I don't think your concerns are badly placed. But, I also don't think that people cubbyhole themselves quite as much as you think. Whenever I hit a slashdot story that really interests me, or get an email that really interests me, or have a new topic I want to go into, I don't search Slashdot. I throw some keywords at Google and see what comes out the other side.
One of the biggest difficulties about designing a UO or EverQuest style game is all of the graphics that have to be made. In these games, however, graphics are always client side. So the server side, the side being emulated, doesn't even have to think about them or know about them. It just has to know what is where and tell the client that information.
MPAA will sue whom it pleases, when it pleases. The Yahoos and Googles and AOLs don't have to worry; MPAA won't bother suing them. MPAA's goal is to put the fear of God into the little guys. Us. The ones nobody cares enough about to defend. When they've chilled reverse-engineering for the sake of interoperability (even though explicitly permitted by DMCA) out of the public eye, they'll have won. The search engines can only index what gets developed and released.
One little problem - us little guys are
the ones who buy thier product!
Excuse me, bought. I have ceased to be a consumer of American cinema as of today.
They don't have the reasons to behave like Origin did.
UO's full selling feature is the community. "Come join our vast community of gamers!" The resource system is boring, the monster AI is abysmal, the training system leaves a lot to be desired. UO is all about the community - interacting, in one form or another, with other players.
You can get community in an Emulated UO just as easily as you can in the Official UO.
But Verant has some useful and interesting code on the server side. There are things in EQ that are actually worth interacting with. The terrain is reasonably immersive. The monsters arn't as dumb as rocks. The EQ server contributes a bit more to your play experience, as compared to the UO server, which just passes the Corp Por of the pk from his machine to yours.
In any case, the event horizon tends to be quite small. If you collapsed the Earth, for example, into a black hole, the event horizon would have a radius of just one inch. Only a supermassive black hole of millions or billions of solar masses (the kind you have at the center of big galaxies like the Milky Way) will have large event horizons.
I remember someone told me once that the smaller the black hole, the more of the tidal forces of the black hole reached outside the event horizon. I don't remember why, but it is sort of freaky.
I think they went a little too far in the security direction. If you're downloading something, why not share it by default?
Sometimes I think the real reason is lazy coding. You can't make the incoming and outgoing directory the same - because then other people might download incomplete files.
The solution is to make the incoming and outgoing directories the same by default, and actually distinguish intelligently between finished and unfinished files. (As in, record the full file size when the download is started, then not share files where current size != max size.)
I should add that - but the Gnotella source doesn't seem to be available. What's the best open sourced Gnutella client?
Just for the fun of it, I tried to find out who had voted for the DMCA, so I could make an extra effort not to vote for them. But they did it with a voice vote - there is no record. How reassuring.
I think my last bit of respect for my government was just pissed away. The fact that nobody was willing to take responsibility for thier decision here says legions about what kind of cowardly nitwits populate both Houses of Congress.
What is going on in the United States these days, anyway? Legions of cops pre-empt a lawful protest by arresting everyone on the streets of the city with a certain brand of cellular phone. Absurd laws bought and paid for by corporations destroy the very concept of justice.
Anyone got a recommendation on a country not run by idiots being bribed by despots? Didn't the Netherlands Government apologize for treating one of the DeCSS programmers badly? I want to go there. I can't picture the US Congress apologizing for anything.
Files that you download are not shared by default.
Let me say that again : Files that you download, with Gnutella, are not shared by default.
Which means that, regardless of what people might say, Gnutella is not, by default, from a practical standpoint, a peer-to-peer network. It's just like any other client-server network - the clients take and the servers give. It takes work to be a server, even if it's 20 seconds of work in copying files and clicking rescan, and most people are short-sighted nitwits who don't realize they need to do that and wouldn't care if they did.
At the very least, files you download on Gnutella network should be shared by default. I think, if it's supposed to be a peer-to-peer network, then sharing should be the default behavior, and not sharing an option. If you download a file and the file you have is the same length as the source (it's finished) then the file should be shared.
I'm feeling like enough of a jerk right now to say that it should be shared regardless of where it is put on the hard drive. Gnutella should keep track of the stuff it's downloaded (Stolen Album-Stolen Song 1.mp3, Stolen Album-Stolen Song 2.mp3) and search your hard drive for those files, and offer them to the net if they are found. What part of "peer-to-peer" do you not understand?
I don't use Gnutella anymore. It's not what it was said to be. I think of a hundred thousand users who can't even be bothered to put thier incomings in thier outgoing directory, and decide not to bother with it.
As long as they give me a computer and a ball of string to play with, I don't mind being a pet. Have you checked out your cat's lifestyle recently? You work - it stays home all day, sleeps, and licks it's balls.
Re:Most disgraceful thing on the web
on
Voteauction.com
·
· Score: 1
The whole basis of voting for a leader is that everyone gets an EQUAL opportunity to influence the final decision.
If this wasn't illegal, the rich would control the entire government until some of the middle class and most of the poor realize that a vote is more important than any dollar amount you can put on it.
The rich don't control the entire government already? Haven't you been paying attention?
That would be . . . MIDI? Except MIDI isn't human readable, unless you are a particularly obsessive human. Still... a MIDI to XML project shouldn't be all that hard.
Apple seized upon a great thing, in the area of actually making computers attractive looking. Oddly enough, it seems to be the case that a lot of mac converts were brought over merely becuase you could buy a computer that matched the decor.
If this, thier advantage in the area of asthetics, is to be thier biggest advantage, then they need to keep thier secrets for as long as possible, and thus put the rest of the industry as far behind them as possible. They apparently have some clever designers in there, nad they are trying to capitalize on this work as much as possible.
So, is there harm? Yes, in allowing other companies to follow closer in Apple's wake. Is this harm qauntifable/actionable/suable? Probably not.
Oh, come on! If you haven't learned that George is nothing but the son of a President, and has demonstrated no real skills other than the ability to waste public and private funds in the name of buisness, you haven't been paying attention.
It *is* a bit rediculous. Yet, I can't help but feel there should be more top level domains than there are now. Why shouldn't a large commercial entity be able to get it's own top level domain?
Consider this process. To apply for a new top level domain, you give 1000 pages that would be getting new DNS names under the new top level domain. The TLD is created.
Then, once a month, you audit to see if there are still 1000 pages using it. Or maybe it goes up a couple pages every month - maybe after the third month 1150 pages have to be using it.
I think if you've got a list of people who want the top level domain, then why not make it?
Re:If the music industry wants to harness MP3's...
on
Embedding Ads In MP3s?
·
· Score: 1
Stuck in thier old ways? Stuck in thier crusty old (generating money immorally in rivers) ways? I'd like to be stuck in thier ways. I could do with that.
You see, the price per eyeball of banner ads has been dropping through the floor. Once affialiate programs become common place, the profit margin there will drop as well. The amount of money they could make with a Napster like system with ads is about piss in the wind compared to what they make now.
But they don't have vision! So? Vision is a poor second to cash.
There's a site now that uses Gnutella, ads, and an affialiate sales program to release music. You are taking big pulls off the crack pipe if you think they are making as much - nearly as much - as Record Execs pull down.
The FBI defends Carnivore as more precise than Internet wiretap methods used in the past. The bureau says the system allows investigators to tailor an intercept operation so they can pluck only the digital traffic of one person from among the stream of millions of other messages. An earlier version, aptly code-named Omnivore, could suck in as much as to six gigabytes of data every hour, but in a less discriminating fashion.
To effectively spy on a known or possible criminal, one needs in this day to watch thier electronic mail as well as thier phone. And, supposedly, they still have to get a court order to use the system.
So it doesn't sound like a tragedy or a monstrous attack on human rights. There are people that I want the government to spy on - terrorists, organized crime, and the like.
One thing that does make me happy about this, as well, is that it seems to indicate that the NSA is following it's charter of not spying on American Citizens, because the FBI has this as a seperate project from the NSA.
Yes, I know how the gnutella protocol works. I've read the spec, I've read the code.
It's a wonderful example of a distributed system. The searches you preform are spread to the other clients, and then you can go get the file from the other client.
So, do you care to give me a reason that, instead of giving string searches that return a list of files, that you can't deliver a string search that gives a list of domain names? No, you can't, because it's just a matter of interpreting the the payload of the search differently. Shut up. I'd bother to be polite if you bothered to give anything other than 'Anonymous Coward'. Boy, my opinion of anonymous posting on slashdot just dropped.
Yes, my example isn't quite Gnutellaish, because there are two types of programs in my example - full clients that share DNS names for keywords and neutered clients that don't provide links, because, well, thier users arn't pushing out web pages.
The point is that you can use the framework of Gnutella, a distributed system, to distribute many, many things with the most superficial of changes.
The Domain Name System just maps 'word names' to ip addresses. So www.slashdot.org maps to an ip address.
All this is old hat, of course. But perhaps it's time to move beyond this. People sometimes want to look for sites by 'topic'. Like, if I'm an ignorant man looking for pictures of boobs, I'm probably going to type www.boobs.com, www.boobs.org, and www.boobs.net. Sarcastic idiots might try www.boobs.gov. (Bet that page is big - there's a lot of boobs in the government.)
So here's what I suggest we do. We take the gnutella distributed client, rip out most of the innards of file transfer, and make a keyword system to go over top of DNS. Let's call this new system 'Gnudo', for Gnudomain.
This way, you could map your web server to whatever keywords you want. If anyone on the Gnudo domain network searched for the keyword "boobs", any machine that chose to could give back it's domain name or ip address for that keyword search. Nobody has 'control' over a certain word, such as boobs, by reserving boobs.com, boobs.org, and boobs.net.
So I've got a new porn server. I run a Gnudo program, and map my dns name, "www.obscurelynamedpornsite.com" to the following keywords: "boobs", "women", "sex". Now, anyone who queries the Gnudo network for either of these three words will get back my site, "www.obscurelynamedpornsite.com", as well as any other sites that choose to answer to "sex" (oh, a couple hundred, say.)
The neat thing about this is that I can have a site that's only up when I'm online - that a new site or unprofessional site can get into the search engines with the best of them, and hopefully, the best man will win. We're going to see about a hundred thousand interesting things based on the Gnutella 'distributed net' technology - irc without servers, chat without servers, search without servers.
See, the web almost never replaces a protocol. TCP? still here. HTTP? we know it's a backward protocol designed by goofy physicists, but it's still here. Finger? Who uses finger? But it's still here. Instead of saying, "We're going to start a new network, and subvert the DNS system with a fair system.", we should be saying, "Ok. What problems was DNS designed to solve, and how can we solve those problems *better* with available technology?"
But I'm just the idea man, and I'm overwhelmed with code I'm getting paid to write. No time for free projects. So you guys go implement this and give me a mention on the credits page. *grin*
Is that Gnute better be based out of some country that the RIAA can't even pronounce, let alone have heard of, or the RIAA isn't even going to bother with police and lawyers this time. They'll nuke it from orbit - only way to be sure. But it seems like it might be located in California. Even better! A RIAA executive with a chainsaw can go over there in person.
On a technical level, the site is very interesting, and very powerful. It uses Gnutella to transfer the underlying files, and has very few graphics. What does this mean? You could practically run this site on an old amiga with a 28.8 link. All it has to do is feed it's queries to Gnutella - it only delivers the front page and formats the search page.
I have a shell account that I use from io.com, so I can get all of the unix functionality I used to get at school over a ssh connection. It's nice having the benefits of unix without having to administrate the astard myself. Only 10 dollars a month - slap it on your credit card and forget it. I've thought that there's all kinds of interesting possibilities about integrating windows and a shell account - say, auto-mirroring certain files and stuff - but I've never written any code in that direction.
If you hop over there and get one, remember, Shren sent you. *grin*
I admit it! I admit it! I was trying to bang out all of the light science obvious insights for the mere pleasure of watching my karma jump! It was all part of my evil plan to dominate the universe! In my haste to beat the five dozen other first posters I said Einstein instead of Darwin! So? Bwahaha! Wait, I'm not completely evil, I did actually *read the article* before diving in to post.
More seriously, shouldn't moderation of threads be delayed a couple hours, maybe as long as a day, so the good posts will get moderated up instead of the first posts? The few times I've moderated I've used all of my moderation points voting stupid stuff down instead of insightful stuff up - because a lot of stupid stuff gets awful high.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think your concerns are badly placed. But, I also don't think that people cubbyhole themselves quite as much as you think. Whenever I hit a slashdot story that really interests me, or get an email that really interests me, or have a new topic I want to go into, I don't search Slashdot. I throw some keywords at Google and see what comes out the other side.
Graphics.
One of the biggest difficulties about designing a UO or EverQuest style game is all of the graphics that have to be made. In these games, however, graphics are always client side. So the server side, the side being emulated, doesn't even have to think about them or know about them. It just has to know what is where and tell the client that information.
MPAA will sue whom it pleases, when it pleases. The Yahoos and Googles and AOLs don't have to worry; MPAA won't bother suing them. MPAA's goal is to put the fear of God into the little guys. Us. The ones nobody cares enough about to defend. When they've chilled reverse-engineering for the sake of interoperability (even though explicitly permitted by DMCA) out of the public eye, they'll have won. The search engines can only index what gets developed and released.
One little problem - us little guys are the ones who buy thier product!
Excuse me, bought. I have ceased to be a consumer of American cinema as of today.
They don't have the reasons to behave like Origin did.
UO's full selling feature is the community. "Come join our vast community of gamers!" The resource system is boring, the monster AI is abysmal, the training system leaves a lot to be desired. UO is all about the community - interacting, in one form or another, with other players.
You can get community in an Emulated UO just as easily as you can in the Official UO.
But Verant has some useful and interesting code on the server side. There are things in EQ that are actually worth interacting with. The terrain is reasonably immersive. The monsters arn't as dumb as rocks. The EQ server contributes a bit more to your play experience, as compared to the UO server, which just passes the Corp Por of the pk from his machine to yours.
In any case, the event horizon tends to be quite small. If you collapsed the Earth, for example, into a black hole, the event horizon would have a radius of just one inch. Only a supermassive black hole of millions or billions of solar masses (the kind you have at the center of big galaxies like the Milky Way) will have large event horizons.
I remember someone told me once that the smaller the black hole, the more of the tidal forces of the black hole reached outside the event horizon. I don't remember why, but it is sort of freaky.
Well, it would be trivial to make the servers lie on this issue.
I think they went a little too far in the security direction. If you're downloading something, why not share it by default?
Sometimes I think the real reason is lazy coding. You can't make the incoming and outgoing directory the same - because then other people might download incomplete files.
The solution is to make the incoming and outgoing directories the same by default, and actually distinguish intelligently between finished and unfinished files. (As in, record the full file size when the download is started, then not share files where current size != max size.)
I should add that - but the Gnotella source doesn't seem to be available. What's the best open sourced Gnutella client?
From the article:
Just for the fun of it, I tried to find out who had voted for the DMCA, so I could make an extra effort not to vote for them. But they did it with a voice vote - there is no record. How reassuring.
I think my last bit of respect for my government was just pissed away. The fact that nobody was willing to take responsibility for thier decision here says legions about what kind of cowardly nitwits populate both Houses of Congress.
What is going on in the United States these days, anyway? Legions of cops pre-empt a lawful protest by arresting everyone on the streets of the city with a certain brand of cellular phone. Absurd laws bought and paid for by corporations destroy the very concept of justice.
Anyone got a recommendation on a country not run by idiots being bribed by despots? Didn't the Netherlands Government apologize for treating one of the DeCSS programmers badly? I want to go there. I can't picture the US Congress apologizing for anything.
Files that you download are not shared by default.
Let me say that again : Files that you download, with Gnutella, are not shared by default.
Which means that, regardless of what people might say, Gnutella is not, by default, from a practical standpoint, a peer-to-peer network. It's just like any other client-server network - the clients take and the servers give. It takes work to be a server, even if it's 20 seconds of work in copying files and clicking rescan, and most people are short-sighted nitwits who don't realize they need to do that and wouldn't care if they did.
At the very least, files you download on Gnutella network should be shared by default. I think, if it's supposed to be a peer-to-peer network, then sharing should be the default behavior, and not sharing an option. If you download a file and the file you have is the same length as the source (it's finished) then the file should be shared.
I'm feeling like enough of a jerk right now to say that it should be shared regardless of where it is put on the hard drive. Gnutella should keep track of the stuff it's downloaded (Stolen Album-Stolen Song 1.mp3, Stolen Album-Stolen Song 2.mp3) and search your hard drive for those files, and offer them to the net if they are found. What part of "peer-to-peer" do you not understand?
I don't use Gnutella anymore. It's not what it was said to be. I think of a hundred thousand users who can't even be bothered to put thier incomings in thier outgoing directory, and decide not to bother with it.
As long as they give me a computer and a ball of string to play with, I don't mind being a pet. Have you checked out your cat's lifestyle recently? You work - it stays home all day, sleeps, and licks it's balls.
The whole basis of voting for a leader is that everyone gets an EQUAL opportunity to influence the final decision.
Wow, somebody actually believes this. I'm flabbergasted.
If this wasn't illegal, the rich would control the entire government until some of the middle class and most of the poor realize that a vote is more important than any dollar amount you can put on it.
The rich don't control the entire government already? Haven't you been paying attention?
That would be . . . MIDI? Except MIDI isn't human readable, unless you are a particularly obsessive human. Still... a MIDI to XML project shouldn't be all that hard.
Apple seized upon a great thing, in the area of actually making computers attractive looking. Oddly enough, it seems to be the case that a lot of mac converts were brought over merely becuase you could buy a computer that matched the decor.
If this, thier advantage in the area of asthetics, is to be thier biggest advantage, then they need to keep thier secrets for as long as possible, and thus put the rest of the industry as far behind them as possible. They apparently have some clever designers in there, nad they are trying to capitalize on this work as much as possible.
So, is there harm? Yes, in allowing other companies to follow closer in Apple's wake. Is this harm qauntifable/actionable/suable? Probably not.
Oh, come on! If you haven't learned that George is nothing but the son of a President, and has demonstrated no real skills other than the ability to waste public and private funds in the name of buisness, you haven't been paying attention.
Does anyone know if this is a publically traded company?
It *is* a bit rediculous. Yet, I can't help but feel there should be more top level domains than there are now. Why shouldn't a large commercial entity be able to get it's own top level domain?
Consider this process. To apply for a new top level domain, you give 1000 pages that would be getting new DNS names under the new top level domain. The TLD is created.
Then, once a month, you audit to see if there are still 1000 pages using it. Or maybe it goes up a couple pages every month - maybe after the third month 1150 pages have to be using it.
I think if you've got a list of people who want the top level domain, then why not make it?
Stuck in thier old ways? Stuck in thier crusty old (generating money immorally in rivers) ways? I'd like to be stuck in thier ways. I could do with that.
You see, the price per eyeball of banner ads has been dropping through the floor. Once affialiate programs become common place, the profit margin there will drop as well. The amount of money they could make with a Napster like system with ads is about piss in the wind compared to what they make now.
But they don't have vision! So? Vision is a poor second to cash.
There's a site now that uses Gnutella, ads, and an affialiate sales program to release music. You are taking big pulls off the crack pipe if you think they are making as much - nearly as much - as Record Execs pull down.
To effectively spy on a known or possible criminal, one needs in this day to watch thier electronic mail as well as thier phone. And, supposedly, they still have to get a court order to use the system.
So it doesn't sound like a tragedy or a monstrous attack on human rights. There are people that I want the government to spy on - terrorists, organized crime, and the like.
One thing that does make me happy about this, as well, is that it seems to indicate that the NSA is following it's charter of not spying on American Citizens, because the FBI has this as a seperate project from the NSA.
*sighs*
Yes, I know how the gnutella protocol works. I've read the spec, I've read the code.
It's a wonderful example of a distributed system. The searches you preform are spread to the other clients, and then you can go get the file from the other client.
So, do you care to give me a reason that, instead of giving string searches that return a list of files, that you can't deliver a string search that gives a list of domain names? No, you can't, because it's just a matter of interpreting the the payload of the search differently. Shut up. I'd bother to be polite if you bothered to give anything other than 'Anonymous Coward'. Boy, my opinion of anonymous posting on slashdot just dropped.
Yes, my example isn't quite Gnutellaish, because there are two types of programs in my example - full clients that share DNS names for keywords and neutered clients that don't provide links, because, well, thier users arn't pushing out web pages.
The point is that you can use the framework of Gnutella, a distributed system, to distribute many, many things with the most superficial of changes.
The Domain Name System just maps 'word names' to ip addresses. So www.slashdot.org maps to an ip address.
All this is old hat, of course. But perhaps it's time to move beyond this. People sometimes want to look for sites by 'topic'. Like, if I'm an ignorant man looking for pictures of boobs, I'm probably going to type www.boobs.com, www.boobs.org, and www.boobs.net. Sarcastic idiots might try www.boobs.gov. (Bet that page is big - there's a lot of boobs in the government.)
So here's what I suggest we do. We take the gnutella distributed client, rip out most of the innards of file transfer, and make a keyword system to go over top of DNS. Let's call this new system 'Gnudo', for Gnudomain.
This way, you could map your web server to whatever keywords you want. If anyone on the Gnudo domain network searched for the keyword "boobs", any machine that chose to could give back it's domain name or ip address for that keyword search. Nobody has 'control' over a certain word, such as boobs, by reserving boobs.com, boobs.org, and boobs.net.
So I've got a new porn server. I run a Gnudo program, and map my dns name, "www.obscurelynamedpornsite.com" to the following keywords: "boobs", "women", "sex". Now, anyone who queries the Gnudo network for either of these three words will get back my site, "www.obscurelynamedpornsite.com", as well as any other sites that choose to answer to "sex" (oh, a couple hundred, say.)
The neat thing about this is that I can have a site that's only up when I'm online - that a new site or unprofessional site can get into the search engines with the best of them, and hopefully, the best man will win. We're going to see about a hundred thousand interesting things based on the Gnutella 'distributed net' technology - irc without servers, chat without servers, search without servers.
See, the web almost never replaces a protocol. TCP? still here. HTTP? we know it's a backward protocol designed by goofy physicists, but it's still here. Finger? Who uses finger? But it's still here. Instead of saying, "We're going to start a new network, and subvert the DNS system with a fair system.", we should be saying, "Ok. What problems was DNS designed to solve, and how can we solve those problems *better* with available technology?"
But I'm just the idea man, and I'm overwhelmed with code I'm getting paid to write. No time for free projects. So you guys go implement this and give me a mention on the credits page. *grin*
Is that Gnute better be based out of some country that the RIAA can't even pronounce, let alone have heard of, or the RIAA isn't even going to bother with police and lawyers this time. They'll nuke it from orbit - only way to be sure. But it seems like it might be located in California. Even better! A RIAA executive with a chainsaw can go over there in person.
On a technical level, the site is very interesting, and very powerful. It uses Gnutella to transfer the underlying files, and has very few graphics. What does this mean? You could practically run this site on an old amiga with a 28.8 link. All it has to do is feed it's queries to Gnutella - it only delivers the front page and formats the search page.
it would be interesting if we could put an incoming asteroid in orbit around earth instead of blasting it onto a different course.
Probably damn near impossible, but interesting.
I have a shell account that I use from io.com, so I can get all of the unix functionality I used to get at school over a ssh connection. It's nice having the benefits of unix without having to administrate the astard myself. Only 10 dollars a month - slap it on your credit card and forget it. I've thought that there's all kinds of interesting possibilities about integrating windows and a shell account - say, auto-mirroring certain files and stuff - but I've never written any code in that direction.
If you hop over there and get one, remember, Shren sent you. *grin*
So, where are they? Where are those binaries? Or is this brimstoneware?
I admit it! I admit it! I was trying to bang out all of the light science obvious insights for the mere pleasure of watching my karma jump! It was all part of my evil plan to dominate the universe! In my haste to beat the five dozen other first posters I said Einstein instead of Darwin! So? Bwahaha! Wait, I'm not completely evil, I did actually *read the article* before diving in to post.
More seriously, shouldn't moderation of threads be delayed a couple hours, maybe as long as a day, so the good posts will get moderated up instead of the first posts? The few times I've moderated I've used all of my moderation points voting stupid stuff down instead of insightful stuff up - because a lot of stupid stuff gets awful high.