If you allow outgoing connections, you can connect to other clients. If you can connect, you can transfer. At any speed. Transfer speeds from other clients is not a problem.
TRANSFER SPEED FROM OTHER CLIENTS IS A PROBLEM, in fact.
If you are not sharing (requires open ports for incoming connections) other peers will intentionally throttle you down to almost no bandwidth, as long as there are other peers requesting the same, and sharing, unlike you.
If you don't (as we in the US do not) then the telecommunications company is paying. Bandwidth does not materialize out of thin air. SOMEBODY pays.
I can only HOPE that telecos have to pay a LOT of money. It's their stubborn refusal to enable multicast over their internet pipes that has made streaming video/audio and other large file distribution so incredibly expensive in the first place. If not for that, cable and satellite would have died off a decade ago, as IPTV would have been cheaper, and much more capable.
It's only right that they get stuck with the bill for P2P, which is, after all, just a workaround for the current system of unicast, that they made necessary.
My prediction is that some clever Slashdot folks will start claiming that P2P is just an evil trick by the man to stick us with the distribution costs!
As long as it's something free/gratis, I think most everyone will be happy to go out of their way, wasting a little bit of their upstream bandwidth, in exchange.
Once it starts being commercial content that you either have to pay for directly to unlock it, or have to watch a significant number of commercials, you can expect users to refuse to waste their own bandwidth on making someone else more money, and shut off all sharing. I know I would.
You're conflating two completely separate issues, and ignoring the real problems...
Wikipedia and/. do a reasonably good job when a subject has high traffic. Those with little traffic, however, probably have no experts watching, and the ignorant non-experts assert horrible misinformation.
Try it with/. Post a comment with factually incorrect assertion to a few stories where it's on-topic. You'll probably get modded up for being so confident, and maybe half of the time someone will reply to correct you... But of that 50%, only half the time will their corrections likely get modded up, and yours modded down. The other half of the time, your factually incorrect assertion gets points, and the expert gets ignored.
On/. such a systems helps to creates all kinds of memes and biases, which may be completely factually inaccurate, but will persist for years. How many people here think AMD has production problems, and couldn't possibly fill orders for Apple, or Dell, or HP, etc. even if they opted to use AMD CPUs? It's a completely baseless rumor, but it persists in force. And in a user vs expert system, the ONLY solution to this problem is endless persistence by the few experts to dispel the misinformation OVER, and OVER, and OVER again. On wikipedia, a single user, in a single edit, can spread disinformation, that may well persist for years, and influence who knows how many readers. Such a system is inherently untenable, as a few experts have to work harder than the hordes of users, to even be heard, let alone be believed, no matter how right they are.
Your mistake is that you're conflating simple review, with a user system. You can eliminate the inaccuracies in magazines, encyclopedias, and the like, if you just have multiple experts reviewing every statement (as opposed to one low-rent semi-expert with no error checking)... It's called peer-review in scientific circles. You certainly don't need to give non-experts an equal say to get facts reviewed and corrected. What's more, such a meritocratic system is far easier on the experts, and more accurate; rather than a users system, where whoever shouts loudest, wins.
The other question is one of response to input and content dynamics. Wikipedia obviously accepts input from anyone, and responds to it automatically, but that's not inherently a part of a users system... With something like a forum, other users don't have to make corrections, or stop spreading false information, no matter how many times you contact them... Some traditional print publications can be more responsive than some users systems. Though, admitedly, a users system has some inherent bias towards being more accepting of input (whether right or wrong).
Wikipedia also benefits over a paper encyclopedia, because errors can be fixed immediately, where traditional methods have to wait for the next edition to be printed. That's an inherent drawback the medium, though, and has nothing to do with a users vs experts system.
the rest of the world who can't afford Hi-Def TVs and Sound systems will probaly be satisfied with plain old DVDs for quite sometime.
By that metric, VCDs should outlive both DVDs as well as Blu-ray...
Unfortunately, the reality of economies of scale isn't so nice and simple. If you've bought a pack of CD-Rs lately, you might notice that prices are going up significantly, even while DVD+-Rs are falling. They're not equivalently priced yet, but for the storage, a DVD is much, much cheaper.
VCDs used to be FAR cheaper than DVDs for the same reason... Now, both the players and the movies/discs are only about half the price of a much higher quality DVD. Pretty much everywhere in the world that VCDs were popular, DVD sales is rising as well, faster than VCD sales. At some point, the cost of making DVD players and discs will get as cheap as CDs/VCDs, and then the rest of the world that currently "can't afford" "plain old DVDs" won't be able to afford NOT to switch...
Exactly the same thing will eventually be true of Blu-ray. Smaller CRT HDTVs in the US are down to $300, less than 2X the price of similar sized standard definition TVs. It won't be long before they're just as cheap, and those who "can't afford" them now, will be able to get a practically free upgrade to high-def. And it probably won't be too long thereafter that Blu-ray discs get nearly as cheap as DVDs, and anyone around the world can pick them up for less than a DVD, and get higher quality for free.
Get some wifi cards to a few of those Cubans! No infrastructure needed, completely free (except for the cost of electricity) high-speed data transfers (faster than I get with DSL), and ad-hoc routing across the country. With a few wifi cards and some decentralized P2P app (like Gnutella), pretty soon everyone in the country has access to EVERYTHING, from home.
If I own a house and it generates no revenue for me, the property tax is not affected by that.
Actually, it might be, depending on local laws. If property values in the area go up, and your house is re-appraised, the taxes will be increased greatly to account for how much more money you will make when you sell the house. If your property is re-zoned for commercial space (so you can make money there), that might have the same effect.
Don't forget that the GPL relies on copyright to keep things Free and open to the public.
No, it doesn't. That's just how they spin it. The GPL imposes numerous restrictions on recipients. The fact that those restrictions happen to include a requirement to contribute source code to the public is irrelevant, and it is still a restriction in every sense.
And who's going to be paying the property taxes on GPLed or other FOSS code, anyhow?
The fact that the GPL happens to work reasonably well with current copyright laws doesn't mean you have an inherent right to prevent changes to the copyright laws that will happen to make it cease to work so well. You're guilty of the same logical fallacies as corporations who hold profitable copyrights.
I love how I have to read other country's news reports to find out what's going on in my own country...
That's patently idiotic.
First of all, the incident happened in the UK, and the webmaster in question drawing attention to it is a UK citizen. As such it is perfectly reasonable that the BBC would get the first crack at it.
Second, you don't HAVE TO read the BBC to get this news, that just HAPPENS to be the link the submitter decided to include...
I have multi-system video gear (unusual for Canada) and routinely watch PAL tapes and DVDs. The video quality is indeed better, but I'm not sure it's that much better.
To be fair, you will see almost none of the advantages of PAL (vs NTSC) by comparing digital videos. The only difference there is resolution and frame-rate.
To really see a the difference, you need to view a broadcast signal. An (analog) VHS tape will, to a lesser degree, also show some of the differences.
It's still true that the improvement isn't huge, and indeed due to having been developed later. And in 10 months, it becomes moot, as NTSC becomes ATSC, digital broadcast HDTV.
And yet it is undeniable that a CRT is much better at handling a range of resolutions. Why?
Well, that's a complicated subject... So I will now ridiculously oversimplify the issue. After all, this is/.
Digital scaling requires complex and CPU-intensive methods... A pixel is a pixel, and fitting 2 lines of picture onto 3 pixels of screen is HARD. Analog signals, however, naturally rescale incredibly well. Those shadow-mask phosphor "pixels" on a CRT aren't anything like pixels on a LCD. On a CRT, it is just a set of evenly spaced "holes" where it samples an infinitely variable analog waveform.
If you have a black pixel, next to a white pixel, the phosphors on a CRT will give you 1 black, 1 grey, and 1 white 'pixel'. Meanwhile, the LCD will probably do something stupid, like giving you two pixels of one color, and one of the other. A high quality scaler would largely fix that, but they aren't cheap... Even nice new Blu-ray players follow the DVD model, and opt NOT to include scalers, so you must use 4:3 or 16:9, whereas film is most often 1.85:1, and must letter box (use black bars) to fudge it.
A second issue is oversampling... CRTs are just so much higher resolution than LCDs of similar sizes, that there's a much greater chance the resolution you're using happens to be a multiple of their maximum (native) resolution, and even if not, individual phosphors are still tiny enough you aren't likely to notice imperfections.
That's a bit like saying a virus on a USB flash drive needs physical access, because somebody has to plug in the drive... Never mind that the owner will suspect nothing, and be happy to do it.
You only need "physical access" if you are assuming those with firewire ports NEVER have them plugged in to anything...
OTOH, if a computer with firewire ports is ever plugged-in to a smart firewire device (one where you can get remote root access) then this firewire problem becomes a remote exploit.
I wonder what the actual U.S. labor cost of changing clocks for DST would come out to. Even if you say it takes 10 seconds to reset each clock, that adds up over millions of people.
Clearly, you've proven that American Idol is single handedly bankrupting this country. Think of how much a person makes working for an hour, and spread that across the many millions of people watching the TV show regularly. Clearly, we could end the recession by just canceling that and a few other TV shows.
Linux users are much more secure from threats than Windows users for two reasons.
#3. Linux users get their software from an organized and centralized location... The idea of visiting some random website, and downloading useful binary software from them is completely foreign.
Considering how well clam did when compared to the other security suites, I'm not worried about using a non-commercial product.
ClamAV works fine, but on Windows, the performance is horrid. ClamAV takes 4X+ as long to scan a hard drive as Grisoft AVG. For that big of a performance difference, I'll just pay the $30. Not to mention the lack of on-demand scanning, and the massive memory footprint.
AdAware works nicely
No it doesn't. AdAware "misses" so much spyware it's not funny. Spybot easily blows it away.
on your monitor, they can devote 30 or 40 pixels to the aliasing
It doesn't matter how many pixels there are. The combined content of those 40 pixels will look exactly the same as the equivalent 4 pixels on the smaller screen.
I noticed this effect a year and a half ago when watching youtube videos through a computer hooked to a tv - the video looked nearly perfect because of the resolution difference.
Your TV may look "better" because it's set for lower contrast/saturation/sharpness/etc. You can do the same thing on a high resolution monitor if you really want to.
Alternatively, it could simply be that the upscaling algorithm used by the video player is horrible, causing aliasing artifacts. So, eg. 4X upscaling on your monitor might look worse than non-upscaled video on your TV.
Plenty of musicians already release their music for free, without expecting any payment.
All the ones I've come across (after lots, and lots of looking) release either partial songs, one hit song from any album, or absolutely positively can't play worth a damn...
And those options aren't mutually exclusive, either... The vast majority that release a couple song sound like 4 people just bought their instruments, can't come up with lyrics that aren't completely banal, can't hold a tune, and often may be making up music and/or lyrics on the spot.
If lots of other musicians "catch on" they'll find the whole "band releases album on net" story is long past stale, no-one cares, and hundreds, never mind millions, aren't going to be made.
It's true enough that they won't get a fraction the press in short order, but with the huge difference in profits, they can make a killing selling just a few thousands (instead of millions), and will have plenty of money left over to advertise their next release, (without the free press publicity).
Man, a bus, I talk like I know something. It's been well over ten years since I've been on a bus. But that's not the point. Well, it's not the point here. We're talking about airplanes. I use those on a regular basis. Although I've never described the experience quite like a neighbouring passenger who said she's "made a career out of strapping a plane to my ass". I miss her. She was an advertising or marketing or sales person for a company that I don't remember, on a flight I've forgotten, going somewhere I can't recall, sometime in the last ten years. Maybe fifteen. Maybe five.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry, runaway inflation will take care of that! In ten years minimum wage will be 7-figures.
TRANSFER SPEED FROM OTHER CLIENTS IS A PROBLEM, in fact.
If you are not sharing (requires open ports for incoming connections) other peers will intentionally throttle you down to almost no bandwidth, as long as there are other peers requesting the same, and sharing, unlike you.
I can only HOPE that telecos have to pay a LOT of money. It's their stubborn refusal to enable multicast over their internet pipes that has made streaming video/audio and other large file distribution so incredibly expensive in the first place. If not for that, cable and satellite would have died off a decade ago, as IPTV would have been cheaper, and much more capable.
It's only right that they get stuck with the bill for P2P, which is, after all, just a workaround for the current system of unicast, that they made necessary.
As long as it's something free/gratis, I think most everyone will be happy to go out of their way, wasting a little bit of their upstream bandwidth, in exchange.
Once it starts being commercial content that you either have to pay for directly to unlock it, or have to watch a significant number of commercials, you can expect users to refuse to waste their own bandwidth on making someone else more money, and shut off all sharing. I know I would.
Long live gopher!
You're conflating two completely separate issues, and ignoring the real problems...
/. do a reasonably good job when a subject has high traffic. Those with little traffic, however, probably have no experts watching, and the ignorant non-experts assert horrible misinformation.
/. Post a comment with factually incorrect assertion to a few stories where it's on-topic. You'll probably get modded up for being so confident, and maybe half of the time someone will reply to correct you... But of that 50%, only half the time will their corrections likely get modded up, and yours modded down. The other half of the time, your factually incorrect assertion gets points, and the expert gets ignored.
/. such a systems helps to creates all kinds of memes and biases, which may be completely factually inaccurate, but will persist for years. How many people here think AMD has production problems, and couldn't possibly fill orders for Apple, or Dell, or HP, etc. even if they opted to use AMD CPUs? It's a completely baseless rumor, but it persists in force. And in a user vs expert system, the ONLY solution to this problem is endless persistence by the few experts to dispel the misinformation OVER, and OVER, and OVER again. On wikipedia, a single user, in a single edit, can spread disinformation, that may well persist for years, and influence who knows how many readers. Such a system is inherently untenable, as a few experts have to work harder than the hordes of users, to even be heard, let alone be believed, no matter how right they are.
Wikipedia and
Try it with
On
Your mistake is that you're conflating simple review, with a user system. You can eliminate the inaccuracies in magazines, encyclopedias, and the like, if you just have multiple experts reviewing every statement (as opposed to one low-rent semi-expert with no error checking)... It's called peer-review in scientific circles. You certainly don't need to give non-experts an equal say to get facts reviewed and corrected. What's more, such a meritocratic system is far easier on the experts, and more accurate; rather than a users system, where whoever shouts loudest, wins.
The other question is one of response to input and content dynamics. Wikipedia obviously accepts input from anyone, and responds to it automatically, but that's not inherently a part of a users system... With something like a forum, other users don't have to make corrections, or stop spreading false information, no matter how many times you contact them... Some traditional print publications can be more responsive than some users systems. Though, admitedly, a users system has some inherent bias towards being more accepting of input (whether right or wrong).
Wikipedia also benefits over a paper encyclopedia, because errors can be fixed immediately, where traditional methods have to wait for the next edition to be printed. That's an inherent drawback the medium, though, and has nothing to do with a users vs experts system.
By that metric, VCDs should outlive both DVDs as well as Blu-ray...
Unfortunately, the reality of economies of scale isn't so nice and simple. If you've bought a pack of CD-Rs lately, you might notice that prices are going up significantly, even while DVD+-Rs are falling. They're not equivalently priced yet, but for the storage, a DVD is much, much cheaper.
VCDs used to be FAR cheaper than DVDs for the same reason... Now, both the players and the movies/discs are only about half the price of a much higher quality DVD. Pretty much everywhere in the world that VCDs were popular, DVD sales is rising as well, faster than VCD sales. At some point, the cost of making DVD players and discs will get as cheap as CDs/VCDs, and then the rest of the world that currently "can't afford" "plain old DVDs" won't be able to afford NOT to switch...
Exactly the same thing will eventually be true of Blu-ray. Smaller CRT HDTVs in the US are down to $300, less than 2X the price of similar sized standard definition TVs. It won't be long before they're just as cheap, and those who "can't afford" them now, will be able to get a practically free upgrade to high-def. And it probably won't be too long thereafter that Blu-ray discs get nearly as cheap as DVDs, and anyone around the world can pick them up for less than a DVD, and get higher quality for free.
Get some wifi cards to a few of those Cubans! No infrastructure needed, completely free (except for the cost of electricity) high-speed data transfers (faster than I get with DSL), and ad-hoc routing across the country. With a few wifi cards and some decentralized P2P app (like Gnutella), pretty soon everyone in the country has access to EVERYTHING, from home.
Actually, it might be, depending on local laws. If property values in the area go up, and your house is re-appraised, the taxes will be increased greatly to account for how much more money you will make when you sell the house. If your property is re-zoned for commercial space (so you can make money there), that might have the same effect.
No, it doesn't. That's just how they spin it. The GPL imposes numerous restrictions on recipients. The fact that those restrictions happen to include a requirement to contribute source code to the public is irrelevant, and it is still a restriction in every sense.
The fact that the GPL happens to work reasonably well with current copyright laws doesn't mean you have an inherent right to prevent changes to the copyright laws that will happen to make it cease to work so well. You're guilty of the same logical fallacies as corporations who hold profitable copyrights.
Well then, the assessor should find it worth almost nothing, and tax you an appropriate amount.
Well then, if it's worthless, you should simply give up your copyright on it, rather than keeping it from the public.
Yeah, three cheers for Mussolini! Hip hip...
That's patently idiotic.
First of all, the incident happened in the UK, and the webmaster in question drawing attention to it is a UK citizen. As such it is perfectly reasonable that the BBC would get the first crack at it.
Second, you don't HAVE TO read the BBC to get this news, that just HAPPENS to be the link the submitter decided to include...
You can read it from US news sources here:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/usaf_email_security_snafu_in_uk_and_no_shorts_ar
http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/03/04/the-air-forces-email-debacle/?mod=googlenews_wsj
http://news.digitaltrends.com/news/story/15947/mildenhall_mix_up
http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=60003&archive=true
etc.
To be fair, you will see almost none of the advantages of PAL (vs NTSC) by comparing digital videos. The only difference there is resolution and frame-rate.
To really see a the difference, you need to view a broadcast signal. An (analog) VHS tape will, to a lesser degree, also show some of the differences.
It's still true that the improvement isn't huge, and indeed due to having been developed later. And in 10 months, it becomes moot, as NTSC becomes ATSC, digital broadcast HDTV.
Well, that's a complicated subject... So I will now ridiculously oversimplify the issue. After all, this is
Digital scaling requires complex and CPU-intensive methods... A pixel is a pixel, and fitting 2 lines of picture onto 3 pixels of screen is HARD. Analog signals, however, naturally rescale incredibly well. Those shadow-mask phosphor "pixels" on a CRT aren't anything like pixels on a LCD. On a CRT, it is just a set of evenly spaced "holes" where it samples an infinitely variable analog waveform.
If you have a black pixel, next to a white pixel, the phosphors on a CRT will give you 1 black, 1 grey, and 1 white 'pixel'. Meanwhile, the LCD will probably do something stupid, like giving you two pixels of one color, and one of the other. A high quality scaler would largely fix that, but they aren't cheap... Even nice new Blu-ray players follow the DVD model, and opt NOT to include scalers, so you must use 4:3 or 16:9, whereas film is most often 1.85:1, and must letter box (use black bars) to fudge it.
A second issue is oversampling... CRTs are just so much higher resolution than LCDs of similar sizes, that there's a much greater chance the resolution you're using happens to be a multiple of their maximum (native) resolution, and even if not, individual phosphors are still tiny enough you aren't likely to notice imperfections.
I hope you've enjoyed the rant.
I suspect he was talking about motion... Response times still aren't there.
That's a bit like saying a virus on a USB flash drive needs physical access, because somebody has to plug in the drive... Never mind that the owner will suspect nothing, and be happy to do it.
You only need "physical access" if you are assuming those with firewire ports NEVER have them plugged in to anything...
OTOH, if a computer with firewire ports is ever plugged-in to a smart firewire device (one where you can get remote root access) then this firewire problem becomes a remote exploit.
Clearly, you've proven that American Idol is single handedly bankrupting this country. Think of how much a person makes working for an hour, and spread that across the many millions of people watching the TV show regularly. Clearly, we could end the recession by just canceling that and a few other TV shows.
Start working 3rd shift. Then you'll get ALL the daylight you could want.
#3. Linux users get their software from an organized and centralized location... The idea of visiting some random website, and downloading useful binary software from them is completely foreign.
ClamAV works fine, but on Windows, the performance is horrid. ClamAV takes 4X+ as long to scan a hard drive as Grisoft AVG. For that big of a performance difference, I'll just pay the $30. Not to mention the lack of on-demand scanning, and the massive memory footprint.
No it doesn't. AdAware "misses" so much spyware it's not funny. Spybot easily blows it away.
It doesn't matter how many pixels there are. The combined content of those 40 pixels will look exactly the same as the equivalent 4 pixels on the smaller screen.
Your TV may look "better" because it's set for lower contrast/saturation/sharpness/etc. You can do the same thing on a high resolution monitor if you really want to.
Alternatively, it could simply be that the upscaling algorithm used by the video player is horrible, causing aliasing artifacts. So, eg. 4X upscaling on your monitor might look worse than non-upscaled video on your TV.
You are either heavily biased (for obvious reasons), or have horrible taste in music...
All the ones I've come across (after lots, and lots of looking) release either partial songs, one hit song from any album, or absolutely positively can't play worth a damn...
And those options aren't mutually exclusive, either... The vast majority that release a couple song sound like 4 people just bought their instruments, can't come up with lyrics that aren't completely banal, can't hold a tune, and often may be making up music and/or lyrics on the spot.
It's true enough that they won't get a fraction the press in short order, but with the huge difference in profits, they can make a killing selling just a few thousands (instead of millions), and will have plenty of money left over to advertise their next release, (without the free press publicity).
Kinda trailed-off near the end there, didn't you?
Copyright protects an implementation. With open standards, there are often no implementations at all.
Go ahead and explain how H.264 or 802.11 can be covered by copyright. Explain how those companies' dramatic investments are going to get repaid.
I'll wait.