That article got me thinking. Perhaps the nifty peer-to-peer technology behind Gnutella, Swarmcast, FreeNet, and etc. can be used to do for audio streaming the same things that it does for file sharing?
In particular, I'm thinking of a system where anyone can broadcast audio (or even video) streams semi-anonymously. Listening nodes automatically forward the stream packets to each other, meaning that only the nodes directly adjacent to the source know who/where it is, and only those nodes use any of its bandwidth.
Such a system could be as scalable as "real" radio, since the bandwidth available increases with the number of people listening, and it could be lawyer-resistant enough that the RIAA couldn't stop it (similar to how they haven't been able to stop mp3 file trading).
(offtopic) I always thought Be did a nice job using BMessage and BMessenger type objects for their GUI API. No language extensions or ugly macros necessary, since a BMessage is really the only data type you'll ever need:^)
How much coal do you have to burn to make the glass for this thing?
Depends on how you are getting power to heat the sand into glass. For the second one of these you build, you can use the power output from the first one to generate the heat, and burn no coal.
Re:I like the one about the Afghani guys E-mail
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Okay, I'm a bio grad student, but is the problem not obvious? The intense stress alters neurology in the entirety of the brain.
Not to worry, they thought of that. That's why they when they calibrated the machine, they had all their subjects wear a cage of starving rats on their face.
Smart software would do a nice producer/consumer blocking queue type thing, where the CD player races ahead until a certain amount of disk space is being used for the temporary.wav files, at which point it would wait for the encoder to free up some space before continuing.
My prediction is that e-paper systems that try to enforce draconian copyright schemes will fail in the marketplace, as people will by the more open systems instead.
In fact, my real prediction is that the 'killer app' for this display will be a simple wireless web browser. Such a device would allow you to read books, as well as everything else the web has to offer.
Turning the page is physically easy to do, has great tactile feedback, and is very familiar.
Nice and familiar yes, but, probably not worth making the e-book thingy N times more expensive (where N is the number of pages in the e-book). Especially since IMHO people would end up using the "next page button" anyway, as it's easier than turning a page once you get used to it.
The book is an incredible device. Compact, durable, cheap, easy-to-use interface.
Books are nice, but not really cheap when you have to keep buying new ones all the time. That is, it's cheaper in the long run to pay a one-time $150 up-front fee for the e-book hardware than it is to pay $5-$45 every single time you want to read a new story.
As for e-book content charges, you'll have your choice of downloading for-pay content, downloading free content, or just browsing the web using the snazzy wireless networking..:^)
The poster asked how open-source would improve the product, and I answered. Whether or not the product is bug free and works as advertised is a separate issue from whether it is open or closed source.
And yes, obviously not all changes can be made solely in software. That doesn't reduce the value of having available source to zero.
Do you really think having the source would improve the product? [...] I don't want something I can buy and fix myself. They should just make it work right in the first place
So you buy your closed-source product, and it works as advertised. Then one morning you have an idea... "it would be SO great if only I could make it do X".... and your write the company asking them to implement feature X. 2 years later, you're still waiting for feature X--and if it ever does appear, you'll probably have to buy the new model to use it anyway ($$$).
Contrast that with the open-source product. You buy one, and it works as advertised. One morning you have your idea. You go on the web, and at www.openzapstation.com, you find that some geek has had the same idea and already uploaded a patch that implements that feature. You download and install the patch, and the next day you have your feature X.
Blaming the software because the user does something stupid is like blaming your car when you run it into a pole
No, it's more like blaming the car because turning up the volume knob on the radio on Tuesdays causes the engine to explode. ("I've told the users again and again, don't turn up the volume on Tuesdays, but they always forget....")
See the distinction? Clicking icons in your email program is reasonable behaviour 99% of the time, but 1% of the time it's catastrophic? That's a horrible design flaw in either the email program, or the OS, or both, and it's no big surprise that people get tripped up by it.
I disagree. Users aren't stupid, software is. Users are taught that when they see an icon on screen, they can click it and something useful will happen. This is as it should be. If something bad happens because they clicked the icon, (e.g. they get or spread a virus), that is the fault of the software, not the user. With a properly secure operating system, viruses would not be possible, and no amount of blaming the user changes that fact that Windows (amongst other OS's) is insecure.
Re:Begging Questions and Urban Planning
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
How many people live close enough to work that they can afford the time to communte on a device that moves at walking speed?
Well, this first implementation goes up to 8 miles an hour (or about 3 times walking speed). Watch for a subsequent version, with a better power source, that goes much faster... (evil grin)
How many people live in places where the weather is neither too warm or too cold to spend the time outside?
Put on some warm clothes and stop whining... geez, you people!;^)
How many businesses have the infrastructure to handle storing and charging these things?
It'll be easier to store than a bicycle, which businesses handle well enough now using bike racks and such. Unlike a bike, it would be easy to bring into the office and store by your desk. As far as charging it goes, that's what electrical outlets are for. According to the article, it doesn't take very much electricity to recharge it.
Is it really going to share the sidewalk with pedestrians? Where are they going to go now?
Not sure about that... bike lanes would probably be a good place for this type of vehicle. (what? your city has no bike lanes? Well this is just the excuse they need to add some!;^))
What about security? Riding around on a $3000 device that can't move faster than walking speed is a huge crime oppurtunity.
Perhaps, but no worse than a bicycle really.
And, unfortunately, this cool device is not "IT"
No, it's not the be-all and end-all, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. Don't forget that there will be subsequent refinements to the technology.
cloning: is simply unnatural reproduction. Much like lesbians being fertilized. This unnatural reproduction degrades life to the point that it can be thrown around.
Where does this unnatural -> degraded implication come from? It's certainly not the case in my experience--if anything, the lesbian couples I know are much more loving and thoughtful in the upbringing of their children than many of the heterosexual couples I know. (I suspect this is due to several things: First, it's currently much harder to legally become a parent if you are in a gay couple, so only the truly dedicated gay couples become parents... contrast that to the situation amongst heterosexual couples, where being thoughtless and unmotivated makes it more likely you will become a parent. Also, gay couples tend to be more open-minded about allowing their child to be him/herself and not forcing any predetermined societal roles on him/her... for obvious reasons)
In any case, as far as I can tell a lot of people arguing this fact have never taken an honest look at gay families compared to traditional ones. Gay couples certainly aren't perfect, but life in the traditional family can be pretty damn disfunctional as well, even if it is more "natural".
BTW, pain is how you grow stronger, ask any athlete, ask any mature person.
I did, and they all agreed that exercise and hard work is the way to grow stronger. Pain (chronic or above moderate levels) is an indicator that something is wrong, not that you are growing stronger.
When asked in an interview why most of the evidence for creationism
Why did God hide all those fake dinosaur bones anyway? What a joker, that guy...;^)
To fix a defect is one thing, but to create a race of super-humans is
another
It's not even clear that fixing a defect is always a good thing to do, since many of these defects may be the downside of an evolutionary compromise that also has a significant upside. For example, the same mutation that causes sickle cell anemia also makes the affected person much more resistant to malaria.
On the other hand, horrible historical abuses aside, what is so intrinsically wrong about trying to improve the health and abilities of the human race?
clones should have the exact same civil & human rights as a twin -
though not inheritance rights if not explicitly given
Hmm. Why not inheritance rights? Just curious. (IMHO, the clone should be considered the legal heir of the original, since (presumably/hopefully) the original was the one who decided to allow the clone to be created)
The current entertainment buissness model will collapse.
If this is the case, it will be replaced by a different business model.
What makes you so sure? Maybe there is no workable replacement business model.
And any viable business model involves money, in particular, it involves paying people who work
Why should music be a business? It wasn't a business for the last couple of millenia, only the last century or so. I for one would have no qualms with popular culture becoming a not-for-profit enterprise again.
After putting the page up, write a tool to hit google's voting engine over and over and over
If I were Google, I would just keep a table mapping IP addresses to voting records. So your second vote for a page merely replaces your first vote, instead of counting as another vote. Would that be enough?
So, by your logic, I should be able to string coax around the neighborhood to hook my friends up to cable too? Hmm, can I do that for my whole town?
Frankly, yes. They agreed to provide you with (so much) bandwidth, and if you want to start your own ISP using that bandwidth, then more power to you. If they think you are using too much bandwidth, they are free to put a bandwidth-limiter on your account, or charge you by the megabyte. Better that than telling you what you can and cannot do with your own hardware.
It targets, rather legitimately, people who use services without paying for them.
But somebody did pay for the connection to the NAT box. Since he's paid for it, why shouldn't he be able to use that bandwidth for whatever he wants (including forwarding some of it to his neighbor)?
Right now, there's simply no way to tell if people are using NAT for illegitimate purposes (or even using it at all, for that matter.)
It's not clear to me what is so illegitimate about forwarding packets to my neighbor. It's my bandwidth, bought and paid for. Is it illegal for me to give my neighbor water from my kitchen tap? (yes, the difference is that water usage is metered, whereas bandwidth usage is currently flat-rate. I would argue that is the ISP's problem, not mine... they can switch to per-megabyte billing if they don't like it, or better yet they could do this.
[ISP guy says that metered billing is too much of a pain because of people disputing the charges, etc]
Perhaps there is another way; meter everyone's bandwidth usage, and automatically set bandwidth-usage-priorities for each account based on their usage. Sort of like how the Unix process scheduler dynamically adjusts process priorities so that CPU hogs end up with low priorities... users who are hogging bandwidth would be automatically deprioritized down to where they only get the "leftover bandwidth" available after the light users are done with it.
Something like that could work pretty well IMHO; no complaints about bills, and to anyone who complains about slow transfer rates, you can tell them "it will go faster if you don't use so much bandwidth", thus encouraging more sociable behaviour.
But the key here is "electricity". Where does that come from? Oh, burning coal, or fission, maybe...
... or solar or wind power, or tidal power, or fusion, or any other power source that mankind figures out how to harness in the next million years. The cool thing about hydrogen is that it allows us to disassociate the method of power generation from the machines that use the fuel. Electricity has already done this for stationary appliances--your television doesn't care whether it's running on electricity made from coal or fusion. Hydrogen promises to give us the same flexibility for vehicles and fuel storage; that way, every time a newer, cleaner method of power generation comes on line, we don't have to replace every car and generator in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
In particular, I'm thinking of a system where anyone can broadcast audio (or even video) streams semi-anonymously. Listening nodes automatically forward the stream packets to each other, meaning that only the nodes directly adjacent to the source know who/where it is, and only those nodes use any of its bandwidth.
Such a system could be as scalable as "real" radio, since the bandwidth available increases with the number of people listening, and it could be lawyer-resistant enough that the RIAA couldn't stop it (similar to how they haven't been able to stop mp3 file trading).
Time to start coding I guess
when it said "MAKE MONEY FAST" :^)
(offtopic) I always thought Be did a nice job using BMessage and BMessenger type objects for their GUI API. No language extensions or ugly macros necessary, since a BMessage is really the only data type you'll ever need :^)
Depends on how you are getting power to heat the sand into glass. For the second one of these you build, you can use the power output from the first one to generate the heat, and burn no coal.
Australia? Chicken feed. Coat the moon!
Not to worry, they thought of that. That's why they when they calibrated the machine, they had all their subjects wear a cage of starving rats on their face.
Smart software would do a nice producer/consumer blocking queue type thing, where the CD player races ahead until a certain amount of disk space is being used for the temporary .wav files, at which point it would wait for the encoder to free up some space before continuing.
In fact, my real prediction is that the 'killer app' for this display will be a simple wireless web browser. Such a device would allow you to read books, as well as everything else the web has to offer.
Nice and familiar yes, but, probably not worth making the e-book thingy N times more expensive (where N is the number of pages in the e-book). Especially since IMHO people would end up using the "next page button" anyway, as it's easier than turning a page once you get used to it.
The book is an incredible device. Compact, durable, cheap, easy-to-use interface.
Books are nice, but not really cheap when you have to keep buying new ones all the time. That is, it's cheaper in the long run to pay a one-time $150 up-front fee for the e-book hardware than it is to pay $5-$45 every single time you want to read a new story.
As for e-book content charges, you'll have your choice of downloading for-pay content, downloading free content, or just browsing the web using the snazzy wireless networking..
The poster asked how open-source would improve the product, and I answered. Whether or not the product is bug free and works as advertised is a separate issue from whether it is open or closed source.
And yes, obviously not all changes can be made solely in software. That doesn't reduce the value of having available source to zero.
So you buy your closed-source product, and it works as advertised. Then one morning you have an idea... "it would be SO great if only I could make it do X".... and your write the company asking them to implement feature X. 2 years later, you're still waiting for feature X--and if it ever does appear, you'll probably have to buy the new model to use it anyway ($$$).
Contrast that with the open-source product. You buy one, and it works as advertised. One morning you have your idea. You go on the web, and at www.openzapstation.com, you find that some geek has had the same idea and already uploaded a patch that implements that feature. You download and install the patch, and the next day you have your feature X.
That is how open source improves a product.
That solution keeps hackers from modifying the database, but does nothing to keep them from gaining (read-only) access to confidential data.
No, I'm quite serious.
Blaming the software because the user does something stupid is like blaming your car when you run it into a pole
No, it's more like blaming the car because turning up the volume knob on the radio on Tuesdays causes the engine to explode. ("I've told the users again and again, don't turn up the volume on Tuesdays, but they always forget....")
See the distinction? Clicking icons in your email program is reasonable behaviour 99% of the time, but 1% of the time it's catastrophic? That's a horrible design flaw in either the email program, or the OS, or both, and it's no big surprise that people get tripped up by it.
I disagree. Users aren't stupid, software is. Users are taught that when they see an icon on screen, they can click it and something useful will happen. This is as it should be. If something bad happens because they clicked the icon, (e.g. they get or spread a virus), that is the fault of the software, not the user. With a properly secure operating system, viruses would not be possible, and no amount of blaming the user changes that fact that Windows (amongst other OS's) is insecure.
Well, this first implementation goes up to 8 miles an hour (or about 3 times walking speed). Watch for a subsequent version, with a better power source, that goes much faster... (evil grin)
How many people live in places where the weather is neither too warm or too cold to spend the time outside?
Put on some warm clothes and stop whining... geez, you people!
How many businesses have the infrastructure to handle storing and charging these things?
It'll be easier to store than a bicycle, which businesses handle well enough now using bike racks and such. Unlike a bike, it would be easy to bring into the office and store by your desk. As far as charging it goes, that's what electrical outlets are for. According to the article, it doesn't take very much electricity to recharge it.
Is it really going to share the sidewalk with pedestrians? Where are they going to go now?
Not sure about that... bike lanes would probably be a good place for this type of vehicle. (what? your city has no bike lanes? Well this is just the excuse they need to add some!
What about security? Riding around on a $3000 device that can't move faster than walking speed is a huge crime oppurtunity.
Perhaps, but no worse than a bicycle really.
And, unfortunately, this cool device is not "IT"
No, it's not the be-all and end-all, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. Don't forget that there will be subsequent refinements to the technology.
Where does this unnatural -> degraded implication come from? It's certainly not the case in my experience--if anything, the lesbian couples I know are much more loving and thoughtful in the upbringing of their children than many of the heterosexual couples I know. (I suspect this is due to several things: First, it's currently much harder to legally become a parent if you are in a gay couple, so only the truly dedicated gay couples become parents... contrast that to the situation amongst heterosexual couples, where being thoughtless and unmotivated makes it more likely you will become a parent. Also, gay couples tend to be more open-minded about allowing their child to be him/herself and not forcing any predetermined societal roles on him/her... for obvious reasons)
In any case, as far as I can tell a lot of people arguing this fact have never taken an honest look at gay families compared to traditional ones. Gay couples certainly aren't perfect, but life in the traditional family can be pretty damn disfunctional as well, even if it is more "natural".
BTW, pain is how you grow stronger, ask any athlete, ask any mature person.
I did, and they all agreed that exercise and hard work is the way to grow stronger. Pain (chronic or above moderate levels) is an indicator that something is wrong, not that you are growing stronger.
When asked in an interview why most of the evidence for creationism
Why did God hide all those fake dinosaur bones anyway? What a joker, that guy... ;^)
another
It's not even clear that fixing a defect is always a good thing to do, since many of these defects may be the downside of an evolutionary compromise that also has a significant upside. For example, the same mutation that causes sickle cell anemia also makes the affected person much more resistant to malaria.
On the other hand, horrible historical abuses aside, what is so intrinsically wrong about trying to improve the health and abilities of the human race?
though not inheritance rights if not explicitly given
Hmm. Why not inheritance rights? Just curious. (IMHO, the clone should be considered the legal heir of the original, since (presumably/hopefully) the original was the one who decided to allow the clone to be created)
If this is the case, it will be replaced by a different business model.
What makes you so sure? Maybe there is no workable replacement business model.
And any viable business model involves money, in particular, it involves paying people who work
Why should music be a business? It wasn't a business for the last couple of millenia, only the last century or so. I for one would have no qualms with popular culture becoming a not-for-profit enterprise again.
If I were Google, I would just keep a table mapping IP addresses to voting records. So your second vote for a page merely replaces your first vote, instead of counting as another vote. Would that be enough?
Frankly, yes. They agreed to provide you with (so much) bandwidth, and if you want to start your own ISP using that bandwidth, then more power to you. If they think you are using too much bandwidth, they are free to put a bandwidth-limiter on your account, or charge you by the megabyte. Better that than telling you what you can and cannot do with your own hardware.
Let's not be too hasty in discounting life there; perhaps life could have evolved in the form of giant alien gasbags.
But somebody did pay for the connection to the NAT box. Since he's paid for it, why shouldn't he be able to use that bandwidth for whatever he wants (including forwarding some of it to his neighbor)?
Right now, there's simply no way to tell if people are using NAT for illegitimate purposes (or even using it at all, for that matter.)
It's not clear to me what is so illegitimate about forwarding packets to my neighbor. It's my bandwidth, bought and paid for. Is it illegal for me to give my neighbor water from my kitchen tap? (yes, the difference is that water usage is metered, whereas bandwidth usage is currently flat-rate. I would argue that is the ISP's problem, not mine... they can switch to per-megabyte billing if they don't like it, or better yet they could do this.
Perhaps there is another way; meter everyone's bandwidth usage, and automatically set bandwidth-usage-priorities for each account based on their usage. Sort of like how the Unix process scheduler dynamically adjusts process priorities so that CPU hogs end up with low priorities... users who are hogging bandwidth would be automatically deprioritized down to where they only get the "leftover bandwidth" available after the light users are done with it.
Something like that could work pretty well IMHO; no complaints about bills, and to anyone who complains about slow transfer rates, you can tell them "it will go faster if you don't use so much bandwidth", thus encouraging more sociable behaviour.
... or solar or wind power, or tidal power, or fusion, or any other power source that mankind figures out how to harness in the next million years. The cool thing about hydrogen is that it allows us to disassociate the method of power generation from the machines that use the fuel. Electricity has already done this for stationary appliances--your television doesn't care whether it's running on electricity made from coal or fusion. Hydrogen promises to give us the same flexibility for vehicles and fuel storage; that way, every time a newer, cleaner method of power generation comes on line, we don't have to replace every car and generator in the world.
Think of hydrogen as the XML of fuels.