The "We destroy ourselves..." wasn't a reference to the movies. It was referring back to our drug-taking, food-gobbling couch-potatohood, followed by the attendant medical, law enforcement, and legal costs. On that scale, movies are a minor expense, just more focused and easier to enumerate.
I'm not getting down on commercialization or capitalism, either one. Nor even hedonism. I'm getting down on our *unrestrained* hedonism, as a society. Balance is essential in life. (So is *some* tipsiness.)
Most of the responses to this post focused on Russia. OTOH, I'd like to focus on the US, for a moment.
At the risk of using the Bible as an historical reference, I'll go ahead and say that the nation of Israel endured every hardship but one, and kept the proverbial British stiff upper lip (How's that for an anachronism?) about it. The one hardship they never managed to handle was affluence. Through the whole Bible, no matter how bad things were, they bounced back. But once things got good, they fell apart within a few generations.
We're too affluent for our own good in the US. Not to pick on movies exclusively, but let's do that, for one example. Today's movies cost tens of millions to make, and are considered flops if they don't break the hundred million mark. What? ONE SINGLE MOVIE is talking the kind of money that Russians use to mount a significant space effort. I'd say our priorities are a bit more fouled than theirs.
Then look at the amount of money going into illegal drugs in the US. Then the amount of money we spend fighting the drug war. Then the amount of money lost in "crimes of financing" illegal drugs. Then the amount of money spent in cleaning up the human misery of drugs.
Then look at the only nation where we're working on 'non-nutritional food', so people can keep feeding out-of-control overactive appetites and worry less about gaining weight. Then look at the medical expense of our national obesity and couch-potatohood.
We waste more money that it takes Russia to run a space program.
We entertain ourselves with so much money that Russia could rebuild their whole nation, and put in gold faucets.
We destroy ourselves...blah, blah, blah
Russia recognizes that space expertise is one of their key national treasures, and a source of national pride. It's something they can respectably sell. Someone else has said this, but it's sufficiently important to repeat. At the moment, Russia needs pride more than any single piece of infrastructure.
Re:IA64 is the "heir apparent"
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Itanium Update
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The difference is in what happens after failure. Intel has had a string of failures, and manages to come back, be forgiven, and continue to dominate the market. The others aren't so lucky. Even with as strong a product as the K7, AMD just hasn't cracked the higher profit markets. Intel would like us to believe that they heyday of the K7 is fading, and if they do a good respin on the P4, they'll be right.
Re:IA64 is the "heir apparent"
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Itanium Update
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Didn't. But that was mostly a chipset, motherboard, and support chip issue. I presume you mean the last-minute delay of the 820 launch.
Another aspect of Rambus is the untamed prefetch on P4. It's so aggressive that only Rambus can provide enough bandwith to keep it running, at least until dual-channel DDR. But according to the reviews, most of that bandwidth is merely wasted, but needed to keep the processer fully fed.
You're right, I had a brain blip on that. I meant PSN instead of CPUID.
I merely wish they had looked into some PSN-type technique that would let software be nodelocked without being usable for tracking. I don't believe PSN must be bad, at least not to anyone other than a fanatical Free Software type, who believes NO software should need to be paid for. I'm sure a technique can be used which will not alarm privacy advocates.
Re:IA64 is the "heir apparent"
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Itanium Update
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True, but Intel has a mindshare that I suspect would let it move IA64 down into consumer-level in the next 5 years, if it wants to and if P4 has run out of steam, or if there is some AMD move that needs countering. I doubt either Power4, Sparc, or PA-RISC could play there.
Re:IA64 is the "heir apparent"
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Itanium Update
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I mentioned both - they're retreating upstream into the high-end server market.
IA64 is the "heir apparent"
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Is anyone else so completely stunned as me, that essentially everyone (except AMD) has rolled over and allowed the IA64 to be crowned heir apparent as the new high-end microprocessor? The Alpha is dead by acquisition, HPPA is dead by partnership, MIPS is lost somewhere in the low end, and Sparc and Power4 are both retreating upstream.
It's amazing that ANYONE can field the number of mistakes that Intel has, and get away with it. For some time now, their first-outs have been essentially flops:
Pentium: Remember the 5V room heaters?
Pentium: Then the 3.3V units with floating point bugs?
Pentium Pro: The ancestor of the Pentium II/III line was a good CPU in its own right, and worked well for Unix and OS/2. But it completely missed the market, performing terribly on 16 bit code.
Celeron: DeCeleron, until they put the cache back on. From another point of view, the whole Celeron program has been a disaster, either by its own crippling, or by revealing how overpriced the PII/PIII line is.
Pentium III: CPUID - A 'workstation idea' that once again missed its market. Maybe if they'd found a way to node-lock software that can't be used for machine tracing. Maybe that's not what they were after.
Pentium 4: Let's face it, this CPU is just plain uneven and imbalanced. After a round of redesign to even it out, just like with the others, it could very well be an excellent CPU. Tame the prefetch, expand the trace cache, etc.
Itanium: Didn't even make it out the door before spin-doctoring began. "Just wait for McKinley!" I've already heard one set of rumors that McKinley isn't going to *really* do it either, so just wait for IA64-III.
Is all this any better than the "Just wait for this new release!" that Microsoft keeps pulling? Though I guess Intel does generally get each family right on the second shot.
AMD has a good product, I just wish they were a little less mum, and had a better response than warmed-over P-numbers. I also wish we could hear a bit more noise about the Hammers.
And here I was expecting to see some government or corporate agency come up with the OTHER security solution...
Have a company distribute sound or music over 802.11, and then have the company use the DMCA to take anyone who cracks the security, and bash them over the head with a big legal mallet.
Either that or the military solution, to outlaw non-governmental, non-corporate encryption to the same end, bash in the head with the legal mallet.
(similarities ('bash' vs '/bin/bash') to a popular shell merely coincidental.)
The post by Bilbo invoked the highway metaphor, and that all of the commercialization that is the current topic can be ok, as long as he was free to tool around on his 'bicycle'. I guess with cable and absurd TOS, I'm tooling around on a moped.
But a second look at his post, and the road metaphor made me think of Northern Maine, hence my reply.
The gist is this: If the road exists for the benefit of the big trucks, maybe we can ride our bikes on it. But we'll need to be wary of getting run off the road or turned into some form of roadkill. Look at the current Copyright fuss, and consider the incidental damage that may be done to peer2peer, simply because the RIAA thinks it's ALL about pirating music. Look at people accused of DMCA getting booted off of their ISPs, simply on suspicion.
Sounds like getting run off the road or becoming roadkill to me. Sounds like Northern Maine.
For humans at least, it's generally accepted that you don't want to spin faster than 1 RPM for artificial gravity. I know they're only aiming for 1/3 G, but that's a linear term in the equation, and an Apollo-sized capsule would still need to spin pretty fast. Or does the smaller size of mice translate to a more robust inner ear, at least for rotation?
Someone else was concerned about the second generation mice coming back to Earth. Maybe the first generation will be too dizzy and nauseous to make a second generation.
I like your post, but it makes me think of some of the roads in Northern Maine. You're free to go on them, but they're essentially owned by loggin firms. If you're going uphill and the truck full of logs is going downhill, prepare to get violated, and there isn't squat you're going to do about it. (I don't know about the legal status of those roads, there may not be squat that your heirs can do about it, either.)
Then think about riding your bicycle on the same road.
Oh yes, make the superhighway limited access, with the best access points controlled by AOL, MSN, and cable and phone companies who feel free to make restrictive conditions about the vehicles and destinations they'll let on their ramp.
Then, once again, try to get your bicycle onto the same road.
It's surprising this topic wasn't posted by Jon Katz.
You should feel lucky that Microsoft and the BSA didn't come after you and FORCE you to buy another copy of NT, to rectify your terrible mistake of not having the box or manuals. Weren't using it anyway? Doesn't matter. After all, Microsoft is careful about retain rights to the presentation of Windows to the user, and aren't the box and manuals just as important for presentation as the splash screen and Desktop?
At $17, I don't buy a CD for much less than a special occasion, like birthdays or Christmas. At least part of this is an impure sense of personal protest. If it weren't impure, I'd buy NO CDs at all.
If CDs were half the price, I'd feel less sense of protest, and buy more than twice as many. At one third the price, I'd probably take off on a binge of replacing my old vinyl, which I still hope to transcribe to CDR one of these days.
The whole thing with Napster and CDRs is MASSIVE violation of copyright law. But any time you get to MASSIVE violation of the law, perhaps more structural inspection is necessary, other than pers^H^H^H^Hprosecuting the violator. I can think of two examples of such massive violation, prohibition and the current War on Drugs.
Prohibition was one of the (scratch "one of") stupidest things ever put in to the US Constitution. The Constitution details rights, interactions, and operations, and Prohibition is the only time it tried to "act like a law instead of a framework." Rightfully repealed.
As for the War on Drugs, I have nothing to do with them, but feel they should be put on a peer basis with tobacco and alcohol. IMHO, the side-effects of the War on Drugs, in terms of 'crimes of financing' and organized crime control, exceed the evils of the drugs themselves.
For another example, the oft-repeated piracy of VHS tapes. Rampant at $80/tape, virtually not a worry at $10-$20/tape.
In short, we're being GOUGED. That's the underlying structural issue behind the current "crime wave". Except that their gouging is apparently legal, in spite of what I used to think were restrictions against collusion and price-fixing.
It's economic and political, not technical
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So far it seem to me that everyone except "Trollman 5000", the only mention of RIAA and MPAA in this whole topic, is missing the point.
There are major economic forces, forces so big that they are (hopefully temporarily) superceding the US Constitution, that are effectively trying to turn the Internet into a big broadcast medium. Essentially, to a media mogul used to TV and Radio, every electronic distribution means ought to look like TV and Radio. (Kinda like the old hammer/nail thing)
Centralized focus means ease of control. It means you can easily go after an ISP for content posted on their servers. The lawyers can wield a big OFF button.
Peer-to-peer is much more difficult to police, though it sounds as if they're trying against Gnutella.
But then realize just WHO runs the cable ISPs, and then take a look at their TOS, and it's immediately obvious WHY. Aside from not having adequate amounts of the correct competence to run a data network, they know that personal servers and peer-to-peer are more difficult to control. Therefore, "No servers for the use of others" is the most common rule on Cable. Note that DSL is generally more open, and that fits with the parent organization being a non-content-owner.
But as a cable subscriber with no hope of DSL, peer-to-peer is beyond my reach.
So...
We need a peer-to-peer proxy, for two reasons.
First, it lets me connect out of cable, and once connected to the proxy, it lets me act as a peer. If the cable companies got a little more enlightened, they might even let run the proxy themselves. (Yeah, right! Who wants to wait?)
Second, as Code Red has shown, with default Microsoft security and Joe Sixpak running his home PC, the Internet simply isn't a safe place. For the most part, perhaps ISPs should allow NO incoming connections, by default*. A peer-to-peer proxy would be the only thing keeping the concept generally viable, in that case.
(*) By the same token, they should allow the knowledgable user to open ports. (Again, fat chance!)
But when you start to consider that the super-duper-top-secret algorithm for encoding message numbers constitutes "encryption" according to some, then it's protected under the DMCA.
You have just published a "Circumvention Algorithm."
Shame on you. No doubt the FBI is on their way to your house to slap you on the wrists with wet noodles. Oops, I mean slap you in irons. The wet noodles are for Microsoft under the new Punitive Actions for the antitrust suit.
Last week I tried to look at the "Microsoft Bra" ad on adcritic. Even though I already have Quicktime installed, it wanted me to install it, again. I figured maybe my Quicktime was downlevel, so I got another.
Restarted Netscape, went back. Wants me to get Quicktime installed.
One of these days I'll look for the ad in mpeg, if I have spare time.
Simply put. Microchannel was great. The biggest problem was the stupid reference diskettes, and that was simply because flash memory wasn't there, yet.
Microchannel machines simply worked longer and more reliably than ISA or even PCI machines.
The problems was the stupid #$%& licensing terms. Gotta separate the technical side from the idiot marketing side.
There have been several suggested remedies, like splitting Microsoft into N pieces, nuke the Redmond Campus, conduct remedies, etc.
But instead, quite simple:
To begin:
All COTS software used by the US government will exchange data in fully documented, non royalty encumbered formats. Only special-order software may use proprietary or secret formats, and special order software may not be used where the function exists in COTS equivalents.
All wired and wireless protocols used by the US government for public exchange of information will be fully documented and non royalty bearing. Exchange of secret data will be fully documented and non royalty bearing, but that information will be classified to the same secrecy level as the data, and also subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
Microsoft Windows has achieved "utility" status in the PC marketplace. To that end:
All terms of all contracts regarding sales and licensing of Windows will be available for public scrutiny.
Contracts for sales and licensing may not contain terms that exclude competitors and potential comptitors, such as per-system or exclusive usage.
Wouldn't cars be safer if there were not public reporting of defects, if safety information went only to the car makers, so they could fix the problem?
I realize this anology has a flaw, being passive defects vs giving attackers key information.
So how about information about the security of your bank. For the moment, let's leave IT out of it. As a consumer, I'd like to know if a given bank is sloppy about their security, because I can vote with my money, and where I put it. A key part of a free market is an informed consumer, and withholding information from the consumer is tampering with the marketplace. (gag terms in software licenses, anyone?)
I can certainly agree with giving the software developer advance notice, but the key word is 'advance', not exclusive or secret.
To take it back to cars, isn't part of just about any safety-related lawsuit a gag order? Is critical information being withheld that would help my decide on a safer car to put my family in?
You apparently are missing the fine points of the term "cross-platform" as found in the Microsoft dictionary. In this context, "cross-platform" means both Win9X family and WinNT family. From what I understand, Win2k now ships with DirectX, so that makes DirectX "cross-platform".
Now that the Win9X line is scheduled to wither, and the WinNT line is to be the One True Solution with the release of WinXP, the term "cross platform" becomes irrelevant, just like "Office" without the "MS " prefix. Of course at some point in the future, "cross-platform" may need to be resurrected, with the release of the X-Box or WinCE-9.3.
On a slightly more serious vein...
The issue of "implementations that actually take advantage" crossed with OpenGL extensions that may differ from vendor to vendor is a bit of a red herring. After all, not all cards are going to have these new whiz-bang features. Someone enlighten me if Direct3D still has the accursed "capability bits" that are under-architected for telling true capabilities, and may leave a game falling back on software rendering without warning - unless the game is 'written to the cards' in the first place.
IMHO, the newest games will be written to a reasonable common denominator, then with a few extra modes, first to a "better common denominator", and finally to the full feature set of a few of the newest cards. This isn't a "write once, run on any Direct3D with the BEST eye-candy" situation by any means.
Haven't you noticed the way cats like to sprawl out and show it all when it's hot?
But then again, I don't bother photographing it. It's just that cats have a way of finding the warmest spot in the winter, and the coolest in the summer. Think of them as comfort canaries.
So perhaps right after the big bang, when the universe was smaller, Pi might have been tart. After enough time, in an apparently open universe, Pi will evolve into pizza, or perhaps beyond. But to think more 3-dimensionally, perhaps Pi is really cake, or perhaps orange, or beach ball.
On a different digression, last week there was a discussion about Pi violating the DMCA by containing bit combinations somewhere deep in the bits that express circumvented copyrighted art. If Pi is indeed changing, perhaps that's why TV, movies, and music just seem to be getting worse as the years go by. (Can't have anything to do with MY aging and turning into an old phart!) Wonder what the same changing Pi theory says about Microsoft products or other software contained deep in the bits.
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't they a subsidiary of Sirius Cybernetics?
You know, the inventors of the talking doors...
The first ones with their back against the wall when the revolution comes.
The "We destroy ourselves..." wasn't a reference to the movies. It was referring back to our drug-taking, food-gobbling couch-potatohood, followed by the attendant medical, law enforcement, and legal costs. On that scale, movies are a minor expense, just more focused and easier to enumerate.
I'm not getting down on commercialization or capitalism, either one. Nor even hedonism. I'm getting down on our *unrestrained* hedonism, as a society. Balance is essential in life. (So is *some* tipsiness.)
Most of the responses to this post focused on Russia. OTOH, I'd like to focus on the US, for a moment.
At the risk of using the Bible as an historical reference, I'll go ahead and say that the nation of Israel endured every hardship but one, and kept the proverbial British stiff upper lip (How's that for an anachronism?) about it. The one hardship they never managed to handle was affluence. Through the whole Bible, no matter how bad things were, they bounced back. But once things got good, they fell apart within a few generations.
We're too affluent for our own good in the US. Not to pick on movies exclusively, but let's do that, for one example. Today's movies cost tens of millions to make, and are considered flops if they don't break the hundred million mark. What? ONE SINGLE MOVIE is talking the kind of money that Russians use to mount a significant space effort. I'd say our priorities are a bit more fouled than theirs.
Then look at the amount of money going into illegal drugs in the US. Then the amount of money we spend fighting the drug war. Then the amount of money lost in "crimes of financing" illegal drugs. Then the amount of money spent in cleaning up the human misery of drugs.
Then look at the only nation where we're working on 'non-nutritional food', so people can keep feeding out-of-control overactive appetites and worry less about gaining weight. Then look at the medical expense of our national obesity and couch-potatohood.
We waste more money that it takes Russia to run a space program.
We entertain ourselves with so much money that Russia could rebuild their whole nation, and put in gold faucets.
We destroy ourselves...blah, blah, blah
Russia recognizes that space expertise is one of their key national treasures, and a source of national pride. It's something they can respectably sell. Someone else has said this, but it's sufficiently important to repeat. At the moment, Russia needs pride more than any single piece of infrastructure.
The difference is in what happens after failure. Intel has had a string of failures, and manages to come back, be forgiven, and continue to dominate the market. The others aren't so lucky. Even with as strong a product as the K7, AMD just hasn't cracked the higher profit markets. Intel would like us to believe that they heyday of the K7 is fading, and if they do a good respin on the P4, they'll be right.
Didn't. But that was mostly a chipset, motherboard, and support chip issue. I presume you mean the last-minute delay of the 820 launch.
Another aspect of Rambus is the untamed prefetch on P4. It's so aggressive that only Rambus can provide enough bandwith to keep it running, at least until dual-channel DDR. But according to the reviews, most of that bandwidth is merely wasted, but needed to keep the processer fully fed.
You're right, I had a brain blip on that. I meant PSN instead of CPUID.
I merely wish they had looked into some PSN-type technique that would let software be nodelocked without being usable for tracking. I don't believe PSN must be bad, at least not to anyone other than a fanatical Free Software type, who believes NO software should need to be paid for. I'm sure a technique can be used which will not alarm privacy advocates.
True, but Intel has a mindshare that I suspect would let it move IA64 down into consumer-level in the next 5 years, if it wants to and if P4 has run out of steam, or if there is some AMD move that needs countering. I doubt either Power4, Sparc, or PA-RISC could play there.
I mentioned both - they're retreating upstream into the high-end server market.
Is anyone else so completely stunned as me, that essentially everyone (except AMD) has rolled over and allowed the IA64 to be crowned heir apparent as the new high-end microprocessor? The Alpha is dead by acquisition, HPPA is dead by partnership, MIPS is lost somewhere in the low end, and Sparc and Power4 are both retreating upstream.
It's amazing that ANYONE can field the number of mistakes that Intel has, and get away with it. For some time now, their first-outs have been essentially flops:
Pentium: Remember the 5V room heaters?
Pentium: Then the 3.3V units with floating point bugs?
Pentium Pro: The ancestor of the Pentium II/III line was a good CPU in its own right, and worked well for Unix and OS/2. But it completely missed the market, performing terribly on 16 bit code.
Celeron: DeCeleron, until they put the cache back on. From another point of view, the whole Celeron program has been a disaster, either by its own crippling, or by revealing how overpriced the PII/PIII line is.
Pentium III: CPUID - A 'workstation idea' that once again missed its market. Maybe if they'd found a way to node-lock software that can't be used for machine tracing. Maybe that's not what they were after.
Pentium 4: Let's face it, this CPU is just plain uneven and imbalanced. After a round of redesign to even it out, just like with the others, it could very well be an excellent CPU. Tame the prefetch, expand the trace cache, etc.
Itanium: Didn't even make it out the door before spin-doctoring began. "Just wait for McKinley!" I've already heard one set of rumors that McKinley isn't going to *really* do it either, so just wait for IA64-III.
Is all this any better than the "Just wait for this new release!" that Microsoft keeps pulling? Though I guess Intel does generally get each family right on the second shot.
AMD has a good product, I just wish they were a little less mum, and had a better response than warmed-over P-numbers. I also wish we could hear a bit more noise about the Hammers.
And here I was expecting to see some government or corporate agency come up with the OTHER security solution...
Have a company distribute sound or music over 802.11, and then have the company use the DMCA to take anyone who cracks the security, and bash them over the head with a big legal mallet.
Either that or the military solution, to outlaw non-governmental, non-corporate encryption to the same end, bash in the head with the legal mallet.
(similarities ('bash' vs '/bin/bash') to a popular shell merely coincidental.)
The post by Bilbo invoked the highway metaphor, and that all of the commercialization that is the current topic can be ok, as long as he was free to tool around on his 'bicycle'. I guess with cable and absurd TOS, I'm tooling around on a moped.
But a second look at his post, and the road metaphor made me think of Northern Maine, hence my reply.
The gist is this: If the road exists for the benefit of the big trucks, maybe we can ride our bikes on it. But we'll need to be wary of getting run off the road or turned into some form of roadkill. Look at the current Copyright fuss, and consider the incidental damage that may be done to peer2peer, simply because the RIAA thinks it's ALL about pirating music. Look at people accused of DMCA getting booted off of their ISPs, simply on suspicion.
Sounds like getting run off the road or becoming roadkill to me. Sounds like Northern Maine.
For humans at least, it's generally accepted that you don't want to spin faster than 1 RPM for artificial gravity. I know they're only aiming for 1/3 G, but that's a linear term in the equation, and an Apollo-sized capsule would still need to spin pretty fast. Or does the smaller size of mice translate to a more robust inner ear, at least for rotation?
Someone else was concerned about the second generation mice coming back to Earth. Maybe the first generation will be too dizzy and nauseous to make a second generation.
I like your post, but it makes me think of some of the roads in Northern Maine. You're free to go on them, but they're essentially owned by loggin firms. If you're going uphill and the truck full of logs is going downhill, prepare to get violated, and there isn't squat you're going to do about it. (I don't know about the legal status of those roads, there may not be squat that your heirs can do about it, either.)
Think superhighways. Think 18-wheelers zooming by.
Then think about riding your bicycle on the same road.
Oh yes, make the superhighway limited access, with the best access points controlled by AOL, MSN, and cable and phone companies who feel free to make restrictive conditions about the vehicles and destinations they'll let on their ramp.
Then, once again, try to get your bicycle onto the same road.
It's surprising this topic wasn't posted by Jon Katz.
You should feel lucky that Microsoft and the BSA didn't come after you and FORCE you to buy another copy of NT, to rectify your terrible mistake of not having the box or manuals. Weren't using it anyway? Doesn't matter. After all, Microsoft is careful about retain rights to the presentation of Windows to the user, and aren't the box and manuals just as important for presentation as the splash screen and Desktop?
And whether we get IPV6 or not, and whether Sears wants my next refrigerator to be on the Internet, or not...
I'll have a firewall at the boundary of my house. *Maybe* I'll poke a point-to-point hole so Sears and my fridge can exchange sob stories. Maybe not.
At $17, I don't buy a CD for much less than a special occasion, like birthdays or Christmas. At least part of this is an impure sense of personal protest. If it weren't impure, I'd buy NO CDs at all.
If CDs were half the price, I'd feel less sense of protest, and buy more than twice as many. At one third the price, I'd probably take off on a binge of replacing my old vinyl, which I still hope to transcribe to CDR one of these days.
The whole thing with Napster and CDRs is MASSIVE violation of copyright law. But any time you get to MASSIVE violation of the law, perhaps more structural inspection is necessary, other than pers^H^H^H^Hprosecuting the violator. I can think of two examples of such massive violation, prohibition and the current War on Drugs.
Prohibition was one of the (scratch "one of") stupidest things ever put in to the US Constitution. The Constitution details rights, interactions, and operations, and Prohibition is the only time it tried to "act like a law instead of a framework." Rightfully repealed.
As for the War on Drugs, I have nothing to do with them, but feel they should be put on a peer basis with tobacco and alcohol. IMHO, the side-effects of the War on Drugs, in terms of 'crimes of financing' and organized crime control, exceed the evils of the drugs themselves.
For another example, the oft-repeated piracy of VHS tapes. Rampant at $80/tape, virtually not a worry at $10-$20/tape.
In short, we're being GOUGED. That's the underlying structural issue behind the current "crime wave". Except that their gouging is apparently legal, in spite of what I used to think were restrictions against collusion and price-fixing.
So far it seem to me that everyone except "Trollman 5000", the only mention of RIAA and MPAA in this whole topic, is missing the point.
There are major economic forces, forces so big that they are (hopefully temporarily) superceding the US Constitution, that are effectively trying to turn the Internet into a big broadcast medium. Essentially, to a media mogul used to TV and Radio, every electronic distribution means ought to look like TV and Radio. (Kinda like the old hammer/nail thing)
Centralized focus means ease of control. It means you can easily go after an ISP for content posted on their servers. The lawyers can wield a big OFF button.
Peer-to-peer is much more difficult to police, though it sounds as if they're trying against Gnutella.
But then realize just WHO runs the cable ISPs, and then take a look at their TOS, and it's immediately obvious WHY. Aside from not having adequate amounts of the correct competence to run a data network, they know that personal servers and peer-to-peer are more difficult to control. Therefore, "No servers for the use of others" is the most common rule on Cable. Note that DSL is generally more open, and that fits with the parent organization being a non-content-owner.
But as a cable subscriber with no hope of DSL, peer-to-peer is beyond my reach.
So...
We need a peer-to-peer proxy, for two reasons.
First, it lets me connect out of cable, and once connected to the proxy, it lets me act as a peer. If the cable companies got a little more enlightened, they might even let run the proxy themselves. (Yeah, right! Who wants to wait?)
Second, as Code Red has shown, with default Microsoft security and Joe Sixpak running his home PC, the Internet simply isn't a safe place. For the most part, perhaps ISPs should allow NO incoming connections, by default*. A peer-to-peer proxy would be the only thing keeping the concept generally viable, in that case.
(*) By the same token, they should allow the knowledgable user to open ports. (Again, fat chance!)
But when you start to consider that the super-duper-top-secret algorithm for encoding message numbers constitutes "encryption" according to some, then it's protected under the DMCA.
You have just published a "Circumvention Algorithm."
Shame on you. No doubt the FBI is on their way to your house to slap you on the wrists with wet noodles. Oops, I mean slap you in irons. The wet noodles are for Microsoft under the new Punitive Actions for the antitrust suit.
Last week I tried to look at the "Microsoft Bra" ad on adcritic. Even though I already have Quicktime installed, it wanted me to install it, again. I figured maybe my Quicktime was downlevel, so I got another.
Restarted Netscape, went back. Wants me to get Quicktime installed.
One of these days I'll look for the ad in mpeg, if I have spare time.
Simply put. Microchannel was great. The biggest problem was the stupid reference diskettes, and that was simply because flash memory wasn't there, yet.
Microchannel machines simply worked longer and more reliably than ISA or even PCI machines.
The problems was the stupid #$%& licensing terms. Gotta separate the technical side from the idiot marketing side.
There have been several suggested remedies, like splitting Microsoft into N pieces, nuke the Redmond Campus, conduct remedies, etc.
But instead, quite simple:
To begin:
All COTS software used by the US government will exchange data in fully documented, non royalty encumbered formats. Only special-order software may use proprietary or secret formats, and special order software may not be used where the function exists in COTS equivalents.
All wired and wireless protocols used by the US government for public exchange of information will be fully documented and non royalty bearing. Exchange of secret data will be fully documented and non royalty bearing, but that information will be classified to the same secrecy level as the data, and also subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
Microsoft Windows has achieved "utility" status in the PC marketplace. To that end:
All terms of all contracts regarding sales and licensing of Windows will be available for public scrutiny.
Contracts for sales and licensing may not contain terms that exclude competitors and potential comptitors, such as per-system or exclusive usage.
Simple, but effective. (IMHO)
Let's just phrase it this way...
Wouldn't cars be safer if there were not public reporting of defects, if safety information went only to the car makers, so they could fix the problem?
I realize this anology has a flaw, being passive defects vs giving attackers key information.
So how about information about the security of your bank. For the moment, let's leave IT out of it. As a consumer, I'd like to know if a given bank is sloppy about their security, because I can vote with my money, and where I put it. A key part of a free market is an informed consumer, and withholding information from the consumer is tampering with the marketplace. (gag terms in software licenses, anyone?)
I can certainly agree with giving the software developer advance notice, but the key word is 'advance', not exclusive or secret.
To take it back to cars, isn't part of just about any safety-related lawsuit a gag order? Is critical information being withheld that would help my decide on a safer car to put my family in?
You apparently are missing the fine points of the term "cross-platform" as found in the Microsoft dictionary. In this context, "cross-platform" means both Win9X family and WinNT family. From what I understand, Win2k now ships with DirectX, so that makes DirectX "cross-platform".
Now that the Win9X line is scheduled to wither, and the WinNT line is to be the One True Solution with the release of WinXP, the term "cross platform" becomes irrelevant, just like "Office" without the "MS " prefix. Of course at some point in the future, "cross-platform" may need to be resurrected, with the release of the X-Box or WinCE-9.3.
On a slightly more serious vein...
The issue of "implementations that actually take advantage" crossed with OpenGL extensions that may differ from vendor to vendor is a bit of a red herring. After all, not all cards are going to have these new whiz-bang features. Someone enlighten me if Direct3D still has the accursed "capability bits" that are under-architected for telling true capabilities, and may leave a game falling back on software rendering without warning - unless the game is 'written to the cards' in the first place.
IMHO, the newest games will be written to a reasonable common denominator, then with a few extra modes, first to a "better common denominator", and finally to the full feature set of a few of the newest cards. This isn't a "write once, run on any Direct3D with the BEST eye-candy" situation by any means.
Haven't you noticed the way cats like to sprawl out and show it all when it's hot?
But then again, I don't bother photographing it. It's just that cats have a way of finding the warmest spot in the winter, and the coolest in the summer. Think of them as comfort canaries.
So perhaps right after the big bang, when the universe was smaller, Pi might have been tart. After enough time, in an apparently open universe, Pi will evolve into pizza, or perhaps beyond. But to think more 3-dimensionally, perhaps Pi is really cake, or perhaps orange, or beach ball.
On a different digression, last week there was a discussion about Pi violating the DMCA by containing bit combinations somewhere deep in the bits that express circumvented copyrighted art. If Pi is indeed changing, perhaps that's why TV, movies, and music just seem to be getting worse as the years go by. (Can't have anything to do with MY aging and turning into an old phart!) Wonder what the same changing Pi theory says about Microsoft products or other software contained deep in the bits.