretty soon they will be able to actually get income directly from tape trading as well!
Burris
Burris
Burris
Burris