Man, can't you guys just FEEL the anti-American hate in here? Read a couple of these posts.
I just love it when all the ignorant foreigners come out to play, lumping all Americans into a biiig group of stupid people who shop at WalMart and go to Disneyland for their vacations.
Why do I say ignorant foreigners? Because you can't tell who's a foreigner from the smart ones, because they don't waste their time expounding on ignorant stereotypes!
every other OS doesn't want that functionality in the software
but then my swap area isnt encrypted
Well, if you used OpenBSD, you wouldn't have to worry about things like that. For example, it has an encrypted swap space, using Blowfish 128bit encryption. Open Source software is likely to come out far ahead on this front, since they are uninhibited by things like slow response time to requests for software features. If there are enough people who want a feature, they just code it right into the OS themselves.
Re:Why not create something like the DNS system?
on
The Gnutella Paradox
·
· Score: 1
Of course, this would be a problem, IF all the root servers were based at NSI, or even in the United States.
However, with the global nature of the Internet in mind, it would be more than likely that a fair amount of the "root" servers would be located outside the legal jurisdiction of the United States. Perhaps place one or two in Sealand? Besides, although the system is similar to Napster in a few critical ways, you have to remember that theoretically, it would not be controlled by any central body, and the root servers are only providing a redirection service to other servers that do essentially the same thing. I believe that this practice would fall under the catagory of "deep linking", and if a law that banned deep linking were allowed, well, I believe we've seen that discussion on Slashdot before.
Why not create something like the DNS system?
on
The Gnutella Paradox
·
· Score: 3
It seems like all of these "truely" distributed will all have the problem of scaling poorly due to the large bandwidth overhead caused by things such as push requests and pings. Why not create a system that, although not truely distributed, doesn't really have to be as centralized as Napster?
Why not model it after DNS? There could be, oh, several dozen "root" servers that keep records of all the IPs that list where you could get files that have a certain file extension, (.zip, for example), much like the root servers for DNS, which list all the servers that serve the various TLDs. Then, when the requests reach the servers on the next level down, you recieve a list of IPs of servers that have a list of clients that have the file you are looking for. Like the DNS system, all the locations of the files you downloaded would be stored in "your" server, which would be on the bottom level of the hierarchy. The clients could be programmed to log into a different lowest-heirarchy server each time they log on, thereby providing some kind of load-balancing, so that no one lowest-rung server has significantly more clients connected than the other.
Although this would throw anonynimity out the window (with all the IPs cached somewhere), I think it would scale a lot better than Gnutella, since it would eliminate a lot of the traffic on the network, or at least channel it to the machines running the server application.
IANAP (I am not a programmer), but I know that a lot of Slashdotters are, so I am counting on everyone to let me know if I am either talking out of my ass, or if I have a genuinely good idea here.
South Africa had a nuclear programme in the 1960s and 70s that rivaled Great Britain's. The biological warfare programme in South Africa was second only to one other nation in the world.
Wow, that sure is something to be proud of! Let's kill more people in less time! What a great country you must live in, where the biological weapons were probably used against the African majority to keep them in line. I am almost as proud of South Africa now as I am of the good ol' US of A!
Perhaps, being located in South Africa, you are oblivious to what is happening on the rest of your continent, which is what I am actually referring to. Have you heard of such countries as the "Democratic" Republic of the Congo? Or maybe Angola? Or perhaps Rwanda? You just live in the most privilidged part of Africa. So don't get so indignant.
Yes, hackable free OSes in a place where, more likely than not, people probably don't know how to read, much less program in C or Perl. And, hey, cheap PCs, who can argue with that? I mean, the article itself says "In a continent where the average annual per capita income is less than US$250". I can see the legions of African geeks now...
Ahh, yes, good old Mormon country. As I recall, they can't even sell real beer there, it has to have half the alcohol content of regular beer. I may be wrong, though...
Here in my town, we don't even have to sign an AUP to use the computers which are profusely scattered around the library. They don't need one, because the only app that can run is some custom-skinned web browser, and it blocks out a lot of harmless sites.
The thought of sending e-mail from there never even crossed my mind, they were so restricted...
...Now we are one step closer to not having to pay a ludicrous amount of money for Apple's overpriced hardware if we just want to run OS X, and I don't think one could argue that "well, you could just use Linux or one of the BSDs."
There are many reasons that a lot of Apple's market consists of graphics professionals, and the pretty UI is one of them, and it's nice to play around with one every once in a while. I say, its about time.
...because I'm thinking, who the hell else uses OSes like Trusted Solaris and Argus Pitbull? I mean, it seems like these systems were designed with government use in mind, and I just assumed that they would be smart enough to use systems like these.
Oh well, I guess when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me...
How many artists can you name that are going to the poor house because of napster? What percent of working musicians do you think make a living on royalties?
Who are we to say how an artist may earn their money? Take a look at how they make their money, and then say "Oh, they don't really need this much, I think I should steal from them to prove a point about such and such law." And, who knows, there may really be artists who are going poor because of Napster, but not the big ones everyone always hears about (of course, this is pure speculation, as I don't really know the financial status of all artists involved.).
How can you steal something from artists that they don't even have in the first place?
The problem is, they do own their music in the first place, in the way that they still get paid royalties, however small, for their work. In this instance, you aren't just hurting some faceless corporate giant (RIAA), but you are also hurting individual artists (well, with the state of today's pop music, I hesitate to use that term.). How in the world do you think the next Britney Spears is going to pay for breast implants if all her music is being distributed, for free, on Napster?
I think the best way to solve this problem of collecting royalties will never really be fully solved, even though many in the Slashdot community suggest online distribution, ala Courtney Love. The crux of the matter is, not everyone has a computer, just that the Slashdot elite assume that everyone does, because they do. My view is that there will always be huge record companies ripping off artists, because everyone still needs to reach normal people through sales of CDs, vinyl, etc.
O.K., I'm trying to be serious here, so I'll try to put it as diplomatically as possible... The collective thoughts of Napster supporters can bascially be narrowed down the the words "Oh NO! They're trying to take our shit!"
I mean, c'mon, how does RIAA's ripping off of artists make it OK to rip off artists even more by downloading their music via Napster?
I also don't see why it is so important to everyone else that RIAA rips off its artists. SO WHAT? That is the artist's fault, for either being stupid or hiring stupid lawyers, and I don't see why anyone else feels pity for them.
And... come to think of it, the Slashdot community relies on copyright laws to protect something that is very close to their hearts... the GPL. Suppose some big company took a GPL program like... say... Nmap, and incorporated it in their closed source software, and consequently benefiting from other people's work? Oh wait, you can't do that with software under the GPL.
What's that you say, you mean information is free for people to do whatever they want to it? Not according to the GPL. The aforementioned act is ignoring intellectual property laws just as much as getting something for nothing from Napster.
Honestly, people who support Napster here should at least be honest about why they REALLY support it (LOOK, THE NEW METALLICA ALBUM, AND I DON'T EVEN HAVE TO PAY FOR IT! SWEET!).
What about trusted systems such as Argus PitBull? That is a Unix too, you know. *sigh* but I guess, like all open source projects, it is incomplete at best.
I doubt that your having expensive Sun hardware has anything to do with your speed. A low-end Pentium II would have no problem keeping up with speeds like that.
I'm not sure if this has been mentioned yet or not, but Kentron Technologies is developing a technology known as QBM, which, to put it in a nutshell, is basically Quad Bandwidth Memory, which means that it transmits twice each cycle, with overlapping cycles, effectively doubling the DDR effect. Their page on it says that memory running at 100Mhz clock could get memory bandwidth of approximately 3.2 Gigabytes/second.
Heh, that's the stuff I want when I build my Ultimate Gaming Machine (TM).
...In other news today, Microsoft is contesting the claims of the latest benchmark that showed Linux to be a faster server OS.
C'mon folks, the only purpose benchmarks serve is to present a set of select statistics that help the advertising department of one company or another (or, in this case, rabid fans of open source projects.). Why does anyone care anymore?
So... with the amount of computing power one of these things has, when will the stupid US laws on the export of supercomputers come into effect and hobble the marketing of this card in places outside of the good ol' US of A?
Also, why would anyone besides IPO millionares or graphics professionals want to spend the price of a low-end PC on JUST a graphics card, which won't even be taken advantage of for another YEAR or so?
Who cares what @Home dictates in their policies? Most of the crap in there is totally unenforcable. For instance, I have several friends with cable modems who use a certain Windows program to uncap their bandwidth, so they have the equivelent of a fiber optic line running into their house.
Number of things @Home can do about it?: Jack squat
I do admit, though, that things like IPSec ARE filterable, so I think that this move is just a way for @Home to squeeze a little more money out of it's users by charging them "business" rates to telecommute.
All that I can think is that this is the computer equivalent of drag-racing, and can't really serve any practical purpose.
They do it because they can! Not everything has to have a practical purpose! Some things are just done to see if they can be done, without knowing the direct or indirect benefits of that knowledge. It's called pure research.
To think about it in an open source sense, why did they port Apache to the Palm OS? Granted, that couldn't have been as fun, but still, I'm sure someone got a kick out of it.
Don't you remember how AOL and Transmeta partnered up a while ago to bring internet appliances featuring AOL to market? They said that they would be running the things on Linux, and this kinda logically fits in...
Oh really? Well, then, I think I'll just go down to the local Air Force Base and fly me an F-16. What? You mean I can't take it? But my taxes helped pay for it!
Taxes don't mean shit when it comes to you having a say in things. Your tax bracket, on the other hand, means a lot.
NO! If this gets passed, my only access to pr0n as an underprivilaged child will be taken away! This is a direct violation of my rights as a United States citizen!
On the serious side, though, I really do think this is disturbing, but, really, if you are relying on a public institution for net access, you really can't complain (e.g., you can't sue anyone if you get Debian Linux and it erases all your important customer data. Why? Because it's free). Now, if there was a law forcing all private ISPs to block certain content from their users, depending on what local governments say, then I would be worried.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, can't you guys just FEEL the anti-American hate in here? Read a couple of these posts.
I just love it when all the ignorant foreigners come out to play, lumping all Americans into a biiig group of stupid people who shop at WalMart and go to Disneyland for their vacations.
Why do I say ignorant foreigners? Because you can't tell who's a foreigner from the smart ones, because they don't waste their time expounding on ignorant stereotypes!
I'm getting sick of hearing it!
but then my swap area isnt encrypted
Well, if you used OpenBSD, you wouldn't have to worry about things like that. For example, it has an encrypted swap space, using Blowfish 128bit encryption. Open Source software is likely to come out far ahead on this front, since they are uninhibited by things like slow response time to requests for software features. If there are enough people who want a feature, they just code it right into the OS themselves.
Of course, this would be a problem, IF all the root servers were based at NSI, or even in the United States.
However, with the global nature of the Internet in mind, it would be more than likely that a fair amount of the "root" servers would be located outside the legal jurisdiction of the United States. Perhaps place one or two in Sealand? Besides, although the system is similar to Napster in a few critical ways, you have to remember that theoretically, it would not be controlled by any central body, and the root servers are only providing a redirection service to other servers that do essentially the same thing. I believe that this practice would fall under the catagory of "deep linking", and if a law that banned deep linking were allowed, well, I believe we've seen that discussion on Slashdot before.
It seems like all of these "truely" distributed will all have the problem of scaling poorly due to the large bandwidth overhead caused by things such as push requests and pings. Why not create a system that, although not truely distributed, doesn't really have to be as centralized as Napster?
Why not model it after DNS? There could be, oh, several dozen "root" servers that keep records of all the IPs that list where you could get files that have a certain file extension, (.zip, for example), much like the root servers for DNS, which list all the servers that serve the various TLDs. Then, when the requests reach the servers on the next level down, you recieve a list of IPs of servers that have a list of clients that have the file you are looking for. Like the DNS system, all the locations of the files you downloaded would be stored in "your" server, which would be on the bottom level of the hierarchy. The clients could be programmed to log into a different lowest-heirarchy server each time they log on, thereby providing some kind of load-balancing, so that no one lowest-rung server has significantly more clients connected than the other.
Although this would throw anonynimity out the window (with all the IPs cached somewhere), I think it would scale a lot better than Gnutella, since it would eliminate a lot of the traffic on the network, or at least channel it to the machines running the server application.
IANAP (I am not a programmer), but I know that a lot of Slashdotters are, so I am counting on everyone to let me know if I am either talking out of my ass, or if I have a genuinely good idea here.
Wow, that sure is something to be proud of! Let's kill more people in less time! What a great country you must live in, where the biological weapons were probably used against the African majority to keep them in line. I am almost as proud of South Africa now as I am of the good ol' US of A!
Perhaps, being located in South Africa, you are oblivious to what is happening on the rest of your continent, which is what I am actually referring to. Have you heard of such countries as the "Democratic" Republic of the Congo? Or maybe Angola? Or perhaps Rwanda? You just live in the most privilidged part of Africa. So don't get so indignant.
Yes, hackable free OSes in a place where, more likely than not, people probably don't know how to read, much less program in C or Perl. And, hey, cheap PCs, who can argue with that? I mean, the article itself says "In a continent where the average annual per capita income is less than US$250". I can see the legions of African geeks now...
Ahh, yes, good old Mormon country. As I recall, they can't even sell real beer there, it has to have half the alcohol content of regular beer. I may be wrong, though...
Here in my town, we don't even have to sign an AUP to use the computers which are profusely scattered around the library. They don't need one, because the only app that can run is some custom-skinned web browser, and it blocks out a lot of harmless sites.
The thought of sending e-mail from there never even crossed my mind, they were so restricted...
Now I can have my very own generator without all the noisy diesel combustion. I wonder how big a Beowulf cluster it would power...
...everyone just use tar.gz? I mean, it's not that hard, just type
$tar xzvf MyProgram.tar.gz
IT'S NOT THAT HARD, PEOPLE!
...Now we are one step closer to not having to pay a ludicrous amount of money for Apple's overpriced hardware if we just want to run OS X, and I don't think one could argue that "well, you could just use Linux or one of the BSDs."
There are many reasons that a lot of Apple's market consists of graphics professionals, and the pretty UI is one of them, and it's nice to play around with one every once in a while. I say, its about time.
Oh well, I guess when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me...
Thank you. Point well taken.
Who are we to say how an artist may earn their money? Take a look at how they make their money, and then say "Oh, they don't really need this much, I think I should steal from them to prove a point about such and such law." And, who knows, there may really be artists who are going poor because of Napster, but not the big ones everyone always hears about (of course, this is pure speculation, as I don't really know the financial status of all artists involved.).
How can you steal something from artists that they don't even have in the first place?The problem is, they do own their music in the first place, in the way that they still get paid royalties, however small, for their work. In this instance, you aren't just hurting some faceless corporate giant (RIAA), but you are also hurting individual artists (well, with the state of today's pop music, I hesitate to use that term.). How in the world do you think the next Britney Spears is going to pay for breast implants if all her music is being distributed, for free, on Napster?
I think the best way to solve this problem of collecting royalties will never really be fully solved, even though many in the Slashdot community suggest online distribution, ala Courtney Love. The crux of the matter is, not everyone has a computer, just that the Slashdot elite assume that everyone does, because they do. My view is that there will always be huge record companies ripping off artists, because everyone still needs to reach normal people through sales of CDs, vinyl, etc.
Whew!
O.K., I'm trying to be serious here, so I'll try to put it as diplomatically as possible... The collective thoughts of Napster supporters can bascially be narrowed down the the words "Oh NO! They're trying to take our shit!"
I mean, c'mon, how does RIAA's ripping off of artists make it OK to rip off artists even more by downloading their music via Napster?
I also don't see why it is so important to everyone else that RIAA rips off its artists. SO WHAT? That is the artist's fault, for either being stupid or hiring stupid lawyers, and I don't see why anyone else feels pity for them.
And... come to think of it, the Slashdot community relies on copyright laws to protect something that is very close to their hearts... the GPL. Suppose some big company took a GPL program like... say... Nmap, and incorporated it in their closed source software, and consequently benefiting from other people's work? Oh wait, you can't do that with software under the GPL.
What's that you say, you mean information is free for people to do whatever they want to it? Not according to the GPL. The aforementioned act is ignoring intellectual property laws just as much as getting something for nothing from Napster.
Honestly, people who support Napster here should at least be honest about why they REALLY support it (LOOK, THE NEW METALLICA ALBUM, AND I DON'T EVEN HAVE TO PAY FOR IT! SWEET!).
What about trusted systems such as Argus PitBull? That is a Unix too, you know. *sigh* but I guess, like all open source projects, it is incomplete at best.
Oh well.
I doubt that your having expensive Sun hardware has anything to do with your speed. A low-end Pentium II would have no problem keeping up with speeds like that.
I'm not sure if this has been mentioned yet or not, but Kentron Technologies is developing a technology known as QBM, which, to put it in a nutshell, is basically Quad Bandwidth Memory, which means that it transmits twice each cycle, with overlapping cycles, effectively doubling the DDR effect. Their page on it says that memory running at 100Mhz clock could get memory bandwidth of approximately 3.2 Gigabytes/second.
Heh, that's the stuff I want when I build my Ultimate Gaming Machine (TM).
...In other news today, Microsoft is contesting the claims of the latest benchmark that showed Linux to be a faster server OS.
C'mon folks, the only purpose benchmarks serve is to present a set of select statistics that help the advertising department of one company or another (or, in this case, rabid fans of open source projects.). Why does anyone care anymore?
So... with the amount of computing power one of these things has, when will the stupid US laws on the export of supercomputers come into effect and hobble the marketing of this card in places outside of the good ol' US of A?
Also, why would anyone besides IPO millionares or graphics professionals want to spend the price of a low-end PC on JUST a graphics card, which won't even be taken advantage of for another YEAR or so?
Who cares what @Home dictates in their policies? Most of the crap in there is totally unenforcable. For instance, I have several friends with cable modems who use a certain Windows program to uncap their bandwidth, so they have the equivelent of a fiber optic line running into their house.
Number of things @Home can do about it?: Jack squat
I do admit, though, that things like IPSec ARE filterable, so I think that this move is just a way for @Home to squeeze a little more money out of it's users by charging them "business" rates to telecommute.
They do it because they can! Not everything has to have a practical purpose! Some things are just done to see if they can be done, without knowing the direct or indirect benefits of that knowledge. It's called pure research.
To think about it in an open source sense, why did they port Apache to the Palm OS? Granted, that couldn't have been as fun, but still, I'm sure someone got a kick out of it.
Don't you remember how AOL and Transmeta partnered up a while ago to bring internet appliances featuring AOL to market? They said that they would be running the things on Linux, and this kinda logically fits in...
Oh really? Well, then, I think I'll just go down to the local Air Force Base and fly me an F-16. What? You mean I can't take it? But my taxes helped pay for it!
Taxes don't mean shit when it comes to you having a say in things. Your tax bracket, on the other hand, means a lot.
NO! If this gets passed, my only access to pr0n as an underprivilaged child will be taken away! This is a direct violation of my rights as a United States citizen!
On the serious side, though, I really do think this is disturbing, but, really, if you are relying on a public institution for net access, you really can't complain (e.g., you can't sue anyone if you get Debian Linux and it erases all your important customer data. Why? Because it's free). Now, if there was a law forcing all private ISPs to block certain content from their users, depending on what local governments say, then I would be worried.