While this is a nice, big paragraph, and I like big paragraphs, don't get me wrong, I fail to see the democrary.
@home runs on a zerocracy. There is no response to anything. I would have more luck praying.
Please see my original message stating that this is the reason for not only my personal problems, but for the banning from Usenet and the k-lining from Dalnet.
I would like to know what part of town you live in. I am confident that @home uses demographics that shows where the most amount of money in town is, and supplies that area with better service.
I lose connectivity every night. I've lived in two houses since I got on the @home network. One was a cheap rental town house, and the other in a neighborhood with $150,000 houses.
The reason you do not dislike @home is because you have not had the hassle with bartering with their tech support for hours in order to get someone to examine your connection in-depth, because your connection works.
However, unlike you, I am someone else. This resets the odds back to start on every factor that could go wrong.
Don't tell me you wouldn't feel nervous about moving to a new house, and getting cable reinstalled. Don't tell me you wouldn't hope that your access would be high quality.
As for dalnet, they detect your *.home.com status, redirect you to gate.dal.net, which is an alias for hebron.dal.net and another server I can't remember, and sit you in a very croweded, laggy situation.
The point of my original message was that @home does not give two shits about anyone. We are banned from Dalnet and Usenet. An a more personal level, I explained how they do not give two shits about me, personally.
Though, it is good to know that you get fine service. I have no doubt that @home works for SOME people. However, I am demographically challenged.
The other alternative is dial-up ISPs, since ADSL cannot reach where I live; Statistically, I am not in a very rich neighborhood, and support for cable and ADSL suffers from that. I am friends with a person who lives in the same building as the VP of Rogers (the [scummy] cable company in bed with @home), and his cable connection is very, very stable, and fast.
I'm not willing to go back to dial-up ISPs yet, since there are three, and soon four computers going to be connected to the Internet through my IP Masquerade. Furthermore, a personal web server and the ability to ssh into my computer when I'm not at home is something I utilize at least once a week.
I'm not the only user in my house who uses the Internet. Rather, I'm just the one who has the knowledge to know what a shitty service it is. It's not up to me to cancel it.
I'm a disgruntled @home user, or in other words, I've been on the service for more than three months. No one at @home takes proper measures to inforce the acceptable use policy. Instead, they cap bandwidth at 5k a second to make their ISP a less viable 'server', inconveniencing every user.
@home costs $65 a month Canadian, and they cut corners everywhere they can. My personal WAN area has between 32 and 40 people on it, and the packet drops are phenomenal. I have been phoning their tech support for thirteen months in a row, and they have told me it's everything BUT a crowded WAN area. They most recently have told me that 'Internet Access' does not include UDP. They do not support UDP, therefore they have no responsibility to control the quality of Internet gaming, despite advertising gaming on their network on television with fullscreen Quake pictures. I have been keeping track and am wondering about the viability of a lawsuit.
As I hinted above, servers are against the rules with @home. Have you ever played on a Quake server with an IP starting with 24.113 or 24.112? That's @home cable. Expect 5 to 50k/s upstreams.
Ever gone to a mp3 search engine? A ton of the sites are 24.113 or 24.112.
@home has been banned from Dalnet, due to excessive numbers of people spamming the network. The Dalnet ops have tried to contact @home about the problem, but they were ignored. The only way to connect to Dalnet for @home members is through gate.dal.net, which has too much lag. My two year old channel dwindled to zero people within a week.
The bottom line is, do NOT sign up with @home if there are any other alternatives. They will hook you in with a high installation fee, and it goes downhill from there. You're on your own. Everyone who has any sense of right and has power at @home must be ignored internally.
It's the chance of news stories like this that make me reload slashdot every few hours. I have downloaded the source, and yes, it IS gpl'd.
From README.src: "Broadcast 200 is GPL. Through the magic of credit, the development costs have been shielded from the user."
When I went to CDIS college for a week, one of the things they showed us was video editing. I ventured a question: How much does the hardware and software cost? The professor gave me a rough estimate of ten thousand dollars. I sadly thought that such a potential low-barrier entry market should not be made high-barrier by the cost alone.
GPL'd software is not the end of all the caveats to make software great, however. One of the things that makes the GNU project's software so great is portability. Also, a lot of the GNU project's software is very solid. I am very interested in a professional video editor looking at this software and giving us input.
The idea of moduluar applications with the GUI being a separate binary has interested me for a while.
Before I start my list, I'd like to say that I agree completely with Stiletto. One thing no one is disputing is that RMS's philosophy of making portable to the hardware and to the OS apps has served well; Hear him speak and he'll tell you that was one of the primary goals of the GNU project early on.
Here are some of the ways to separate the GUI: 1) mpg123 and gqmpeg are a combo that allows the user to play mp3s on the command line and with a GTK widget set. It communicates through signals. This is limited, but it's one form of IPC.
2) AF_UNIX. Unix socket IPC seems like a viable choice. Furthermore, anything that's written with AF_UNIX can be easily ported to AF_INET. (For those not familiar with the socket API, this means the GUI can be on another computer on a TCP/IP network, though I believe this is redundant with the way X works.)
3) Fire-parameters-out-to-commandline-binary. This works for simpler apps. For example, a program called xgrep, which is a GUI shell for grep would have dialog boxes, and other GUI widgets that represent parameters for grep. When everything is set and the user is satisfied, he would click 'search', which would execute the real grep. The output would be taken back to the GUI program.
The book Beginning Linux Programming, which was reviewed here on Slashdot covers quite a few ways, with some brevity (a chapter each) of using IPC. Perhaps someone with real world programming experience would like to reply to this and comment about the upsides and downsides of each one.
After talking with Zoid about hypothetical ways to crack Quake 3's CD Key, and me coming up blank other than cracking the Quake server which turned out to be unacceptable ( I had already purchased the game before any of this talk went on in private ), I was quite impressed with the "server's server" verification:
The Quake 3 server sends the CD key verification to the Master server along with it's heartbeat.
Would it not be possible for Quake 3 to also do a CRC check on it's own binary, send that with the CD key info, for requirement of validation?
While this would require a small deviation from cross platformism, a list of valid CRCs would be on ID's server of servers.
In order to stop proxies, the closed source binary would encrypt the data of a port on the localhost being sent to the server. The server would decrypt this, and establish a new connection (or connections for both UDP and TCP) on the localhost.
Essentially, the server would connect to the client.
I'm still only 25 pages into Richard Steven's TCP/IP Illustrated, so if this sounds a bit naive, know that it is the product of my fascination with abstraction and my good will.:)
Um, after reading over the above, would it be possible with winsock or BSD sockets API implementation to have a program open every socket from 1024 to 32768, and then wait on them all? (All of Quake 3's potential resocket ports.) Also, you'd have to beat the proxy to bind(), which would be just another chapter in the bot cold war.
Note that Quake one users could be prevented from cheating by implementing what I mentioned for Quake 3. At least in my head.
I disagree. What is obvious changes with time, and if it isn't specifically about the Internet, then it may change with culture as well. The problem with patents is that it causes market stagnation.
As a long-time Quake player who knows the inner workings of Quake quite well, I saw this coming. In fact, I posted a request for an 'ask slashdot' a bit under a year ago about this topic, but it never got posted on the webpage. Guess I should have written Quake for it to have been valid.
I wonder if this was foreseen by ID before the code was released. ( I say ID because Carmack gives credit to others for doing the grunt work of making the code releasable. ) If so, the protocol should have been modified or ripped out of the clients that were OSS until someone DID take these security measures, at which time ID would re-release the real source tree.
If someone does make this cheating verification software, I recommend that they make it more open ended than for just Quake. I think this sets a precedent for Open Sourcing network games, and if a solution is readily waiting, people will be more open to open their code.
Although ID is correct, they often take down their older products in order to hype their newer ones. Carmack, in PC Gamer in the Quake 2 feature issue, called Quake one's development 'a competition to see who could make the best deathmatch map'. Quake Two was described in Gamespot's recent article as having tons of mapfixes up to the final hour before it went gold.
Everyone from the Quake Talk days knows of the quotes that describe Quake making Doom look like pong.
This strategy works for ID, because their games are great, and pole vaulting off of them gets the expectations even higher.
When Doom Two came out, for another example, it was cited as having maps better suited to deathmatch than Doom one.
I'll speculate that Quake 3's distribution of separate versions will be cited by ID when their next game comes close to shipping. Also, in order to hype their new product, they might describe Quake 3 as having to force detail out of the maps because the curves were a new technology and took a lot of triangles. Hardware will be newer, and it won't be such a big deal. Hence the cooler maps.
Furthermore, the bots will be improved upon, and mentioned in hype.:)
I'll bet you, internally at Id, this is a promoted strategy for hyping their games.
Of course, Microsoft's embracing and extending is not better for the user.
The reason people would jump at Microsoft for saying this is because we're correctly sceptical when Microsoft says 'better for the users'. It's much easier to believe this, coming from RMS, no?
When people compare suing the creators of Napster to suing the creators of FTP, I find one essential difference: Napster discriminates on it's content based on file format, whereas FTP does not. Like the story about Lycos denying Excite, Infoseek or Yahoo searches, Napster is responsible for all content that passes through their program because they have content discrimination. This is not a place they want to be.
I still maintain that a more general purpose type of Napster clone should exist, to fully realise the possibilities of this sort of file distribution.
I've wondered this myself, and the conclusion I've come to is that a geek utilizes his skills in the real world; whether that be a trade, or the running of a Charity.
A nerd is someone who has yet to apply it to the real world. This is an acceptable status, especially if you're still in school.
Or maybe I'm mistaking overanalysis with an imagination for reading into things... I think that's it. (No, I don't care that I just rendered my entire message senseless.)
I think Napster is a very poorly implemented version of a concept that hasn't seen the light of day fully yet. The idea that I'm about to throw out is a bit cynical, but very profitable, I would assume.:)
All of the old Internet protocols will be reworked, proprietarized and perhaps even improved upon in our lifetime. Some of the old ones will even die out. An attack on the life of Internet Relay Chat has already happened. Harnessing the power of teenage chat, ICQ has become a success story of no obscure sort.
When I saw this, I thought of reinventing other wheels. What protocol could use proprietarizing? (I've actually got six or seven GPL'd works out there, and this is all hypothetical.) My first thought was FTP. Transferring files could be vastly simplified, I thought, if it wasn't done on a per-site basis. I mean, the user doesn't care if he's getting it from site A or site B. (In practice, bandwidth is an issue.) Places like www.shareware.com already do this, by presenting you with many mirrors.
However, a proprietary interface may have better results. Different types of files could have different search specifications.
At the very least, a complete reworking of FTP could get the underbelly of the Internet (porn traders, warez) off of conventional protocols.:)
Napster comes fairly close to that original vision of mine. It only deals with one sort of file, however. I still see room for an app that reworks all of FTP.
I'd like to work on such an app. I see some free time coming up in my future. Perhaps I'll throw some code at it.
So maybe a 'browser' is a beast that does not lend itself very well to the Open Source development model. Maybe it needs to be broken up into smaller tasks: HTML viewer, Location finder (URL, local files, etc), JPG viewer, etc. Then, like a shell script does to standard Unix commands, they could be brought together to transparently create what we already use.
I recall Carmack making a.plan update or two while he he was talking about latency while creating the first version of Quakeworld. He stated a few changes which could be done in order to decrease latency.
What your modem does, by default, is collect all data into a buffer, and then send it out all at once. The larger the buffer, the more efficiently compression can be performed upon it. All of the old Doom init strings that came with the game turned off your compression... and your error correction for that matter. (Wasn't it ATL0&M0&N0&B0 for a US Robotics?)
A common misconception is that some of the new midspeed connects such as ADSL or Cable give low pings because they have a lot of bandwidth. Rather, it's the lack of PPP. PPP adds about 140ms onto the ping time, because of the way it's designed: SLIP looks like it was written on the back of a paper napkin. PPP was.:)
Having strikingly low bandwidth causes for dropped packets, which is a very high possibility, especially since most (not all) packets in Quake games are UDP. However, other than this exception, bandwidth is secondary to latency when playing Quake.
That's why there isn't a notable latency difference between 28.8 and 56k. It's still PPP with error correction.
It seems to me that the best way to learn something is to learn two of its type. I found a good growth of my knowledge of computers when I learned my second OS, but not my third. The same with programming languages.
You start to learn what is fundamental to the process, and what is just extra stuff added by the designer.
As I look down the list of all the things I am good at such as music, I see that the Two Of Everything rule applies there as well.
Good job to Katz, and anyone else who attempts a second of anything as daunting as an operating system, so that they may understand what's fundamental, and what's fluff.
I think it would be correct to say that Brooks essay No Silver Bullet stated that there would be no algoithm or coding method that improved software across the board in the next ten years. This ten year period was over two and a half years ago.
Most programmers are in unison in agreeing that the Silver Bullet didn't emerge.
While you may argue that the Internet is a silver bullet, in-house development is far more efficient a method as far as communication goes than the Internet. The Unreal team had members from across the globe for the first half of their game design. In the end, they all met in Canada to finish it off, as development was going too slow.
The closer to realtime communication is, the less time spent concentrating on synchronizing everyone's thoughts on matters pertaining to the project.
The reason the development of a free Unix works very well over the internet, is that it is broken up into very small parts. If one person is to develop 'grep', they would not need to be continuously in synch with someone who is writing an archiving tool.
The only thing that may surprise the development teams, is that some of their proprietary code that they have developed may now have to be open-sourced.
I wonder if a possible way around this would be to take all the newly written, hacked functions, and call them from a closed source binary. Of course, this would be deliberately avoiding A Good Thing.
Also, what is the legal obligation of companies to stay with their current license? Is it possible for a piece of software to gain momentum because it's free software, and then do an about face with a new, decidedly more evil license?
If you check Doomnation, you'll realise that Doom hacking is still alive. I can see that community becoming very excited.
We've all spent years learning how to type, so we have a large investment in a QWERTY layout, while those few people who've spent the even larger investment to relearn a DVORAK keyboard are extremely unlikely to turn around and admit (even if only to themselves) that this was a mistake!
I find it pretty doubtful that every last person who ever learned Dvorak has a psychological barrier to admitting to the truth. That type of point is a dangerous point for anyone to accept in any context: Free software is a waste of time, but no one wants to admit it because of all the time they spent on it.
I've been using only Dvorak for fourteen months, and I've managed to get my typing speed up to the 120wpm it was in QWERTY. I don't claim to type faster. It's probably a mental limit, as I stopped increasing my speed when I reached 120wpm in QWERTY as well.
Rather, I type with less mistakes. Furthermore, Dvorak's localised vowels lends itself to chording, which is putting your fingers over every key of a word at once, and pressing them with about 70 milliseconds apart.
Corel has slipped up on something that makes passionate software users everywhere an anomaly: There needs to be a connection between the legal department and the PR department.
Coming from a Windows world where messing with copyright terms will not anger most end users, they have made a horrible blunder that needs to be fixed right away if they wish to retain the respect of a large part of the community. If they do not, it is a sign that the support of the hardcore Linux users do not matter to Corel in the slightest.
I don't know about most of you, but as a home computer user, I don't really read the licenses of Windows products that I've installed, but I go through the trouble for a lot of Linux packages, because the implications of a limiting license under Linux could mean a lot more, since distros like Debian Linux can be rolled out in most situations without a second thought as to whether the software that I just installed software that needed to be registered with the company in 20 days, or it becomes disabled.
Corel Linux's blunder has only slightly to do with inconveniencing us from using their modified betas. Rather, it has everything to do with someone stealing the intellectual property that was released to the public. It is a challenge against the GPL.
Don't we have to protect the GPL, or the software that had it's copyright licenses gets violated? The applying laws to this may or may not be the same in my country. Also, does anyone have a list or could pass some names along as to what software was stolen?
This could also bring up a bit of a holy war: People who say that anyone who cries out against Corel for this are overreacting: They will release the source with the distro eventually. However, I believe it's the principal of the thing.
Let's hope this is a stupid mistake and not a stupid company. It is a sign that when Linux grows up enough to have a big enough user base, that the communities of old and wise(sometimes) coders can be ignored by companies and profit can still be made using our software. When this happens, and I'm not saying it did, people will hesitate to contribute to a movement that helps so many companies who do not care about us. Free software has this hurdle to get past, if Linux ever eventually has enough of a userbase of average users. It will probably happen within the next few years.
This reminds me of the Turing test in the 1940's. Alan Turing predicted that by the year 2000, man and machine alike could take his intelligence test, and there would be no distinguishable outcome.
Alan Turing looked at the human brain as matter, and said that it could be reproduced by humans. Turing introduced a concept of the 'Universal Turing Machine'. Each Turing Machine would be part of a different method or algorithm. These Turing Machines would be embedded in the Universal Turing machine, and this one machine could accomplish any task.
These Universal Turing Machines are computers (refer to them as such amongst friends as a pedantic joke:) ), and the Turing Machines that run inside them are the programs we run. Alan Turing is seen as the grandfather of all modern Computer Science.
In the article, the keywords 'Nothing human here' are thrown around. To me, this is just fluff. I would like to see their definition of what constitutes human only behaviour. The right side of the brain does work completely with physical matter. Therefore, simulating such things is a possibility, given enough capacity to store and process a large enough neural net.
They also mention that they do not think Brutus is 'a conscious entity'. To say that this is what will always define humans and computers may be a bit rash.
However, this is an exciting prospect. Perhaps Turing's predictions about the outcome of the Turing Test's completion date were only off by six to ten years.
You're putting the horse before the carriage here in terms of taking things out of context. Sure, in the big picture laws are put into place because of bills from elected people being passed. However, in the context in which I was speaking, Microsoft isn't going to get a re-election before the verdict.
Furthermore, judges are not voted in by public opinion, as this would sway their decisions, of course.
In a time when Microsoft is greatly unpopular with the people, they are trying to get them to rally against the DOJ?
Either way, since when do laws have anything to do with the majority's opinion? I didn't even realise it had to do with anyone's opinion. The law is the law, and if the DOJ establishes that Microsoft had (not has) a monopoly in the judges eyes, then Microsoft is going to be punished.
However, what the ruling may be may be affected by public opinion. How much, is something that Microsoft is hoping for.
Of course, anyone who has been hurt by Microsoft realises that they are stifling the competition's right to innovate by creating proprietary standards. Although it doesn't get posted to slashdot, there are some pro Micro-innovation sites around on the Internet. Some of them articulate MS-truth (ActiveTruth?) quite vividly.
Slashdot Mirror
While this is a nice, big paragraph, and I like big paragraphs, don't get me wrong, I fail to see the democrary.
@home runs on a zerocracy. There is no response to anything. I would have more luck praying.
Please see my original message stating that this is the reason for not only my personal problems, but for the banning from Usenet and the k-lining from Dalnet.
I would like to know what part of town you live in. I am confident that @home uses demographics that shows where the most amount of money in town is, and supplies that area with better service.
I lose connectivity every night. I've lived in two houses since I got on the @home network. One was a cheap rental town house, and the other in a neighborhood with $150,000 houses.
The reason you do not dislike @home is because you have not had the hassle with bartering with their tech support for hours in order to get someone to examine your connection in-depth, because your connection works.
However, unlike you, I am someone else. This resets the odds back to start on every factor that could go wrong.
Don't tell me you wouldn't feel nervous about moving to a new house, and getting cable reinstalled. Don't tell me you wouldn't hope that your access would be high quality.
As for dalnet, they detect your *.home.com status, redirect you to gate.dal.net, which is an alias for hebron.dal.net and another server I can't remember, and sit you in a very croweded, laggy situation.
The point of my original message was that @home does not give two shits about anyone. We are banned from Dalnet and Usenet. An a more personal level, I explained how they do not give two shits about me, personally.
Though, it is good to know that you get fine service. I have no doubt that @home works for SOME people. However, I am demographically challenged.
The other alternative is dial-up ISPs, since ADSL cannot reach where I live; Statistically, I am not in a very rich neighborhood, and support for cable and ADSL suffers from that. I am friends with a person who lives in the same building as the VP of Rogers (the [scummy] cable company in bed with @home), and his cable connection is very, very stable, and fast.
I'm not willing to go back to dial-up ISPs yet, since there are three, and soon four computers going to be connected to the Internet through my IP Masquerade. Furthermore, a personal web server and the ability to ssh into my computer when I'm not at home is something I utilize at least once a week.
I'm not the only user in my house who uses the Internet. Rather, I'm just the one who has the knowledge to know what a shitty service it is. It's not up to me to cancel it.
I'm a disgruntled @home user, or in other words, I've been on the service for more than three months. No one at @home takes proper measures to inforce the acceptable use policy. Instead, they cap bandwidth at 5k a second to make their ISP a less viable 'server', inconveniencing every user.
@home costs $65 a month Canadian, and they cut corners everywhere they can. My personal WAN area has between 32 and 40 people on it, and the packet drops are phenomenal. I have been phoning their tech support for thirteen months in a row, and they have told me it's everything BUT a crowded WAN area. They most recently have told me that 'Internet Access' does not include UDP. They do not support UDP, therefore they have no responsibility to control the quality of Internet gaming, despite advertising gaming on their network on television with fullscreen Quake pictures. I have been keeping track and am wondering about the viability of a lawsuit.
As I hinted above, servers are against the rules with @home. Have you ever played on a Quake server with an IP starting with 24.113 or 24.112? That's @home cable. Expect 5 to 50k/s upstreams.
Ever gone to a mp3 search engine? A ton of the sites are 24.113 or 24.112.
@home has been banned from Dalnet, due to excessive numbers of people spamming the network. The Dalnet ops have tried to contact @home about the problem, but they were ignored. The only way to connect to Dalnet for @home members is through gate.dal.net, which has too much lag. My two year old channel dwindled to zero people within a week.
The bottom line is, do NOT sign up with @home if there are any other alternatives. They will hook you in with a high installation fee, and it goes downhill from there. You're on your own. Everyone who has any sense of right and has power at @home must be ignored internally.
It's the chance of news stories like this that make me reload slashdot every few hours. I have downloaded the source, and yes, it IS gpl'd.
From README.src:
"Broadcast 200 is GPL. Through the magic of credit, the development costs have been shielded from the user."
When I went to CDIS college for a week, one of the things they showed us was video editing. I ventured a question: How much does the hardware and software cost? The professor gave me a rough estimate of ten thousand dollars. I sadly thought that such a potential low-barrier entry market should not be made high-barrier by the cost alone.
GPL'd software is not the end of all the caveats to make software great, however. One of the things that makes the GNU project's software so great is portability. Also, a lot of the GNU project's software is very solid. I am very interested in a professional video editor looking at this software and giving us input.
Kudos to the Broadcast 2000 team.
What are credits?
The idea of moduluar applications with the GUI being a separate binary has interested me for a while.
Before I start my list, I'd like to say that I agree completely with Stiletto. One thing no one is disputing is that RMS's philosophy of making portable to the hardware and to the OS apps has served well; Hear him speak and he'll tell you that was one of the primary goals of the GNU project early on.
Here are some of the ways to separate the GUI:
1) mpg123 and gqmpeg are a combo that allows the user to play mp3s on the command line and with a GTK widget set. It communicates through signals. This is limited, but it's one form of IPC.
2) AF_UNIX. Unix socket IPC seems like a viable choice. Furthermore, anything that's written with AF_UNIX can be easily ported to AF_INET. (For those not familiar with the socket API, this means the GUI can be on another computer on a TCP/IP network, though I believe this is redundant with the way X works.)
3) Fire-parameters-out-to-commandline-binary. This works for simpler apps. For example, a program called xgrep, which is a GUI shell for grep would have dialog boxes, and other GUI widgets that represent parameters for grep. When everything is set and the user is satisfied, he would click 'search', which would execute the real grep. The output would be taken back to the GUI program.
The book Beginning Linux Programming, which was reviewed here on Slashdot covers quite a few ways, with some brevity (a chapter each) of using IPC. Perhaps someone with real world programming experience would like to reply to this and comment about the upsides and downsides of each one.
After talking with Zoid about hypothetical ways to crack Quake 3's CD Key, and me coming up blank other than cracking the Quake server which turned out to be unacceptable ( I had already purchased the game before any of this talk went on in private ), I was quite impressed with the "server's server" verification:
:)
The Quake 3 server sends the CD key verification to the Master server along with it's heartbeat.
Would it not be possible for Quake 3 to also do a CRC check on it's own binary, send that with the CD key info, for requirement of validation?
While this would require a small deviation from cross platformism, a list of valid CRCs would be on ID's server of servers.
In order to stop proxies, the closed source binary would encrypt the data of a port on the localhost being sent to the server. The server would decrypt this, and establish a new connection (or connections for both UDP and TCP) on the localhost.
Essentially, the server would connect to the client.
I'm still only 25 pages into Richard Steven's TCP/IP Illustrated, so if this sounds a bit naive, know that it is the product of my fascination with abstraction and my good will.
Um, after reading over the above, would it be possible with winsock or BSD sockets API implementation to have a program open every socket from 1024 to 32768, and then wait on them all? (All of Quake 3's potential resocket ports.) Also, you'd have to beat the proxy to bind(), which would be just another chapter in the bot cold war.
Note that Quake one users could be prevented from cheating by implementing what I mentioned for Quake 3. At least in my head.
I disagree. What is obvious changes with time, and if it isn't specifically about the Internet, then it may change with culture as well. The problem with patents is that it causes market stagnation.
As a long-time Quake player who knows the inner workings of Quake quite well, I saw this coming. In fact, I posted a request for an 'ask slashdot' a bit under a year ago about this topic, but it never got posted on the webpage. Guess I should have written Quake for it to have been valid.
I wonder if this was foreseen by ID before the code was released. ( I say ID because Carmack gives credit to others for doing the grunt work of making the code releasable. ) If so, the protocol should have been modified or ripped out of the clients that were OSS until someone DID take these security measures, at which time ID would re-release the real source tree.
If someone does make this cheating verification software, I recommend that they make it more open ended than for just Quake. I think this sets a precedent for Open Sourcing network games, and if a solution is readily waiting, people will be more open to open their code.
Although ID is correct, they often take down their older products in order to hype their newer ones. Carmack, in PC Gamer in the Quake 2 feature issue, called Quake one's development 'a competition to see who could make the best deathmatch map'. Quake Two was described in Gamespot's recent article as having tons of mapfixes up to the final hour before it went gold.
:)
Everyone from the Quake Talk days knows of the quotes that describe Quake making Doom look like pong.
This strategy works for ID, because their games are great, and pole vaulting off of them gets the expectations even higher.
When Doom Two came out, for another example, it was cited as having maps better suited to deathmatch than Doom one.
I'll speculate that Quake 3's distribution of separate versions will be cited by ID when their next game comes close to shipping. Also, in order to hype their new product, they might describe Quake 3 as having to force detail out of the maps because the curves were a new technology and took a lot of triangles. Hardware will be newer, and it won't be such a big deal. Hence the cooler maps.
Furthermore, the bots will be improved upon, and mentioned in hype.
I'll bet you, internally at Id, this is a promoted strategy for hyping their games.
Of course, Microsoft's embracing and extending is not better for the user.
The reason people would jump at Microsoft for saying this is because we're correctly sceptical when Microsoft says 'better for the users'. It's much easier to believe this, coming from RMS, no?
When people compare suing the creators of Napster to suing the creators of FTP, I find one essential difference: Napster discriminates on it's content based on file format, whereas FTP does not. Like the story about Lycos denying Excite, Infoseek or Yahoo searches, Napster is responsible for all content that passes through their program because they have content discrimination. This is not a place they want to be.
I still maintain that a more general purpose type of Napster clone should exist, to fully realise the possibilities of this sort of file distribution.
Furthermore, I'm not a lawyer.
I've wondered this myself, and the conclusion I've come to is that a geek utilizes his skills in the real world; whether that be a trade, or the running of a Charity.
A nerd is someone who has yet to apply it to the real world. This is an acceptable status, especially if you're still in school.
Or maybe I'm mistaking overanalysis with an imagination for reading into things... I think that's it. (No, I don't care that I just rendered my entire message senseless.)
I think Napster is a very poorly implemented version of a concept that hasn't seen the light of day fully yet. The idea that I'm about to throw out is a bit cynical, but very profitable, I would assume. :)
:)
All of the old Internet protocols will be reworked, proprietarized and perhaps even improved upon in our lifetime. Some of the old ones will even die out. An attack on the life of Internet Relay Chat has already happened. Harnessing the power of teenage chat, ICQ has become a success story of no obscure sort.
When I saw this, I thought of reinventing other wheels. What protocol could use proprietarizing? (I've actually got six or seven GPL'd works out there, and this is all hypothetical.) My first thought was FTP. Transferring files could be vastly simplified, I thought, if it wasn't done on a per-site basis. I mean, the user doesn't care if he's getting it from site A or site B. (In practice, bandwidth is an issue.) Places like www.shareware.com already do this, by presenting you with many mirrors.
However, a proprietary interface may have better results. Different types of files could have different search specifications.
At the very least, a complete reworking of FTP could get the underbelly of the Internet (porn traders, warez) off of conventional protocols.
Napster comes fairly close to that original vision of mine. It only deals with one sort of file, however. I still see room for an app that reworks all of FTP.
I'd like to work on such an app. I see some free time coming up in my future. Perhaps I'll throw some code at it.
So maybe a 'browser' is a beast that does not lend itself very well to the Open Source development model. Maybe it needs to be broken up into smaller tasks: HTML viewer, Location finder (URL, local files, etc), JPG viewer, etc. Then, like a shell script does to standard Unix commands, they could be brought together to transparently create what we already use.
I recall Carmack making a .plan update or two while he he was talking about latency while creating the first version of Quakeworld. He stated a few changes which could be done in order to decrease latency.
:)
What your modem does, by default, is collect all data into a buffer, and then send it out all at once. The larger the buffer, the more efficiently compression can be performed upon it. All of the old Doom init strings that came with the game turned off your compression... and your error correction for that matter. (Wasn't it ATL0&M0&N0&B0 for a US Robotics?)
A common misconception is that some of the new midspeed connects such as ADSL or Cable give low pings because they have a lot of bandwidth. Rather, it's the lack of PPP. PPP adds about 140ms onto the ping time, because of the way it's designed: SLIP looks like it was written on the back of a paper napkin. PPP was.
Having strikingly low bandwidth causes for dropped packets, which is a very high possibility, especially since most (not all) packets in Quake games are UDP. However, other than this exception, bandwidth is secondary to latency when playing Quake.
That's why there isn't a notable latency difference between 28.8 and 56k. It's still PPP with error correction.
It seems to me that the best way to learn something is to learn two of its type. I found a good growth of my knowledge of computers when I learned my second OS, but not my third. The same with programming languages.
You start to learn what is fundamental to the process, and what is just extra stuff added by the designer.
As I look down the list of all the things I am good at such as music, I see that the Two Of Everything rule applies there as well.
Good job to Katz, and anyone else who attempts a second of anything as daunting as an operating system, so that they may understand what's fundamental, and what's fluff.
I think it would be correct to say that Brooks essay No Silver Bullet stated that there would be no algoithm or coding method that improved software across the board in the next ten years. This ten year period was over two and a half years ago.
Most programmers are in unison in agreeing that the Silver Bullet didn't emerge.
While you may argue that the Internet is a silver bullet, in-house development is far more efficient a method as far as communication goes than the Internet. The Unreal team had members from across the globe for the first half of their game design. In the end, they all met in Canada to finish it off, as development was going too slow.
The closer to realtime communication is, the less time spent concentrating on synchronizing everyone's thoughts on matters pertaining to the project.
The reason the development of a free Unix works very well over the internet, is that it is broken up into very small parts. If one person is to develop 'grep', they would not need to be continuously in synch with someone who is writing an archiving tool.
I wonder if a possible way around this would be to take all the newly written, hacked functions, and call them from a closed source binary. Of course, this would be deliberately avoiding A Good Thing.
Also, what is the legal obligation of companies to stay with their current license? Is it possible for a piece of software to gain momentum because it's free software, and then do an about face with a new, decidedly more evil license?
If you check Doomnation, you'll realise that Doom hacking is still alive. I can see that community becoming very excited.
I find it pretty doubtful that every last person who ever learned Dvorak has a psychological barrier to admitting to the truth. That type of point is a dangerous point for anyone to accept in any context: Free software is a waste of time, but no one wants to admit it because of all the time they spent on it.
I've been using only Dvorak for fourteen months, and I've managed to get my typing speed up to the 120wpm it was in QWERTY. I don't claim to type faster. It's probably a mental limit, as I stopped increasing my speed when I reached 120wpm in QWERTY as well.
Rather, I type with less mistakes. Furthermore, Dvorak's localised vowels lends itself to chording, which is putting your fingers over every key of a word at once, and pressing them with about 70 milliseconds apart.
Boo-bab.
This completely reminds me of the crudest first parameter that works with so many Linux commands: penis.
For example:
cat penis
finger penis
touch penis
grep penis
unzip penis
rm penis
Think of a few yourself, and you'll realise just how versatile penii are... I mean, how versatile Unix is.
Corel has slipped up on something that makes passionate software users everywhere an anomaly: There needs to be a connection between the legal department and the PR department.
Coming from a Windows world where messing with copyright terms will not anger most end users, they have made a horrible blunder that needs to be fixed right away if they wish to retain the respect of a large part of the community. If they do not, it is a sign that the support of the hardcore Linux users do not matter to Corel in the slightest.
I don't know about most of you, but as a home computer user, I don't really read the licenses of Windows products that I've installed, but I go through the trouble for a lot of Linux packages, because the implications of a limiting license under Linux could mean a lot more, since distros like Debian Linux can be rolled out in most situations without a second thought as to whether the software that I just installed software that needed to be registered with the company in 20 days, or it becomes disabled.
Corel Linux's blunder has only slightly to do with inconveniencing us from using their modified betas. Rather, it has everything to do with someone stealing the intellectual property that was released to the public. It is a challenge against the GPL.
Don't we have to protect the GPL, or the software that had it's copyright licenses gets violated? The applying laws to this may or may not be the same in my country. Also, does anyone have a list or could pass some names along as to what software was stolen?
This could also bring up a bit of a holy war: People who say that anyone who cries out against Corel for this are overreacting: They will release the source with the distro eventually. However, I believe it's the principal of the thing.
Let's hope this is a stupid mistake and not a stupid company. It is a sign that when Linux grows up enough to have a big enough user base, that the communities of old and wise(sometimes) coders can be ignored by companies and profit can still be made using our software. When this happens, and I'm not saying it did, people will hesitate to contribute to a movement that helps so many companies who do not care about us. Free software has this hurdle to get past, if Linux ever eventually has enough of a userbase of average users. It will probably happen within the next few years.
This reminds me of the Turing test in the 1940's. Alan Turing predicted that by the year 2000, man and machine alike could take his intelligence test, and there would be no distinguishable outcome.
:) ), and the Turing Machines that run inside them are the programs we run. Alan Turing is seen as the grandfather of all modern Computer Science.
Alan Turing looked at the human brain as matter, and said that it could be reproduced by humans.
Turing introduced a concept of the 'Universal Turing Machine'. Each Turing Machine would be part of a different method or algorithm. These Turing Machines would be embedded in the Universal Turing machine, and this one machine could accomplish any task.
These Universal Turing Machines are computers (refer to them as such amongst friends as a pedantic joke
In the article, the keywords 'Nothing human here' are thrown around. To me, this is just fluff. I would like to see their definition of what constitutes human only behaviour. The right side of the brain does work completely with physical matter. Therefore, simulating such things is a possibility, given enough capacity to store and process a large enough neural net.
They also mention that they do not think Brutus is 'a conscious entity'. To say that this is what will always define humans and computers may be a bit rash.
However, this is an exciting prospect. Perhaps Turing's predictions about the outcome of the Turing Test's completion date were only off by six to ten years.
You're putting the horse before the carriage here in terms of taking things out of context. Sure, in the big picture laws are put into place because of bills from elected people being passed. However, in the context in which I was speaking, Microsoft isn't going to get a re-election before the verdict.
Furthermore, judges are not voted in by public opinion, as this would sway their decisions, of course.
In a time when Microsoft is greatly unpopular with the people, they are trying to get them to rally against the DOJ?
Either way, since when do laws have anything to do with the majority's opinion? I didn't even realise it had to do with anyone's opinion. The law is the law, and if the DOJ establishes that Microsoft had (not has) a monopoly in the judges eyes, then Microsoft is going to be punished.
However, what the ruling may be may be affected by public opinion. How much, is something that Microsoft is hoping for.
Of course, anyone who has been hurt by Microsoft realises that they are stifling the competition's right to innovate by creating proprietary standards. Although it doesn't get posted to slashdot, there are some pro Micro-innovation sites around on the Internet. Some of them articulate MS-truth (ActiveTruth?) quite vividly.