It's still damn two-faced, though. They managed to convince legions of Mac users to use a proprietary archiving format (all StuffIt 3.x and later were undocumented), but they placated desire for cross-platform capability with support for all the common PC formats (without Mac features, natch). They also changed the format a lot (in 5.x and again in 7.x), possibly in response to other people reverse engineering it.
Thus Aladdin took full advantage of the openness of the ZIP format for so long, for compatibility, but used closed formats to keep competitors away for Mac-specific files. It is somewhat ironic, then, that they are complaining about ZIP becoming closed when people have certainly complained in the past about their format being closed.
What, though, if you use one as a qubit in a quantum computer? Something akin to how a quantum fast Forier (sp?) transform is used in Shor's algorithm to boost the probability that the final, classical read operation will produce a factor of the input.
If you can shift the wavefunction's state vector at all then it would seem that you can send information with some nonzero probability faster than light. As long as your ECC has greater corrective abilities than the probability of corruption, why isn't this an FTL information conduit?
Oh, though there still remains the problem of getting the entangled qubits to the ends of the communication channel... well, presumably you could do that at 2c by putting the transmitter in the middle.
Potentially speaking you could send your half of the contract in a tracked, return-reciepted method... and as to make sure that you actually sent a copy of what you still have... hmm... there must be a way. It'd need to be something you couldn't forge... like say a bank notarization?
Just pondering. I might actually do this with the next piece of software I buy just to see what happens. And yes, I'd send it off before breaking the shrinkwrap.
"Dear [company],
I have purchaced [product] but would like you to agree to the following before I agree to your EULA:...
Failure to recieve a letter stating otherwise on company stationary within [some reasonable time - seven business days?] constitutes your agreement to the above terms.
Sincerely, [name]"
Alright, alright, it'd never work, but it'd be nice.
It's HIDEOUS! It looks just like Aqua and WinXP... the cartoony graphics of one and the cycle-wasting interface of the other... rolled into one bloated package. When did KDE move from being the K Desktop Environment to the K Deskop Everything?
Not to be overly harsh on KDE - it's a wonderful environment and has been great to use the past few years (about three, I want to say). However, the feature-bloat is simply getting on my nerves. I mean c'mon... it's a DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT... both KDE and GNOME have complete VFS layers in them, along with more prepackaged doodads than you can shake a stick at.
That said, it's time for me to find a new desktop-environment... no, what I really want is just a window manager again. Anybody got some recommendations? I think I'm going to check out Enlightenment.
Actually... to the best of my knowledge that uninstall method has issues.
For instance the MacOS's file-type registry (you know, the thing that links the file type stored in the resource fork to the application that's supposed to open it?) would be inconsistant after such a delete, while a proper uninstall *should* restore the settings to what they were prior to the program being installed.
There are other things, like extensions being left around... and we all know that extensions NEVER, EVER, EVER cause system conflicts. Basically it's the DLL hell all over again, just renamed.
Does this still apply to MacOSX? I know it's valid for 9.2 on down, and would imagine that there must be relics of applications dragged to the trash left elsewhere even in MacOSX.
Who cares? I just don't want my equipment acting against me, and the companies behind it considering me a criminal.
So while "all 10 of [us]" might not have an impact on the market (personally I think there are more than 10 people going to be pissed off about Palladium, and I know there *are* more than 10 people out there with modchips installed), we will at least have equipment that does what *we* want it to, fully under our control, and will forever ignore the MPAA, the RIAA, and the US government.
Have fun in your megacorporation-dominated libertarian-party's utopia.
I think with proper dynamic loader setup you should have no trouble with an old libgtk+1.2 and a new libgtk+2 library around for binary compatibility. What then gets sticky is source level compatibility, though I think that's quite fixable too.
1% market share... that's actually very impressive, you know that? Have *you* contributed to a project with 1% market share or better? Well, you can, but have you?
Linux is a textbook example of bad useability.... so try giving specific feedback? Or bug reports, like wishlist requests? Or code the damn thing up yourself.
We're about.001% of the population? Hey, that's quite a lot, you know? Even one-in-a-million things would happen six times on average in that group.
"me-centric" - the word is egocentric. May I sugguest a dictionary?
And 50 years from now leaves us in the same century. And if 99% of the world is still running Windows, fine, let them suffer. I love Linux and simply don't see myself as being able to tolerate chaning back, despite that I can make my way around a Windows box better than most users.
In short, would you please care to say something useful instead of just attacking an amorphous "you?" Do your job to increase the signal-to-noise ratio!
Aaactually, the actual decryption / authorization occurs on your local machine. What doesn't is the generation of the decryption token. That bit is hard-coded on DVDs and in the players and thus is very easy to get.
Here you have to be really sneaky and be able to be able to forge talking with the servers.
Wouldn't be a bad idea to ask everybody who got the CD to run a tcpdump capture of all trafic to/from the authentication server, their UID, and other such information. That way we could start reverse-engineering immediately without having to actually prod at the server.
*This* slashdotter disagrees strongly. I've been on an MPAA boycott and RIAA boycott for months, haven't been on GNUTELLA or Kazaa or anything like that in a similar amount of time.
Haven't bought, to the best of my knowledge (bear in mind it's hard to keep track of who owns whom), but I've made an honest effort not to buy anything from companies either in the MPAA or the RIAA.
I've been following LKML, not that I can contribute much, but still. Most of the scheduling work, if memory serves, is tested on large-way boxes (the number 32 leaps to mind).
You are encouraged to read the list for yourself because it's early in the morning and my brain might be playing tricks on me.
Be careful who you call a dumb fuck. Netscape had a functional browser long before IE3, aguably the first usable version of IE. And it would not surprise me if Netscape 1 predated IE 1, though I can't say I know that for sure.
Speeding The Net is an excellent book about Netscape vs Microsoft, in case anybody cares (it's been a long while since I read it, thus why my date memory is rusty).
Yes, ostensibly compensates. Since $162, as the writeup says, is sufficient compensation for inventing a blue LED, ok, remove ostensibly. Do you know how *hard* it was to get a blue LED working?
Actually, in this day and age, venture capital is harder to come by than you might imagine, since we're slumping and all that.
Alright, selling your soul was over the top. I simply meant that many researchers don't want to be bothered with the details of making a company.
And what's abusive about IP laws? Oh.... let's see. Overbroad pattents, gene patents, trivial algorithm patents, never-ending copyrights, oppressive restrictions on research and speech... that should be a good start.
Actually, I think the most expedient way to get rid of the hypocracy that is Intellectual Property would be to severly restrict the laws we have in place - shorter term patents, copyrights, etc, and a requirement that the actual inventor(s) always maintain rights over their invention - they may be required by employment contract to allow their company to use it without limits but not exclusively.
No, I don't want it both ways - at least, I don't see a "both ways" in there.
Sooooo... if all the scientists currently being paid by companies decided to massively go on strike... it wouldn't matter because the really intelligent ones would have started their own company, sold their souls to the SEC, the IRS, and a zillion lawyers.
Ever think that some people are just too damned interested in their own research to want to be hastled with creating a company? So they to to work in a system which *ostensibly* rewards them for their work. Recently, repeatedly, the rewards have been... neglidgable. This is a situation of "lets screw the little guys with the big ideas."
Actually.... a massive strike could very, very quickly end the abusive IP laws, abusive practices, and who knows, maybe even get things like the DMCA thrown out.
Or maybe it's all hopeful thinking of a tired mind at 4 AM.
Alright, this analogy is REALLY STARTING TO PISS ME OFF. It's wrong, plain and simple.
Leaving your door unlocked actually requires somebody to attempt to open the door. Leaving the door wide open is slightly better because then it's easy to see with observation.
The WAPs are actually *broadcasting* packets - the equivelant of "HEY! LOOK AT ME! I'M OPEN AND YOU CAN TALK TO ME IF YOU WANT TO!" It's like putting an active neon sign on your lawn reading "Yes, we're open!"
And if your DHCP server is set up to honor DHCP requests from *anybody* - even moreso. Yes, yes, I'm sure you'll say that "oh, well, my fridge is set up to honor requests from anybody, so..." Sure, that's so, but a DHCP answer is more active than opening a door - it's actually transmitting a message saying "go ahead, talk to us!" - again, a sign on the fridge saying "Take anything you like."
Please, understand that pushing what amounts to "yes you may use my resources" messages out the door means that, yes, we may use your resources. Deal with it.
I've been fooling with UML as a potential container for grid computing applications..
Think about it - they get full ring3 native assembler optimization for the computation (none of this Java/emulation stuff) and only encounter a minor penalty when they need to talk to the net or a "disk" - virtual or no. And, with iptables on the real kernel one can set up arbitrary network access rules for the UML world. And since the disks are just files or real disks, you have near-perfect control there too. The only thing I can think of not working is device driver modules like NVdriver... but that shouldn't be a terribly big drawback.
Sorry if that's incoherent, it's 4:00 here and I'm really really tired.
How do you engineer a data transport protocol that prevents a DoS?
The only thing I can think of is making the transmitter do some nontrivial computation that can easily be done by the reciever - an overly expensive CRC or something - and have the packet be dropped if the result isn't right. Relaying nodes wouldn't have to compute this because it's already been done.
However, it's still possible to DoS a smaller subset of the network by sending out random packets that will in all liklihood be dropped but nevertheless will require CPU time to be dropped.
Well, on my DSL line we were given 10.n.n.n addresses and the NATting was done at some hop down the line - we, two nodes behind the NATting router, could talk to each other as 10.n.n.n as well as our true IPs. Clearly doing the former is much more efficient as we don't have to span the router twice for nothing (in effect - yes, we're probably just hitting its routing tables once, but still, the routers before it probably could have handled the 10.n.n.n instead of the other form).
That sounds like a good way to eat up bandwidth.
Yes, I am aware that it's a risky proposition. Though each node knows very little - its position, its neighbors, and whether it is acting as a ultrapeer for its group. Maybe a little more state information (all members of the group?) but not much. And intelligence would only migrate *after* acceptance into the group by at least one member and/or one ultrapeer member (yes, there can be many).
Gnutella is incredibly fragile.
Well, in some ways yes, but in some ways no. It tries its damnest to stay around and with the ultrapeering technology already present, in addition to LimeWire (and presumably others?) ability to drop most DoS-style packets, it's as much an arms race as the internet in general.
Where Gnutella suffers, though, is its "broadcast to the world" idea. With an intelligent meshing protocol, one could concievably implement a much more efficient "local" routing scheme through some clever manipulation of TTLs inside the mesh and/or some more routing information (at the very least "drop this if you've seen it before," which I think Gnutella does already). This is all optional and maybe not even worth persuing. But the intelligent meshing protocol would prevent a DoS on Gnutella from scaling to a DoS on the backbone segments, ISPs, etc. involved because it would try as hard as possible to have as few reflective connections across a given link.
A supernode architecture, sure. And why not? Gnutella v0.6 already is one, yet its still possibly best described as a mesh with supernodes at the fringes in places.
Alright, I'm really tired. So if none of this makes sense, assume it's my fault.
Nat vs unNAT: Treat the NAT as an uplink that we should try to limit connections through.
High churn rates / volatile peer groups: yes, there's a lot of changeover in everything, but I'd wager that copying intelligence on connection ("Here's everything I know about the network around me") would endow newcomers with a good base to start off with.
There's nothing fragile about this topology: it's a runtime dynamic mesh topology - exactly like Gnutella's now. The sole difference is that groups of peers would try to actually group themselves by network-proximity (probably IP range, or for things like Road Runner or at a university, reverse DNS mappings might help). Yes, it might take some more effort from users to specify how to identify members of their local group and get it right. But there are surely some decent ways (IP ranges, as stated) of getting it *usually* right.
It shouldn't hurt the network - it should be an option to turn it off, it should turn itself off if it detects its being unhelpful. The incentive towards the users (inside a university or on a local cable loop) would be much faster downloads due to less routing overhead.
Really you could think of this as ultrapeers agreeing amongst themselves as to which of them will actually route outside a group.
I say P2P mesh networks (ala Gnutella) need to have intelligent meshing algorithms so that the network tries to minimize the number of mesh links crossing a given physical uplink or a given backbone segment.
Such a scheme would return optimized search results because your net neighbors would know of your query before somebody on the other side of an uplink (and, as there is less routing between you, can transfer files faster in theory).
On top of that, with such a router-aware network the wasted bandwith of broadcast packets multiply crossing a given line due to reflection by peers on the other side would be virtually gone once the network became aware of the layout - ideally each node wouldn't have to learn but could get some kind of topological information from a node it connected to ("You are in the same/x block as a.b.c.d - please connect to that node and drop this connection") or maybe even ask the remote node to preform some kind of query for it ("who wants a.b.c.e, because I don't?"). Our current "host caches" like router.limewire.com could gain some intelligence for whom they introduced to whom.
Instead of capping upload and download capacities as much as done now, perhaps those limits should be relaxed but a P2P "introduction" program installed on the ISP's router so that clients behind the firewall mesh with each other before a few of them send meshing links spanning the uplink.
Yes, downloads will still follow the usual TCP/IP pathways - which we presume are most efficient already. But the broadcast discovery packets which now ricochet around the network would, with an intelligent meshing algorithm, span as few uplinks as possible to query hosts as network-close as possible. All in all this would reduce traffic.
Simple Direct media Layer (SDL) and OpenGL not good enough for you? Why not?
There are a handful, yes, but ALSA is going to be the new kernel standard in 2.6 and will allieviate the need for oss (current kernel code), esd, artsd, etc - at least as far as "many people writing to/dev/dsp at once."
Your choice of desktop never determines your application compatibility - I'm running Galeon right now under KDE3. What's the problem?
Now, that said, I hope KDE and GNOME both drop their VFS layers and encourage the use of something like LUFS that's much more general and will result in less code duplication. We've already seen GNOME and KDE work out a lot, together - like say the XDnD system. These days it seems like the only "war" between the two is in the minds of the non-developers.
I can't speak for the rest of slashdotters, but I think all copyright, patent, and trademark laws need to go byebye or be shortened incredibly to, say, maybe a year.
The public domain suffers at the hands of Congress for the profits of big corporations. Open source suffers from the squashing of patents. Trademarks are rediculous - note the DNS nightmare.
>>So, to all you Napsterites, where's your web page listing all the songs you've downloaded illegally?
Why, I'm so glad you asked! It's at 127.0.0.1:6346. Oh, and unless your browser supports the GNUTELLA extensions to HTTP, may I sugguest LimeWire or another program?
Yes, yes, I'm being picky. Still, every P2P file transfer program must list or at least confirm files it has.
Slashdot Mirror
Thus Aladdin took full advantage of the openness of the ZIP format for so long, for compatibility, but used closed formats to keep competitors away for Mac-specific files. It is somewhat ironic, then, that they are complaining about ZIP becoming closed when people have certainly complained in the past about their format being closed.
--Knots;
What, though, if you use one as a qubit in a quantum computer? Something akin to how a quantum fast Forier (sp?) transform is used in Shor's algorithm to boost the probability that the final, classical read operation will produce a factor of the input.
If you can shift the wavefunction's state vector at all then it would seem that you can send information with some nonzero probability faster than light. As long as your ECC has greater corrective abilities than the probability of corruption, why isn't this an FTL information conduit?
Oh, though there still remains the problem of getting the entangled qubits to the ends of the communication channel... well, presumably you could do that at 2c by putting the transmitter in the middle.
--Knots;
Potentially speaking you could send your half of the contract in a tracked, return-reciepted method... and as to make sure that you actually sent a copy of what you still have... hmm... there must be a way. It'd need to be something you couldn't forge... like say a bank notarization?
...
Just pondering. I might actually do this with the next piece of software I buy just to see what happens. And yes, I'd send it off before breaking the shrinkwrap.
"Dear [company],
I have purchaced [product] but would like you to agree to the following before I agree to your EULA:
Failure to recieve a letter stating otherwise on company stationary within [some reasonable time - seven business days?] constitutes your agreement to the above terms.
Sincerely,
[name]"
Alright, alright, it'd never work, but it'd be nice.
--Knots;
After they went up in arms defending their right to use the name GAIM against AOL, it really wouldn't make that much sense to change it.
Besides, what's in a name?
--Knots;
It's HIDEOUS! It looks just like Aqua and WinXP... the cartoony graphics of one and the cycle-wasting interface of the other... rolled into one bloated package. When did KDE move from being the K Desktop Environment to the K Deskop Everything?
Not to be overly harsh on KDE - it's a wonderful environment and has been great to use the past few years (about three, I want to say). However, the feature-bloat is simply getting on my nerves. I mean c'mon... it's a DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT... both KDE and GNOME have complete VFS layers in them, along with more prepackaged doodads than you can shake a stick at.
That said, it's time for me to find a new desktop-environment... no, what I really want is just a window manager again. Anybody got some recommendations? I think I'm going to check out Enlightenment.
--Knots;
Actually... to the best of my knowledge that uninstall method has issues.
For instance the MacOS's file-type registry (you know, the thing that links the file type stored in the resource fork to the application that's supposed to open it?) would be inconsistant after such a delete, while a proper uninstall *should* restore the settings to what they were prior to the program being installed.
There are other things, like extensions being left around... and we all know that extensions NEVER, EVER, EVER cause system conflicts. Basically it's the DLL hell all over again, just renamed.
Does this still apply to MacOSX? I know it's valid for 9.2 on down, and would imagine that there must be relics of applications dragged to the trash left elsewhere even in MacOSX.
--Knots;
Who cares? I just don't want my equipment acting against me, and the companies behind it considering me a criminal.
So while "all 10 of [us]" might not have an impact on the market (personally I think there are more than 10 people going to be pissed off about Palladium, and I know there *are* more than 10 people out there with modchips installed), we will at least have equipment that does what *we* want it to, fully under our control, and will forever ignore the MPAA, the RIAA, and the US government.
Have fun in your megacorporation-dominated libertarian-party's utopia.
--Knots;
I think with proper dynamic loader setup you should have no trouble with an old libgtk+1.2 and a new libgtk+2 library around for binary compatibility. What then gets sticky is source level compatibility, though I think that's quite fixable too.
--Knots;
My apologies, I can't spell.
1% market share... that's actually very impressive, you know that? Have *you* contributed to a project with 1% market share or better? Well, you can, but have you?
.001% of the population?
Linux is a textbook example of bad useability.... so try giving specific feedback? Or bug reports, like wishlist requests? Or code the damn thing up yourself.
We're about
Hey, that's quite a lot, you know? Even one-in-a-million things would happen six times on average in that group.
"me-centric" - the word is egocentric. May I sugguest a dictionary?
And 50 years from now leaves us in the same century. And if 99% of the world is still running Windows, fine, let them suffer. I love Linux and simply don't see myself as being able to tolerate chaning back, despite that I can make my way around a Windows box better than most users.
In short, would you please care to say something useful instead of just attacking an amorphous "you?" Do your job to increase the signal-to-noise ratio!
--Knots;
Aaactually, the actual decryption / authorization occurs on your local machine. What doesn't is the generation of the decryption token. That bit is hard-coded on DVDs and in the players and thus is very easy to get.
Here you have to be really sneaky and be able to be able to forge talking with the servers.
Wouldn't be a bad idea to ask everybody who got the CD to run a tcpdump capture of all trafic to/from the authentication server, their UID, and other such information. That way we could start reverse-engineering immediately without having to actually prod at the server.
--Knots;
*This* slashdotter disagrees strongly. I've been on an MPAA boycott and RIAA boycott for months, haven't been on GNUTELLA or Kazaa or anything like that in a similar amount of time.
Haven't bought, to the best of my knowledge (bear in mind it's hard to keep track of who owns whom), but I've made an honest effort not to buy anything from companies either in the MPAA or the RIAA.
--Knots;
I've been following LKML, not that I can contribute much, but still. Most of the scheduling work, if memory serves, is tested on large-way boxes (the number 32 leaps to mind).
You are encouraged to read the list for yourself because it's early in the morning and my brain might be playing tricks on me.
--Knots;
Be careful who you call a dumb fuck. Netscape had a functional browser long before IE3, aguably the first usable version of IE. And it would not surprise me if Netscape 1 predated IE 1, though I can't say I know that for sure.
Speeding The Net is an excellent book about Netscape vs Microsoft, in case anybody cares (it's been a long while since I read it, thus why my date memory is rusty).
Yes, ostensibly compensates. Since $162, as the writeup says, is sufficient compensation for inventing a blue LED, ok, remove ostensibly. Do you know how *hard* it was to get a blue LED working?
Actually, in this day and age, venture capital is harder to come by than you might imagine, since we're slumping and all that.
Alright, selling your soul was over the top. I simply meant that many researchers don't want to be bothered with the details of making a company.
And what's abusive about IP laws? Oh.... let's see. Overbroad pattents, gene patents, trivial algorithm patents, never-ending copyrights, oppressive restrictions on research and speech... that should be a good start.
Actually, I think the most expedient way to get rid of the hypocracy that is Intellectual Property would be to severly restrict the laws we have in place - shorter term patents, copyrights, etc, and a requirement that the actual inventor(s) always maintain rights over their invention - they may be required by employment contract to allow their company to use it without limits but not exclusively.
No, I don't want it both ways - at least, I don't see a "both ways" in there.
--Knots;
IHBT. IHL. But I'm still going to bite.
> It's nobody's fault but the inventor.
Sooooo... if all the scientists currently being paid by companies decided to massively go on strike... it wouldn't matter because the really intelligent ones would have started their own company, sold their souls to the SEC, the IRS, and a zillion lawyers.
Ever think that some people are just too damned interested in their own research to want to be hastled with creating a company? So they to to work in a system which *ostensibly* rewards them for their work. Recently, repeatedly, the rewards have been... neglidgable. This is a situation of "lets screw the little guys with the big ideas."
Actually.... a massive strike could very, very quickly end the abusive IP laws, abusive practices, and who knows, maybe even get things like the DMCA thrown out.
Or maybe it's all hopeful thinking of a tired mind at 4 AM.
--Knots;
Alright, this analogy is REALLY STARTING TO PISS ME OFF. It's wrong, plain and simple.
Leaving your door unlocked actually requires somebody to attempt to open the door. Leaving the door wide open is slightly better because then it's easy to see with observation.
The WAPs are actually *broadcasting* packets - the equivelant of "HEY! LOOK AT ME! I'M OPEN AND YOU CAN TALK TO ME IF YOU WANT TO!" It's like putting an active neon sign on your lawn reading "Yes, we're open!"
And if your DHCP server is set up to honor DHCP requests from *anybody* - even moreso. Yes, yes, I'm sure you'll say that "oh, well, my fridge is set up to honor requests from anybody, so..." Sure, that's so, but a DHCP answer is more active than opening a door - it's actually transmitting a message saying "go ahead, talk to us!" - again, a sign on the fridge saying "Take anything you like."
Please, understand that pushing what amounts to "yes you may use my resources" messages out the door means that, yes, we may use your resources. Deal with it.
--Knots;
I've been fooling with UML as a potential container for grid computing applications..
Think about it - they get full ring3 native assembler optimization for the computation (none of this Java/emulation stuff) and only encounter a minor penalty when they need to talk to the net or a "disk" - virtual or no. And, with iptables on the real kernel one can set up arbitrary network access rules for the UML world. And since the disks are just files or real disks, you have near-perfect control there too. The only thing I can think of not working is device driver modules like NVdriver... but that shouldn't be a terribly big drawback.
Sorry if that's incoherent, it's 4:00 here and I'm really really tired.
--Knots;
How do you engineer a data transport protocol that prevents a DoS?
The only thing I can think of is making the transmitter do some nontrivial computation that can easily be done by the reciever - an overly expensive CRC or something - and have the packet be dropped if the result isn't right. Relaying nodes wouldn't have to compute this because it's already been done.
However, it's still possible to DoS a smaller subset of the network by sending out random packets that will in all liklihood be dropped but nevertheless will require CPU time to be dropped.
Did I miss something? Care to enlighten me?
--Knots;
What do you mean?
Well, on my DSL line we were given 10.n.n.n addresses and the NATting was done at some hop down the line - we, two nodes behind the NATting router, could talk to each other as 10.n.n.n as well as our true IPs. Clearly doing the former is much more efficient as we don't have to span the router twice for nothing (in effect - yes, we're probably just hitting its routing tables once, but still, the routers before it probably could have handled the 10.n.n.n instead of the other form).
That sounds like a good way to eat up bandwidth.
Yes, I am aware that it's a risky proposition. Though each node knows very little - its position, its neighbors, and whether it is acting as a ultrapeer for its group. Maybe a little more state information (all members of the group?) but not much. And intelligence would only migrate *after* acceptance into the group by at least one member and/or one ultrapeer member (yes, there can be many).
Gnutella is incredibly fragile.
Well, in some ways yes, but in some ways no. It tries its damnest to stay around and with the ultrapeering technology already present, in addition to LimeWire (and presumably others?) ability to drop most DoS-style packets, it's as much an arms race as the internet in general.
Where Gnutella suffers, though, is its "broadcast to the world" idea. With an intelligent meshing protocol, one could concievably implement a much more efficient "local" routing scheme through some clever manipulation of TTLs inside the mesh and/or some more routing information (at the very least "drop this if you've seen it before," which I think Gnutella does already). This is all optional and maybe not even worth persuing. But the intelligent meshing protocol would prevent a DoS on Gnutella from scaling to a DoS on the backbone segments, ISPs, etc. involved because it would try as hard as possible to have as few reflective connections across a given link.
A supernode architecture, sure. And why not? Gnutella v0.6 already is one, yet its still possibly best described as a mesh with supernodes at the fringes in places.
Alright, I'm really tired. So if none of this makes sense, assume it's my fault.
--Knots;
Nat vs unNAT: Treat the NAT as an uplink that we should try to limit connections through.
High churn rates / volatile peer groups: yes, there's a lot of changeover in everything, but I'd wager that copying intelligence on connection ("Here's everything I know about the network around me") would endow newcomers with a good base to start off with.
There's nothing fragile about this topology: it's a runtime dynamic mesh topology - exactly like Gnutella's now. The sole difference is that groups of peers would try to actually group themselves by network-proximity (probably IP range, or for things like Road Runner or at a university, reverse DNS mappings might help). Yes, it might take some more effort from users to specify how to identify members of their local group and get it right. But there are surely some decent ways (IP ranges, as stated) of getting it *usually* right.
It shouldn't hurt the network - it should be an option to turn it off, it should turn itself off if it detects its being unhelpful. The incentive towards the users (inside a university or on a local cable loop) would be much faster downloads due to less routing overhead.
Really you could think of this as ultrapeers agreeing amongst themselves as to which of them will actually route outside a group.
--Knots;
I say P2P mesh networks (ala Gnutella) need to have intelligent meshing algorithms so that the network tries to minimize the number of mesh links crossing a given physical uplink or a given backbone segment.
/x block as a.b.c.d - please connect to that node and drop this connection") or maybe even ask the remote node to preform some kind of query for it ("who wants a.b.c.e, because I don't?"). Our current "host caches" like router.limewire.com could gain some intelligence for whom they introduced to whom.
Such a scheme would return optimized search results because your net neighbors would know of your query before somebody on the other side of an uplink (and, as there is less routing between you, can transfer files faster in theory).
On top of that, with such a router-aware network the wasted bandwith of broadcast packets multiply crossing a given line due to reflection by peers on the other side would be virtually gone once the network became aware of the layout - ideally each node wouldn't have to learn but could get some kind of topological information from a node it connected to ("You are in the same
Instead of capping upload and download capacities as much as done now, perhaps those limits should be relaxed but a P2P "introduction" program installed on the ISP's router so that clients behind the firewall mesh with each other before a few of them send meshing links spanning the uplink.
Yes, downloads will still follow the usual TCP/IP pathways - which we presume are most efficient already. But the broadcast discovery packets which now ricochet around the network would, with an intelligent meshing algorithm, span as few uplinks as possible to query hosts as network-close as possible. All in all this would reduce traffic.
Somebody want to blow holes in this for me?
--Knots;
Simple Direct media Layer (SDL) and OpenGL not good enough for you? Why not?
/dev/dsp at once."
There are a handful, yes, but ALSA is going to be the new kernel standard in 2.6 and will allieviate the need for oss (current kernel code), esd, artsd, etc - at least as far as "many people writing to
Your choice of desktop never determines your application compatibility - I'm running Galeon right now under KDE3. What's the problem?
Now, that said, I hope KDE and GNOME both drop their VFS layers and encourage the use of something like LUFS that's much more general and will result in less code duplication. We've already seen GNOME and KDE work out a lot, together - like say the XDnD system. These days it seems like the only "war" between the two is in the minds of the non-developers.
--Knots;
I can't speak for the rest of slashdotters, but I think all copyright, patent, and trademark laws need to go byebye or be shortened incredibly to, say, maybe a year.
The public domain suffers at the hands of Congress for the profits of big corporations. Open source suffers from the squashing of patents. Trademarks are rediculous - note the DNS nightmare.
--Knots;
>>So, to all you Napsterites, where's your web page listing all the songs you've downloaded illegally?
Why, I'm so glad you asked! It's at 127.0.0.1:6346. Oh, and unless your browser supports the GNUTELLA extensions to HTTP, may I sugguest LimeWire or another program?
Yes, yes, I'm being picky. Still, every P2P file transfer program must list or at least confirm files it has.
--Knots;