It's really only relevant to europeans since it's a petition to the European Union authorities who are currently reviewing the validity of software patents. Whilst they haven't been made legal here I believe something like 55% of the board support implementing them.
Personally I feel software patents stifle innovation and whilst actual algorithms should be considered seperately I feel patenting something as simple as those in this story is just wrong.
For the record i've also submitted this as a/. story but it hasn't quite made the front page yet.
In an optimised situation surely mbone would have some sort of star topology where the data is only transmitted once across the atlantic and then only once to each country and distributed from that countries main internet exchange. Am i right?
Anyway whether that's the case or not, there still must be an awful lot of excess data floating about if you only want to mirror the file onto say 100 sites. Given that people are also talking about tunnelling mbone connections too - it makes me cringe.
Point blank problem is that redhat dont have enough bandwidth.
Perhaps a better system of conventional ftp mirroring would be the answer. First of all put the file onto a restricted ftp server at redhat.com. Then only allow each contitenents fastest two servers to pull it, they can then distribute it to smaller ones, and finally (like 3 hours later) it's open to the world.
That way i'd probably find that Sunsite at imperial college london grab the file from redhat, my isp download it to their local mirror archive and then i can pull it over my cable modem at 55kbytes/s.
I can buy all the nice cheap american food, gasoline and computer equipment load it in through the bathroom window and out of the front door and not only do i avoid customs but I save myself those nasty shipping costs.
I'd quite like one or two to play with in my appartment but being in the UK i'm not quite sure whether or not u can walk into radio shack and pick one up.
I have a flatmate in california so hopefully he should be able to pick up a couple and we'll do all the 'illegal' stuff outwith US jurisdiction.
I used their NTFSDOS utility some time ago and it definitely didn't appear to use any DLLs at all.
I used it on a boot disk to exploit the ntfs partitions on my universities NT4 workstations and certainly i never copied any files from them to make it work.
The company Winternals provide (and have done for some time) tools which allow you to read and now write ntfs volumes under Dos and Win9x.
I recall reading a M$ knowledgebase article about some methods for deploying NT 4 (I think) that actually recommended using these third party tools. (Oh and they provide fat32 support under NT4)
Now why is it acceptable to make tools that enable microsoft operating systems to read microsoft disk formats, but not make those same tools for other operating systems.
Surely winternals have set a precedent for acceptance of tools capable of utilising NTFS and the DoJ would have a fit if they weren't attacked when the linux version was:)
Anyway the last I recall FAT, FAT32 & Jolliet systems have been supported in linux for sometime. Is hacking thier flagship (as if) filesystem more punishable?
If you'd been paying attention you might have noticed that adam durtiz of the crows said that he thinks it's fantastic that people can use the internet and mp3 to trade in the bands unreleased and bootlegged songs.
There are a few ftp sites that hold literally gigabytes of crows bootlegs and there have never been any legal moves by the band (or geffen) to shut them down.
Some of the collectors even got together and made a two disc boxed set of the very best of the bootlegs (in the same track order as the first two albums) and presented this to the band.
And you think perl jam selling you their for the bargin price of $10 is good... btw was that 10 dollars for 2 cds full of mp3s of $10 per concert?!
320 on the face of it looks like a big number... but i've got 45 in my own pc now.
Our flat (appartment) network already has a server with 4 20 gig maxtor disks and we've got 4 more 60 gigs on order.
That will give us about the same amount total diskspace although we intend to raid5 it and bring our total storage down to 0.25Tb (including the 10gig boot disk)
Caching of results (and even files) is certainly a reasonable idea in such Peer to Peer systems.
It does however start to create problems of its own. One feeling is that gnutella needs to be more anonymous. This would most likely be done by propagating a public key along with each search query and then accepting the results in an encrypted form - hence no intermediatary could cache results.
The other difficulty with complex caching mechanisms is the potential for them to be badly implemented. Unfortunately these peer to peer systems rely on clients being properly written and properly configured. Gnutella still finds about 1/3rd of it's network traffic is consumed by a bug in the Pong response that caused any pong message to propagate to the entire network. If we start on with complex demand vs availability style caching then problems will no doubt emerge.
The other problem with things like this is the possibility for abuse. Consider just what our DNS system would look like if anyone could add information to it - you'd end up with more entries like (sisgo.net - nslookup it - it's weird).
Gnutella is already struggling to fight the script kiddies:(
The only solution I can envisage would be some kind of star shaped topology. Take the basic gnutella network style and use it with people on t1+ connections to build a network backbone.
Then onto them you can start hanging the cable modem and DSL users, and then each CM user can hold a couple of modem users. That MIGHT make it work.
Then it would be the responsibility of the faster users whether or not to forward search queries... that way a search for something common like 'metallica' would never go further than the local group, but when u search for something bizarre it would go all over the network.
The other way this could be extended is by having the slower users upload the lists of files they are sharing to the faster users where they could be cached.
So we have a set of fast servers which are capable of answering on behalf of anyone else.... hang on that's napster.
Certainly in the context of using it on a Lan to locate things this could be a very powerful tool. However how many sysadmins would like to have to secure every workstation from hackers instead of just every key server... fun stuff.
However on the internet it's doomed to failure. I followed the work on GnutellaNG for a little while and it seemed at that point to be involved in attempting to reduce the bandwidth requirements of gnutella by slimming down the protocol, whilst simultanously increasing the functions and hence bandwidth requirements.
Ultimately any P2P system is limited by the outbound bandwidth that each user has. At the moment with about 3000 host on Gnutella you are using about 1.5-2kbytes/s for each connection you have open (most ppl have 2 - 4) plus that doesn't include bandwidth left to upload or download.
Curiously though this would be the most optimum way of doing things (not gnutella in particularl but p2p) if it weren't for the fact that we have so little bandwidth at the end user.
Even cable modem users typically have only 128kbit upstream, which will only take gnutella to about the 10,000 user mark before it starts to fall over again. The same has to be true of any raw peer to peer system.
No amount of optimisation will reduce the bandwidth requirements of any search having to be executed on any host.
Freenet on the other hand is a lot smarter than that and does actually move information about in a streamlined manner. Unfortunately I fear that freenet would fall over and die right now if it were holding the terabytes of files that gnutella does - so it appears not to be the best solution either.
We need more bandwidth at end users and less at big corporations, except that would count as empowering the people and be morally repulsive to most politicians.
It just proves that the RIAA have dont a phenomenal amount for napsters business.
Just like gnutella would have probably quietly disappeared into the woodwork, when AOL pulled it off the site they catapulted it into the limelight.
How many other software packages besides napster and windows 95 have actually made it into the mainstream press. There aren't many.
Sadly what the RIAA dont realise is whilst they may well stop napster the product, they will almost certainly never stop the thinking behind it and the desire to trade in mp3s.
Sadly for them, napster was probably their best chance at controlling it.
About two years ago my university apparently unofficially ran an ftp site with about 10 gigs of mp3s on it.
Sadly the powers that be decided it was wrong and it was closed down.
Now as far as I know napster is now blocked from my university, although the action to do that blocks all access to www.napster.com by resolving it's dns to 0.0.0.0. However if you already have the napster client then u can still use it.
I guess it's just an sensible sysadmin move to allow access to the smarter (more hackerlike) students and yes appease the people who write policy.
Bol.com are probably the only online bookstore capable of stealing their market and they still have some way to go.
Amazon do at least sell things and have revenue. Mp3.com's business plan appears to be something akin to setting up a cd store which buys discs in in bulk and then gives them out for free.
Yes but as i recall all the examples you have cited are application level.
To do dvd decoding you will need at least some driver level interaction surely since there is some degree of authorisation at drive level.
Anyway there was never any decree that you must own windows to play dvds. In the UK you can buy standalone players and these sport far better support for high definition tv output and surround sound decoding. You can also play dvds on your Mac, you should be able to play them on solaris (either now or soon) and it's free.
The article mentions on going royalties being paid to the record companies.
I have to wonder how long it will be before mp3.com's capital dries up. Considering their lawsuits have probably cost in the region of $0.5bn they surely cant have *that* much left.
Also you can imagine the bandwidth charges they must be incurring by allowing users to stream 128kbit audio from them.
Just how long can you keep afloat such a hugely loss making website in the hope that it will one day be profitable?
Similary can anyone see any nice routes for how mp3.com could become profitable?
That's still pretty naieve to think that that eliminates the problem.
Ultimately the BIOS in most modern systems can easily be replaced since it's only software.
If a manufacturer is sufficiently dodgy to be selling marked up cpus then they probably woudln't realy mind flashing the bioses to hide their sins.
Anyway you are already expecting all motherboards to have their existing bioses replaced with new ones that support this extended CPUID. No novice user is going to recognise that their motherboard is a few months older than it should be...!
Anyway there is also the further problem of how the fsck do u expect AMD to do this. I guess they'd have to generate difference wafers for each speed of CPU.
At the end of the day AMD and Intel only manufacture a few different chips and then sort them by tolerance to feed the different markets.
In transistor terms theres really no difference between a 700 and an 850 but in order to keep the overclocking market you want AMD to double their overheads..?
AMD know fine well that most of us (spare the die hard freon cooling bunch) would likea bit of extra CPU power.
My next system upgrade was planned to be a duron 700 running at 900mhz which would give me 87% or so of the power of a 1ghz Thunderbirdie.
I could afford the thunderbird. Sure it would have meant no voodoo5 and maybe even no film scanner but by locking the duron they want to push me into spending a higher proportion of my budget on a cpu that I otherwise would.
Plus it will raise the overall percieved stability of their cpus since as mentioned before the vendors will get away from it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry for this being a bit offtopic but i hope people interested in software patents would take the time to sign this petition.
/. story but it hasn't quite made the front page yet.
http://petition.eurolinux.org/
It's really only relevant to europeans since it's a petition to the European Union authorities who are currently reviewing the validity of software patents. Whilst they haven't been made legal here I believe something like 55% of the board support implementing them.
Personally I feel software patents stifle innovation and whilst actual algorithms should be considered seperately I feel patenting something as simple as those in this story is just wrong.
For the record i've also submitted this as a
In an optimised situation surely mbone would have some sort of star topology where the data is only transmitted once across the atlantic and then only once to each country and distributed from that countries main internet exchange. Am i right?
Anyway whether that's the case or not, there still must be an awful lot of excess data floating about if you only want to mirror the file onto say 100 sites. Given that people are also talking about tunnelling mbone connections too - it makes me cringe.
Point blank problem is that redhat dont have enough bandwidth.
Perhaps a better system of conventional ftp mirroring would be the answer. First of all put the file onto a restricted ftp server at redhat.com. Then only allow each contitenents fastest two servers to pull it, they can then distribute it to smaller ones, and finally (like 3 hours later) it's open to the world.
That way i'd probably find that Sunsite at imperial college london grab the file from redhat, my isp download it to their local mirror archive and then i can pull it over my cable modem at 55kbytes/s.
Yeah it's magic for smuggling stuff.
I can buy all the nice cheap american food, gasoline and computer equipment load it in through the bathroom window and out of the front door and not only do i avoid customs but I save myself those nasty shipping costs.
I'd quite like one or two to play with in my appartment but being in the UK i'm not quite sure whether or not u can walk into radio shack and pick one up.
I have a flatmate in california so hopefully he should be able to pick up a couple and we'll do all the 'illegal' stuff outwith US jurisdiction.
:)
I used their NTFSDOS utility some time ago and it definitely didn't appear to use any DLLs at all.
I used it on a boot disk to exploit the ntfs partitions on my universities NT4 workstations and certainly i never copied any files from them to make it work.
The company Winternals provide (and have done for some time) tools which allow you to read and now write ntfs volumes under Dos and Win9x.
:)
I recall reading a M$ knowledgebase article about some methods for deploying NT 4 (I think) that actually recommended using these third party tools. (Oh and they provide fat32 support under NT4)
Now why is it acceptable to make tools that enable microsoft operating systems to read microsoft disk formats, but not make those same tools for other operating systems.
Surely winternals have set a precedent for acceptance of tools capable of utilising NTFS and the DoJ would have a fit if they weren't attacked when the linux version was
Anyway the last I recall FAT, FAT32 & Jolliet systems have been supported in linux for sometime. Is hacking thier flagship (as if) filesystem more punishable?
If you'd been paying attention you might have noticed that adam durtiz of the crows said that he thinks it's fantastic that people can use the internet and mp3 to trade in the bands unreleased and bootlegged songs.
There are a few ftp sites that hold literally gigabytes of crows bootlegs and there have never been any legal moves by the band (or geffen) to shut them down.
Some of the collectors even got together and made a two disc boxed set of the very best of the bootlegs (in the same track order as the first two albums) and presented this to the band.
And you think perl jam selling you their for the bargin price of $10 is good... btw was that 10 dollars for 2 cds full of mp3s of $10 per concert?!
Ummm you get a second one...?
320 on the face of it looks like a big number... but i've got 45 in my own pc now.
Our flat (appartment) network already has a server with 4 20 gig maxtor disks and we've got 4 more 60 gigs on order.
That will give us about the same amount total diskspace although we intend to raid5 it and bring our total storage down to 0.25Tb (including the 10gig boot disk)
3)
:)
Television was developed by John Logie Baird, who was as the name suggests, Scottish.
Nane aw that english or american crap please.
The pound has been a metric currency unit since 1964 I belive. Before that it comprised of 144 pence = 12 shillings = 1 pound.
Every sunday at the royal highland showground and Ingleston Edinburgh :)
:)
Look for the stalls that just have a few bulging ringbinders on display.
Get there early cos the polis usually show up around 2pm
I went down to my local car boot sale to get Windows 2000 for my two home computers and had to buy a whole 4 copies (at £15 each!!).
:)
At this rate it'll soon be cheaper to buy a legit copy.
Caching of results (and even files) is certainly a reasonable idea in such Peer to Peer systems.
:(
It does however start to create problems of its own. One feeling is that gnutella needs to be more anonymous. This would most likely be done by propagating a public key along with each search query and then accepting the results in an encrypted form - hence no intermediatary could cache results.
The other difficulty with complex caching mechanisms is the potential for them to be badly implemented. Unfortunately these peer to peer systems rely on clients being properly written and properly configured. Gnutella still finds about 1/3rd of it's network traffic is consumed by a bug in the Pong response that caused any pong message to propagate to the entire network. If we start on with complex demand vs availability style caching then problems will no doubt emerge.
The other problem with things like this is the possibility for abuse. Consider just what our DNS system would look like if anyone could add information to it - you'd end up with more entries like (sisgo.net - nslookup it - it's weird).
Gnutella is already struggling to fight the script kiddies
The only solution I can envisage would be some kind of star shaped topology. Take the basic gnutella network style and use it with people on t1+ connections to build a network backbone.
Then onto them you can start hanging the cable modem and DSL users, and then each CM user can hold a couple of modem users. That MIGHT make it work.
Then it would be the responsibility of the faster users whether or not to forward search queries... that way a search for something common like 'metallica' would never go further than the local group, but when u search for something bizarre it would go all over the network.
The other way this could be extended is by having the slower users upload the lists of files they are sharing to the faster users where they could be cached.
So we have a set of fast servers which are capable of answering on behalf of anyone else.... hang on that's napster.
D'oh
Certainly in the context of using it on a Lan to locate things this could be a very powerful tool. However how many sysadmins would like to have to secure every workstation from hackers instead of just every key server... fun stuff.
However on the internet it's doomed to failure. I followed the work on GnutellaNG for a little while and it seemed at that point to be involved in attempting to reduce the bandwidth requirements of gnutella by slimming down the protocol, whilst simultanously increasing the functions and hence bandwidth requirements.
Ultimately any P2P system is limited by the outbound bandwidth that each user has. At the moment with about 3000 host on Gnutella you are using about 1.5-2kbytes/s for each connection you have open (most ppl have 2 - 4) plus that doesn't include bandwidth left to upload or download.
Curiously though this would be the most optimum way of doing things (not gnutella in particularl but p2p) if it weren't for the fact that we have so little bandwidth at the end user.
Even cable modem users typically have only 128kbit upstream, which will only take gnutella to about the 10,000 user mark before it starts to fall over again. The same has to be true of any raw peer to peer system.
No amount of optimisation will reduce the bandwidth requirements of any search having to be executed on any host.
Freenet on the other hand is a lot smarter than that and does actually move information about in a streamlined manner. Unfortunately I fear that freenet would fall over and die right now if it were holding the terabytes of files that gnutella does - so it appears not to be the best solution either.
We need more bandwidth at end users and less at big corporations, except that would count as empowering the people and be morally repulsive to most politicians.
dunno i can think of at least 18 different ways
:)
ummm oh i see, as a keyword
It just proves that the RIAA have dont a phenomenal amount for napsters business.
Just like gnutella would have probably quietly disappeared into the woodwork, when AOL pulled it off the site they catapulted it into the limelight.
How many other software packages besides napster and windows 95 have actually made it into the mainstream press. There aren't many.
Sadly what the RIAA dont realise is whilst they may well stop napster the product, they will almost certainly never stop the thinking behind it and the desire to trade in mp3s.
Sadly for them, napster was probably their best chance at controlling it.
About two years ago my university apparently unofficially ran an ftp site with about 10 gigs of mp3s on it.
Sadly the powers that be decided it was wrong and it was closed down.
Now as far as I know napster is now blocked from my university, although the action to do that blocks all access to www.napster.com by resolving it's dns to 0.0.0.0. However if you already have the napster client then u can still use it.
I guess it's just an sensible sysadmin move to allow access to the smarter (more hackerlike) students and yes appease the people who write policy.
The volunteers were quicker at pressing a matching button if the headset was switched on
:(
The improvement was small--about 4 per cent.
Hmmm still not quite enough to counter the 900ms ping times i get playing halflife over my nokia
But amazon has a vaguely realistic business plan.
Bol.com are probably the only online bookstore capable of stealing their market and they still have some way to go.
Amazon do at least sell things and have revenue. Mp3.com's business plan appears to be something akin to setting up a cd store which buys discs in in bulk and then gives them out for free.
It just isn't viable.
Yes but as i recall all the examples you have cited are application level.
To do dvd decoding you will need at least some driver level interaction surely since there is some degree of authorisation at drive level.
Anyway there was never any decree that you must own windows to play dvds. In the UK you can buy standalone players and these sport far better support for high definition tv output and surround sound decoding. You can also play dvds on your Mac, you should be able to play them on solaris (either now or soon) and it's free.
Similarly the bible is public domain.
The sources may be lost but u can do waht u want with your own copy.
The article mentions on going royalties being paid to the record companies.
I have to wonder how long it will be before mp3.com's capital dries up. Considering their lawsuits have probably cost in the region of $0.5bn they surely cant have *that* much left.
Also you can imagine the bandwidth charges they must be incurring by allowing users to stream 128kbit audio from them.
Just how long can you keep afloat such a hugely loss making website in the hope that it will one day be profitable?
Similary can anyone see any nice routes for how mp3.com could become profitable?
That's still pretty naieve to think that that eliminates the problem.
Ultimately the BIOS in most modern systems can easily be replaced since it's only software.
If a manufacturer is sufficiently dodgy to be selling marked up cpus then they probably woudln't realy mind flashing the bioses to hide their sins.
Anyway you are already expecting all motherboards to have their existing bioses replaced with new ones that support this extended CPUID. No novice user is going to recognise that their motherboard is a few months older than it should be...!
Anyway there is also the further problem of how the fsck do u expect AMD to do this. I guess they'd have to generate difference wafers for each speed of CPU.
At the end of the day AMD and Intel only manufacture a few different chips and then sort them by tolerance to feed the different markets.
In transistor terms theres really no difference between a 700 and an 850 but in order to keep the overclocking market you want AMD to double their overheads..?
AMD know fine well that most of us (spare the die hard freon cooling bunch) would likea bit of extra CPU power.
My next system upgrade was planned to be a duron 700 running at 900mhz which would give me 87% or so of the power of a 1ghz Thunderbirdie.
I could afford the thunderbird. Sure it would have meant no voodoo5 and maybe even no film scanner but by locking the duron they want to push me into spending a higher proportion of my budget on a cpu that I otherwise would.
Plus it will raise the overall percieved stability of their cpus since as mentioned before the vendors will get away from it.