Shameless plug here, but Dijjer works great with video, and should significantly reduce your bandwidth requirements. Unlike BitTorrent, it can start playing back the video as soon as it starts download it because it downloads from the beginning. It can even embed videos in a web browser because Dijjer just acts as a HTTP proxy, rather than requiring a dedicated download GUI client. Lastly, distributing a video over Dijjer is dead simple, just make a minor change to the URL you use to link to the file.
I often wonder whether Blake Ross' involvement with FireFox is accurate and fair to other people involved, or whether it is a creation of the media in love with the notion that a 19 year old could go up against Microsoft and win.
Does anyone have a good understanding of the actual role Ross played here and whether the media reports are being fair to other contributors by focussing on him?
Mr. Gates has had superb business sense and has had tremendous success with his leadership of Microsoft, but I'm not sure how much of his success can be attributed to 'nothing but ideas in his head'.
The point I was making is that Bill Gates, who wasn't particularly wealthy, was able to succeed in software because of its low barriers to entry. I wasn't endorsing everything he has ever done.
With the state of patenting as it currently is I agree, but if changes were made so that patents are 'properly' rewarded - ie restricted to true innovations that require a reasonable amount of risk and investment, then I would disagree.
Never happen. I can't think of a single software invention that was so difficult to take from idea to implementation that only a 20 year patent could provide sufficient motivation.
Some software ideas are difficult to create - ie the SHA encryption algorithm, but can readily implemented by a competent programmer. I don't see how copyright would be adequate incentive to create such notrivial ideas.
Great example, because even a non-trivial software invention such as SHA didn't require the motivation of a software patent.
The real problem is that patents should only be awarded in any field based on innovativeness - the likelyhood that it could or would have been invented without a substantial investment of sweat equity. There also needs to be a method where if an idea is broadly useful, that even if it is highly innovative and patentable, the rights can be purchased to it to make it generally available for usage (ie perhaps a government patent buyback or some such).
I have a simpler solution. No software patents. You haven't made the case that they are necessary under any circumstances, even with your SHA example.
Here is an article I wrote a few days ago which is intended to introduce the issue of software patents, and why they are a bad thing:
The European Union is attempting to pass a Directive that will force many European governments to permit patents on software despite growing protests from software engineers and small European software companies. Opponents fear that software patents will stifle innovation and competition in their industry, increasing their legal costs, while leaving them at the mercy of large companies who have the resources to acquire large numbers of patents. The Directive is supported by trade groups dominated by large multinational software companies, along with national patent offices who generate revenue from patent applications.
A patent is a fearsome weapon, not only does it prevent someone from copying an invention, it also prevents them from independently inventing the same thing. This means that you could spend your entire life sitting in a cave, with no contact with the outside world, and anything you invent could still infringe other people's patents. In contrast, a copyright only prevents other people from copying your work. If you copyright a poem and someone else, by chance, happens to write the same poem without copying yours, then they are not infringing your copyright.
The purpose of patents, indeed all forms of intellectual property, is to promote the arts and sciences. Patents achieve this by granting an inventor exclusive control over their invention for a limited time. In return, the inventor is required to disclose their invention so that after the limited time expires, it is freely available to the rest of society. Society benefits when this provides an incentive for inventors to invent, where otherwise they might not have bothered.
A patent isn't just granted on an idea for an invention, it can only be granted once you have a prototype, or at least the ability to teach someone how to build a prototype, this is known as a "teachable invention". Patents therefore motivate an inventor to take their idea and invest the time and money to develop it into a teachable invention. In return for this, and a small fee, inventors are granted a 20 year monopoly over their invention.
This monopoly is not granted without a price. Every invention builds on those that came before, yet for the duration of a patent nobody else can build on a patented invention without the permission of the inventor. This creates a cost for society, and other inventors. Patents work when the benefit to society of having the invention outweighs the cost of the inventor's monopoly over it.
In a field such as pharmaceuticals, a vast investment may be required to get from an idea for a new drug, to the drug itself. In this case, it is easy to see how a patent on this drug will benefit society if it provides sufficient motivation to the drug's inventor to make the investment required to invent it.
Software, however, is very different. Getting from an idea to a prototype in software requires very little investment and risk. This is the great strength of software. Its why Bill Gates, a college drop-out, could build a multi-billion dollar company out of nothing but the ideas in his head. Its why Linus Torvalds could later sow the seeds of an operating system built by volunteers that would challenge that multi-billion dollar company.
Patents should not apply to software for the simple reason that they would do far more harm than good, harming creativity rather than promoting it. Software doesn't need patents, copyright is more than adequate to provide the incentive software engineers need to turn their ideas into software. The cost to society of a 20 year monopoly over a software invention will never be justified, because it is inconceivable that any software invention could require such a powerful incentive. The price for this monopoly is paid by other inventors, and so the effect is to stifle innovation, not to promote it.
isn't there a peer to peer protocol that doesn't revolve around supernodes?
Several. Freenet doesn't require supernodes, it is entirely decentralised, the same is true of Dijjer. Generally, a P2P application can use a Distributed Hashtable to find information without relying on a centralised server (neither Freenet nor Dijjer use a DHT, although their approach is vaguely similar).
Skype is a peer-to-peer VoIP client developed by KaZaa...
KaZaa isn't a company, it is a piece of software. Skype was developed by the same guys that were behind the KaZaa software, but not (to the best of my knowledge) by the company that now owns KaZaa.
...almost all airline security introduced since Sept. 11 2001 has absolutely no effect on the likelihood that your aircraft will be used as a weapon in future.
Rather the purpose of most of these rediculous security measures is to convince people that someone is doing something. Nothing more.
I consider myself to be a pretty discerning sci-fi fan, and this show is pretty-much perfect. The characters are interesting, imperfect, complicated. The stories are interesting, even the bad-guys, the Cylons, are intriguing (some of them are religous zealots, others are obsessed by sex!).
This show is in a different league to Stargate SG1/Atlantis, Enterprise, and the rest, and certainly doesn't need to rely on lazy nostalgia for the original.
I started a thread on the P2P-Hackers mailing list abuot this, and a number of people have responded with examples of prior art and other relevant information. You can find the post that starts this thread here.
This article doesn't seem to talk much about ogg at all, unless I am missing something, in fact, it virtually dismisses all lossy algorithms in favour of lossless algorithms which achieve only 50% compression (instead of 90% compression with lossy).
Each to their own, but I am more than satisfied with oggs or mp3s encoded at a reasonable bitrate - I think the popularity of hardware such as iPods suggest that most other people are too.
I think calling it copyright infringement is still a weaseling out by many people because somehow that suddenly makes it all OK.
Calling it copyright infringement is calling it exactly what it is.
Calling it "stealing" is weaseling language used by people who want to make something relatively harmless seem like a serious crime worthy of serious punishment.
What an idiot. This interview will become evidence against him.
Yeah, how dare some kid not know how to respond when a multinational corporation decides to sue him. They really need to start teaching that in Elementary School.
(Does anyone else remember when that would be considered a joke rather than a realistic suggestion?).
Clearly nobody taught you that copyright infringement isn't stealing. Stealing is when you deprive someone of property, who is deprived of their property with copyright infringement?
You throw the toad straight into the pot of boiling water and it will jump straight out, but put it in a pot of cold water and slowly increase the heat, and the toad will be boiled to death.
We should be wary of *any* move towards turning computers from our servants into our prison guards.
It's real innovation is the tit-for-tat file sharing. With only multi-source downloading, no-one has an incentive to upload (it uses bandwidth, they risk getting cause supposedly). With tit-for-tat however, you have to upload in order to download at a reasonable speed.
I have never been convinced by that. Uploading only benefits you while you are downloading, yet BitTorrent relies significantly on uploaders who have finised downloading, for which there is no tit-for-tat incentive.
Also, in a slightly related topic, tit-for-tat (ie bittorrent) is generally more successful than always-defect (ie kazaa etc) in the iterated prisoners dilema.
If Kazaa users indeed followed the strategy of always-defect then it would be impossible to download anything from Kazaa.
Simple. Don't break the law, and you won't become a "juicy legal target". There's nothing illegal about BitTorrent, but it is illegal to violate copyright with it, so don't do that.
There is certainly nothing illegal about BitTorrent itself, but there is something illegal about what the vast majority of its users do with it.
If trading copyrighted material is no-longer possible, I am not sure that BitTorrent will retain its current popularity for long.
I'm really not sure which is faster, although if its BitTorrent, I suspect it may have more to do with the usage patterns of its users than the way the technology is designed.
Slashdot Mirror
Shameless plug here, but Dijjer works great with video, and should significantly reduce your bandwidth requirements. Unlike BitTorrent, it can start playing back the video as soon as it starts download it because it downloads from the beginning. It can even embed videos in a web browser because Dijjer just acts as a HTTP proxy, rather than requiring a dedicated download GUI client. Lastly, distributing a video over Dijjer is dead simple, just make a minor change to the URL you use to link to the file.
Does anyone have a good understanding of the actual role Ross played here and whether the media reports are being fair to other contributors by focussing on him?
The European Union is attempting to pass a Directive that will force many European governments to permit patents on software despite growing protests from software engineers and small European software companies. Opponents fear that software patents will stifle innovation and competition in their industry, increasing their legal costs, while leaving them at the mercy of large companies who have the resources to acquire large numbers of patents. The Directive is supported by trade groups dominated by large multinational software companies, along with national patent offices who generate revenue from patent applications. A patent is a fearsome weapon, not only does it prevent someone from copying an invention, it also prevents them from independently inventing the same thing. This means that you could spend your entire life sitting in a cave, with no contact with the outside world, and anything you invent could still infringe other people's patents. In contrast, a copyright only prevents other people from copying your work. If you copyright a poem and someone else, by chance, happens to write the same poem without copying yours, then they are not infringing your copyright.
The purpose of patents, indeed all forms of intellectual property, is to promote the arts and sciences. Patents achieve this by granting an inventor exclusive control over their invention for a limited time. In return, the inventor is required to disclose their invention so that after the limited time expires, it is freely available to the rest of society. Society benefits when this provides an incentive for inventors to invent, where otherwise they might not have bothered.
A patent isn't just granted on an idea for an invention, it can only be granted once you have a prototype, or at least the ability to teach someone how to build a prototype, this is known as a "teachable invention". Patents therefore motivate an inventor to take their idea and invest the time and money to develop it into a teachable invention. In return for this, and a small fee, inventors are granted a 20 year monopoly over their invention.
This monopoly is not granted without a price. Every invention builds on those that came before, yet for the duration of a patent nobody else can build on a patented invention without the permission of the inventor. This creates a cost for society, and other inventors. Patents work when the benefit to society of having the invention outweighs the cost of the inventor's monopoly over it.
In a field such as pharmaceuticals, a vast investment may be required to get from an idea for a new drug, to the drug itself. In this case, it is easy to see how a patent on this drug will benefit society if it provides sufficient motivation to the drug's inventor to make the investment required to invent it. Software, however, is very different. Getting from an idea to a prototype in software requires very little investment and risk. This is the great strength of software. Its why Bill Gates, a college drop-out, could build a multi-billion dollar company out of nothing but the ideas in his head. Its why Linus Torvalds could later sow the seeds of an operating system built by volunteers that would challenge that multi-billion dollar company.
Patents should not apply to software for the simple reason that they would do far more harm than good, harming creativity rather than promoting it. Software doesn't need patents, copyright is more than adequate to provide the incentive software engineers need to turn their ideas into software. The cost to society of a 20 year monopoly over a software invention will never be justified, because it is inconceivable that any software invention could require such a powerful incentive. The price for this monopoly is paid by other inventors, and so the effect is to stifle innovation, not to promote it.
Unfortunately software is not the only fie
Rather the purpose of most of these rediculous security measures is to convince people that someone is doing something. Nothing more.
..download through Dijjer?
Yeah, and I have heard people claim they can hear the difference between cheap digital cables and expensive digital cables...
This show is in a different league to Stargate SG1/Atlantis, Enterprise, and the rest, and certainly doesn't need to rely on lazy nostalgia for the original.
I started a thread on the P2P-Hackers mailing list abuot this, and a number of people have responded with examples of prior art and other relevant information. You can find the post that starts this thread here.
Each to their own, but I am more than satisfied with oggs or mp3s encoded at a reasonable bitrate - I think the popularity of hardware such as iPods suggest that most other people are too.
Are you claiming that information is property? On what basis do you make that claim?
Calling it "stealing" is weaseling language used by people who want to make something relatively harmless seem like a serious crime worthy of serious punishment.
I hate to blow your mind, but it isn't.
(Does anyone else remember when that would be considered a joke rather than a realistic suggestion?).
Clearly nobody taught you that copyright infringement isn't stealing. Stealing is when you deprive someone of property, who is deprived of their property with copyright infringement?
IP law is fucked up. It is punishing children for doing what they are told to do on Sesame Street.
We should be wary of *any* move towards turning computers from our servants into our prison guards.
If trading copyrighted material is no-longer possible, I am not sure that BitTorrent will retain its current popularity for long.
I'm really not sure which is faster, although if its BitTorrent, I suspect it may have more to do with the usage patterns of its users than the way the technology is designed.