Everyone rips on the Lynch movie but I think it was great. It did not butcher the book at all. About all they butchered was turning the "weirding" fighting technique into a Hollywood-esque sound blaster thingy. Oh, and Paul/Chani's relationship is reduced to the line "Chani & Paul's Love Grew"
Otherwise it's a great movie. I saw it not that long ago with my girlfriend and I was stopping it every few minutes to explain what the hell was going on. However, I noticed that every time I did that, the very next line after I restarted the player explained what had I had stopped the movie to talk about.
You see, they got everything into this movie, but it's a lot of stuff. EVERY SINGLE LINE is important in the movie. If you miss a single line, you're lost. Coupled with the fact that there is a lot of "whispering" to indicate private thoughts, it's easy to miss a line. I think that's why people don't like it. Otherwise I think the movie is a masterpiece and is relatively faithful to the book.
BTW, I love to play the out of print Avalon Hill DUNE board game. IMHO it's the best board game ever created. It's best to play with six players, each player gets to play one of the main factions from the book: Atreidies, Harkonen, Fremen, Emperor, Bene Gesserit, and Guild. Each character is played slightly differently according to the actual character in the book: The Guild tries to prevent other players from gaining control of Dune, if nobody controls Dune by the end of the game then the Guild wins. The Atreidies have limited prescience but find out that sometimes that just means you know you are going to get fsck'd and you can't do a damned thing about it. The Bene Gesserit have the voice and can force you to do or not do certain things in battle and they also must predict the winner of the game (and in what turn they win) before the game starts. If they are successful in manipulating the game so their prediction comes true then the Bene win and everyone else looses! The Emperor is rich and kicks ass, the Harks are treacherous and unpredictable. It's a great game and copies are always available on eBay of course.
Chording is the only way to have a device that is simple and doesn't have a jillion keys on it. I am typing this on a BAT keyboard with just my left hand and there are only 7 buttons on it. It would be simple to come up with a sleeker design that was just a glove that strapped onto your hand and could be used anywhere.
Contrary to intuition, chording is very easy to learn and doesn't interfere with your other keyboard memory. I've only been using it for a day and I'm already getting pretty good at it.
....and if Java wasn't so lame as to not have first class method objects then you could do something like this (like you can in Python, which also runs on the Java platform with JPython)
import java.io.*;
cooler = System.out.println
cooler("Python Rules")
Burris
Re:Get automatically sorted out
on
Spambot Poisoner
·
· Score: 2
But I don't think the active spammers using a relay are necessarily the ones harvesting the addresses. The harvesters probably automatically remove "nospam" in an attempt to boost the number of likely good addresses in the lists they are peddling to spammers.
If you go entirely on the MD5 hash, you will get false positives: look at the "birthday problem" to see
why. With literally millions of different songs on Napster, there will be many random "collisions" (as
they are known in crypto circles).
Uh, did you do the math here? MD5 is a 128-bit hash. The birthday attack reduces that to the square root, which means on average you'll need to generate 2^64 hashes before finding a collision. Last time I checked, 2^64 is quite a bit larger than "millions" (which is about 2^20). The magnetic particles on my hard drive platter spontaneously rearranging themselves into Britney Spears new single is more likely than any two songs on Napster accidentially having the same hash.
To put this into better perspective, distributed.net has been trying to find a single 64-bit key for close to three years now and the key rate is up to 121 billion keys per second without success.
Can you imagine bands "open-sourcing" their pieces? Not only would we have access to every
music sheet they write on, but they would be giving their "software" out for free. How would they
make a living?
Ever hear of some bands like the GRateful Dead and Phish? They allow people to record and freely trade their live concerts. The Dead were the top grossing band on tour year after year until Jerry Garcia died. Phish is one of the top grossing bands on tour and they make millions. Both of these bands could sell out NYC's Madison Square Garden for multiple nights in a row.
Those two bands are the best two examples of the "Jam Band" business model; tour a lot, play a differen show every night, let people record and trade the music; lather, rinse, repeat. There's a whole industry of bands using this model and some are quite successful.
Yes, these bands also sell albums which are not freely distributable, but it is clear that album sales are not a very large portion of their income at all and they subsist almost entirely on live performances. As Public Enemy's Chuck D has said, you can't download the actual artists.
Some bands using the "Jam Band" model also have had radio hits and became _very_ successful, including Dave Matthews Band and Blues Traveler.
Mojo Nation uses digital token technology. The Mojo tokens actually sit on each users drive. However, they are digitally signed with RSA, so you can't make new tokens. Each token can only be spent once. Go read Applied Cryptography for an in-depth discussion of how it works.
You get Mojo when you actually provide service for someone else (i.e. you let someone download a block from you, accept a block from someone, return search results, or relay messages for others). Tokens are given directly to the counterparty (though they exchange them for fresh ones right away so you can't spend the Mojo behind their back).
Re:Mojo Nation solves the leeching problem
on
Scour is Dead
·
· Score: 2
Sorry, but that won't work. You don't get Mojo for publishing content. Mojo is exchanged for resources, not data. You are consuming others resources when you put data on their machine, so you must pay them Mojo.
You get Mojo for providing resources. To do that you need to share your bandwidth/computer by running a block server, content tracker, or relay server.
Burris
New Version, New Install
on
Scour is Dead
·
· Score: 2
A new version of Mojo Nation was released yesterday (0.920) which has a new installer. It should be much easier to get running now. It also has much faster download and publishing code.
Burris
MN solves the leeching problem
on
Scour is Dead
·
· Score: 4
There are certain systems that are designed to handle leeches and other associated problems with peer to peer systems. The most notable is Mojo Nation. It is basically a barter system for computing resources, especially bandwidth and to a lesser extent disk space and CPU.
In order to download, search, or even upload, you must compensate your peers with Mojo, which represents the the resources of theirs you are consuming. To earn Mojo you must contribute your own resources to the network by setting the software to resell your own computing resources. It also features redundancy so servers can disappear without data disappearing. It's really cool, check it out.
These membership models are doomed to failure. It's likely that the RIAA will demand only "blessed" MP3's be avialable from the service, there goes the availability of obscure music. Further, it's possible that the RIAA will demand that only "SDMI friendly" formats or whatever are used, there goes the convenience of MP3....and how will the money be divvied up anyway? If it's a fixed monthly memebership, then you can bet that the wealth will be distributed according the statistical "Business As Usual" method that will continue to line the record company and a few ultra-famous artist pockets while further marginalizing the little guys.
In any event, nothing will stop people from trading the music on free networks.
Record companies are still focused on the way they made money in the old days: controlling distribution and charging for every copy made. They seriously do not understand that they have lost control over distribution forever. Instead of expending so much time and energy trying unsuccessfully to control the flow of data throughout the 'Net (impossible), they should concentrate on making it as easy as possible for people to compensate the artists after they download music, no matter where they get it from. Directly compensate the artist/publisher for music you like. If your friend e-mails you an MP3 and you hate it, should you have to pay anyone for it? Hell no! You took nothing from them.
If it were as easy clicking a button on your MP3 player to send a 'tip' to the artist/publisher, people would do it. After all, everyone knows that artists have to make some money to keep producing art. People trading MP3's want to give money to their favorite artists, the problem right now is they cannot! About as close as you can get right now is to go buy the physical album or go see a concert and/or buy t-shirts and whatever. What if you live in Abu-Dabi and can't buy the album or go see a concert? Centuries of experience with busking and recent tipping experiments on the net (such as Steven King's _The Plant_) show that people will compensate artists if they like what they hear.
Let's face it, the 'Net provides the opportunity for more music from more artists to reach more people than ever before, for almost no cost to the artist/publisher. Instead of capitalizing on the inexpensive and efficient flow of data on the 'Net, the RIAA is trying to restrict it. It won't ever work and they will loose out as a result of it.
Setting up compensation systems for artists/publishers will be a long and political process, but people are working hard on the solutions.
You are right about digital signatures but wrong about the central source. There's no need for some central authority, just an entity that you trust. Lots of work is being done with distributed trust metrics, such as on Advogato.
Requests to mojonation.net are intercepted by the Mojo Proxy and are handled by your Broker; the requests don't actually go to www.mojonation.net Mojo Nation does not depend on that machine's existance at all.
You can argue that its already starting, with the trade in black-market organs (particularly kidneys)
harvested from the 3rd world for 1st world clients. That's bad (and if you think those people really are
giving them up by their free will, dream on).
What kind of nonsense is this? Do you actually have any evidence for this or are you merely spouting hearsay, rumors, and urban legends? Last time I checked, an organ transplant was still a very serious and complicated procedure. Do you really think the doctors and hospitals involved in such transplants are buying human organs off the backs of trucks? If you believe that then I can get you a great deal on a brain transplant.
The patent office issues the patents according to the law (both written by congress, and the
implications derived from the courts). Wouldn't it then make more sense to get the proper laws
written?
The law says that prior art and anything obvious to someone trained in the art are specifically not patentable. Storing someone's credit card number and shipping address, indexed by the cookie returned by their browser is obvious to any software engineer.
It's the patent office's fault; they are over taxed and not thoroughly investigating patent applications.
You are right to be concerned, but as with all sound reproduction equipment: You Can't Tell How It Sounds By Looking At The Specs(*TM).
In this case, they are sealed in your ear canal, relatively close to your eardrum, and in this environment they sound flat. They actually have extraordinarily detailed and but not harsh high end. I also have a pair of Sennheiser HD-600's (top of the line dynamic headphones that kick ass) and they are only slightly better than the Etymotics and that is only in a quiet room.
I can assure you that they are designed for very accurate reproduction and do not have exaggerated bass to please indescriminate consumers, nor is the high end compromised in any way. I only emphasised the how good the bass is because most people cannot believe something so small can produce accurate bass the way these can.
Their only drawback is they are an earplug and require a good seal (sometimes requiring you to moisten the tips, yuck!) and many people can't deal with that. Custom molds are much better, unless you happen to have strangely shaped ear canals that are impossible to fit, but add about $100 to the cost.
As someone who used the NeXT exclusively for 8 years and now only has a Mac because Mac is NeXT or NeXT is Mac or something, I like the Apple menu quite a bit and hope it returns to OS-X. I'm not your average user.
Regarding DLL hell, you should check out the Frameworks stuff. Shared Libraries done the Right Way. Framework directories contain dynamically loadable code, and localized UI, and headers, and localized documentation, and anything else....and they are versioned. Two different versions of the same Framework will hapilly coexist. It's killer!
I won't argue with you on whether or not the media in general has a corporate bias, but lets not forget that the media sees P2P sharing technology as nearly as much of a threat as the RIAA.
The whole publishing industry is based on Copyright, the former inability of making lots of copies without easily getting hauled into court, and ad impressions. Software that lets people trade their works with impunity and without any way to tally ad impressions scares them because it threatens life as they know it.
You can hear NOTHING outside when you are using them. They block outside noise by 23dB (that's more than two orders of magnitude). Because they block out so much sound, you don't have to turn them up so much to hear it, so they actually protect your hearing.
Absolutely nothing can touch them for listening to tunes in a noisy office, on a plane, or a train. You can also walk down the street with them and nobody knows you are wearing a $300 pair of headphones. Sonic bliss anywhere. Despite their small size they have amazing bass response due to the seal they produce in your ear canal.
Very highly recommended. You won't be able to listen to the Sony headphones anymore after getting used to these (the Sony's will sound like shit by comparison).
Dr. Burris T. Ewell
FTP has some of the same problems as Gnutella.
on
The Gnutella Paradox
·
· Score: 2
Gnutella suffers from two problems: 1) the protocol for searching doesn't scale well and 2) as soon as you put up some tasty content you get hammered with leeches who don't offer the file up to anyone else (similar to the Slashdot Effect). FTP for the most part suffers from the second problem.
Check out Etree. This is a loose group of people that legitimately trade live concert recordings compressed with Shorten (lossless compression). They use FTP. People setup FTP servers and then announce to a mailing list what they have available.
The problem is that all of the public servers are staggering under the load. They limit the number of concurrent connections betwen 2-5 users to prevent complete mayhem on their bandwidth. So many people are trying to get in that the servers have scripts that automatically route ban anyone that attempts to connect more often than once a minute (or even two minutes for the bigger servers). The files are so large (350 megs per CD, 1-3 CD's per show usually) that it takes forever to get in. Standard Operating Procedure for downloading from public Etree servers is to open 12 terminal windows, each with a script trying to login to 12 different sites (once per minute, of course). After a few days you might get into one or two of them.
Hotline is a relatively modern BBS like system (it has integrated file transfer, message bases, and chatting). It's a little more advanced than FTP: it lets anyone connect but downloads are placed in a queue. So instead of redialing over and over and over again you just connect and start your download, and wait for the people in the queue ahead of you to finish. On popular sites that have lots of goodies I have literally had to wait in the queue for well over 24 hours to begin the actual file transfer.
I think the solution to the problem is a market based solution. Create a barter system for disk space, bandwidth, and CPU. In order to download something from someone and depelete their disk/bandwidth/cpu resources you must provide a comparable amount of resources. Since disk/bandwidth/cpu is a commodity, you can use a digital bearer instrument to represent those resources and create a fungible currency backed by the disk/cpu/bandwidth. Mojo Nation does exactly that, but you probably already knew I was going to say that.
Slashdot Mirror
Otherwise it's a great movie. I saw it not that long ago with my girlfriend and I was stopping it every few minutes to explain what the hell was going on. However, I noticed that every time I did that, the very next line after I restarted the player explained what had I had stopped the movie to talk about.
You see, they got everything into this movie, but it's a lot of stuff. EVERY SINGLE LINE is important in the movie. If you miss a single line, you're lost. Coupled with the fact that there is a lot of "whispering" to indicate private thoughts, it's easy to miss a line. I think that's why people don't like it. Otherwise I think the movie is a masterpiece and is relatively faithful to the book.
BTW, I love to play the out of print Avalon Hill DUNE board game. IMHO it's the best board game ever created. It's best to play with six players, each player gets to play one of the main factions from the book: Atreidies, Harkonen, Fremen, Emperor, Bene Gesserit, and Guild. Each character is played slightly differently according to the actual character in the book: The Guild tries to prevent other players from gaining control of Dune, if nobody controls Dune by the end of the game then the Guild wins. The Atreidies have limited prescience but find out that sometimes that just means you know you are going to get fsck'd and you can't do a damned thing about it. The Bene Gesserit have the voice and can force you to do or not do certain things in battle and they also must predict the winner of the game (and in what turn they win) before the game starts. If they are successful in manipulating the game so their prediction comes true then the Bene win and everyone else looses! The Emperor is rich and kicks ass, the Harks are treacherous and unpredictable. It's a great game and copies are always available on eBay of course.
Burris
QWERTY sux, at least use Dvorak... it works on standard hardware and every platform.
Burris
Contrary to intuition, chording is very easy to learn and doesn't interfere with your other keyboard memory. I've only been using it for a day and I'm already getting pretty good at it.
Burris
"i mean, we can send a canoe from the edge of florida to the keys, why not across the atlantic, c'mon people"
import java.io.*;
cooler = System.out.println
cooler("Python Rules")
Burris
Burris
To put this into better perspective, distributed.net has been trying to find a single 64-bit key for close to three years now and the key rate is up to 121 billion keys per second without success.
Burris
Those two bands are the best two examples of the "Jam Band" business model; tour a lot, play a differen show every night, let people record and trade the music; lather, rinse, repeat. There's a whole industry of bands using this model and some are quite successful.
Yes, these bands also sell albums which are not freely distributable, but it is clear that album sales are not a very large portion of their income at all and they subsist almost entirely on live performances. As Public Enemy's Chuck D has said, you can't download the actual artists.
Some bands using the "Jam Band" model also have had radio hits and became _very_ successful, including Dave Matthews Band and Blues Traveler.
Burris
You get Mojo when you actually provide service for someone else (i.e. you let someone download a block from you, accept a block from someone, return search results, or relay messages for others). Tokens are given directly to the counterparty (though they exchange them for fresh ones right away so you can't spend the Mojo behind their back).
You get Mojo for providing resources. To do that you need to share your bandwidth/computer by running a block server, content tracker, or relay server.
Burris
Burris
In order to download, search, or even upload, you must compensate your peers with Mojo, which represents the the resources of theirs you are consuming. To earn Mojo you must contribute your own resources to the network by setting the software to resell your own computing resources. It also features redundancy so servers can disappear without data disappearing. It's really cool, check it out.
Burris
In any event, nothing will stop people from trading the music on free networks.
Record companies are still focused on the way they made money in the old days: controlling distribution and charging for every copy made. They seriously do not understand that they have lost control over distribution forever. Instead of expending so much time and energy trying unsuccessfully to control the flow of data throughout the 'Net (impossible), they should concentrate on making it as easy as possible for people to compensate the artists after they download music, no matter where they get it from. Directly compensate the artist/publisher for music you like. If your friend e-mails you an MP3 and you hate it, should you have to pay anyone for it? Hell no! You took nothing from them.
If it were as easy clicking a button on your MP3 player to send a 'tip' to the artist/publisher, people would do it. After all, everyone knows that artists have to make some money to keep producing art. People trading MP3's want to give money to their favorite artists, the problem right now is they cannot! About as close as you can get right now is to go buy the physical album or go see a concert and/or buy t-shirts and whatever. What if you live in Abu-Dabi and can't buy the album or go see a concert? Centuries of experience with busking and recent tipping experiments on the net (such as Steven King's _The Plant_) show that people will compensate artists if they like what they hear.
Let's face it, the 'Net provides the opportunity for more music from more artists to reach more people than ever before, for almost no cost to the artist/publisher. Instead of capitalizing on the inexpensive and efficient flow of data on the 'Net, the RIAA is trying to restrict it. It won't ever work and they will loose out as a result of it.
Setting up compensation systems for artists/publishers will be a long and political process, but people are working hard on the solutions.
Burris
Burris
Burris
Burris
Burris
It's the patent office's fault; they are over taxed and not thoroughly investigating patent applications.
Burris
Burris
In this case, they are sealed in your ear canal, relatively close to your eardrum, and in this environment they sound flat. They actually have extraordinarily detailed and but not harsh high end. I also have a pair of Sennheiser HD-600's (top of the line dynamic headphones that kick ass) and they are only slightly better than the Etymotics and that is only in a quiet room.
I can assure you that they are designed for very accurate reproduction and do not have exaggerated bass to please indescriminate consumers, nor is the high end compromised in any way. I only emphasised the how good the bass is because most people cannot believe something so small can produce accurate bass the way these can.
Their only drawback is they are an earplug and require a good seal (sometimes requiring you to moisten the tips, yuck!) and many people can't deal with that. Custom molds are much better, unless you happen to have strangely shaped ear canals that are impossible to fit, but add about $100 to the cost.
Burris (serious audio snob)
Regarding DLL hell, you should check out the Frameworks stuff. Shared Libraries done the Right Way. Framework directories contain dynamically loadable code, and localized UI, and headers, and localized documentation, and anything else. ...and they are versioned. Two different versions of the same Framework will hapilly coexist. It's killer!
Burris
The whole publishing industry is based on Copyright, the former inability of making lots of copies without easily getting hauled into court, and ad impressions. Software that lets people trade their works with impunity and without any way to tally ad impressions scares them because it threatens life as they know it.
Burris
You can hear NOTHING outside when you are using them. They block outside noise by 23dB (that's more than two orders of magnitude). Because they block out so much sound, you don't have to turn them up so much to hear it, so they actually protect your hearing.
Absolutely nothing can touch them for listening to tunes in a noisy office, on a plane, or a train. You can also walk down the street with them and nobody knows you are wearing a $300 pair of headphones. Sonic bliss anywhere. Despite their small size they have amazing bass response due to the seal they produce in your ear canal.
Very highly recommended. You won't be able to listen to the Sony headphones anymore after getting used to these (the Sony's will sound like shit by comparison).
Dr. Burris T. Ewell
Check out Etree. This is a loose group of people that legitimately trade live concert recordings compressed with Shorten (lossless compression). They use FTP. People setup FTP servers and then announce to a mailing list what they have available.
The problem is that all of the public servers are staggering under the load. They limit the number of concurrent connections betwen 2-5 users to prevent complete mayhem on their bandwidth. So many people are trying to get in that the servers have scripts that automatically route ban anyone that attempts to connect more often than once a minute (or even two minutes for the bigger servers). The files are so large (350 megs per CD, 1-3 CD's per show usually) that it takes forever to get in. Standard Operating Procedure for downloading from public Etree servers is to open 12 terminal windows, each with a script trying to login to 12 different sites (once per minute, of course). After a few days you might get into one or two of them.
Hotline is a relatively modern BBS like system (it has integrated file transfer, message bases, and chatting). It's a little more advanced than FTP: it lets anyone connect but downloads are placed in a queue. So instead of redialing over and over and over again you just connect and start your download, and wait for the people in the queue ahead of you to finish. On popular sites that have lots of goodies I have literally had to wait in the queue for well over 24 hours to begin the actual file transfer.
I think the solution to the problem is a market based solution. Create a barter system for disk space, bandwidth, and CPU. In order to download something from someone and depelete their disk/bandwidth/cpu resources you must provide a comparable amount of resources. Since disk/bandwidth/cpu is a commodity, you can use a digital bearer instrument to represent those resources and create a fungible currency backed by the disk/cpu/bandwidth. Mojo Nation does exactly that, but you probably already knew I was going to say that.
Burris