Not that star wars was ever a paragon of realism, but Ive always wondered (especially after reading that page a while back) why Lucas sidestepped the issue of what happened to Endor after the death star fell on it.
Of course I wondered even more how the ewoks beat the stormtroopers in the first place, but Im just such a cynic I guess.
Whatever happened to the Ewok Hunters pages? Mostly written by the crowd that cheered when the ewok died in ROTJ. Probably the same crowd that cheered when we thought Jar-Jar wasnt going to be able to get his hand loose from the pod-racer engine in time. What a disappointment.
I have to agree that having broadband is a big help when youre playing q3 or ut. However, a well written engine and a little strategy go a long way towards compensating for running on a 33.6. A lot of games have features that really help even the field for high ping players.
For example, I had a 33.6 for 2 years after I graduated and before I finally got cable. I played Q3, UT and team fort regularly.
-I found that although I would occaisionally get dropped from my ISP or have a weird crash, I could do pretty well in Q3. I had to "lead" people through the 300-500ms lag when using the railgun, but the client does a pretty good job of predicting, especially with the machine gun and RL. I found that on a server with medium-skill players, I could easily dominate. Sometimes it was unplayable and sometimes i would get 0wnz3d, but thats the price you pay for free internet, I guess
-In team fort, i found the game pretty unplayable as a sniper but I found that some classes just plain kick ass on a laggy 33.6 connection. For example, playing as an engineer is all about camping and choosing your sentry gun location right, and its fun as hell to EMP people. Also, playing as the spy and heavy weapons fatty are great ideas for hi ping players. They dont require a low ping so much as clever forethought. Besides, the spy is such a riot, especially when the other team is running around shooting each other isntead of invading your base.
-Unreal is pretty hard to play with high ping, due to the dominance of the sniper gun in a lot of the levels. Also, a lot of weapons like the shock rifle require timing to work to maximum efficiency. Still, the quality of the bots more than makes up for this, I feel.
I hate to stoop to this, but search the directory system32 for files containing "Regents" or "Berkeley" or "California" depending on what you have installed, you get about 50 or so hits on the various network related utils. Im not saying that Microsoft is a ripoff of BSD. I mean, Edlin is 100 microsoft kwalitie, since 1981 baby. However, they certainly havent been shy about borrowing source code when it was convenient.
Youre damn right that microsoft loves the BSD license. Take open any microsoft command line utility (ftp.exe used as example here) and what do you see????
Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved.
Sweet Jesus! Is this what I think I see? Shame this isnt linux code instead of BSD code.
Exactly. Napster is an IRC server. People keep forgetting how trivial the technology here is.
Did I mention that people still use IRC? What do you think people do in #mp3?
Also, remember that napster isnt the real killer app that pirates are waiting for. Wait till we have fiber in our homes. Want to borrow my 10GB mp3 library? Here you go, 10 minutes.
Napster dying isnt the begining or the end. In the old days, big BBSes got shut down all the time. Most people I know left Napster a year ago. Its positively crawling with AOL lusers on dialups these days.
Last but not least, if napster has 50 million or 100 billion, or whatever many users, how come there are never more than 10 thousand logged on at once?
I personally didnt take Microsoft's latest brain-fart seriously, but I think the real problem here is that Microsoft and others are seeing the whole battlefield backwards. quote: Linux threatens the "Intellectual Property" business and the "software business". These entities are somehow assumed to be entirely beneficial in themselves and harm to them is thus a bad thing. But how do we measure the worth of a thing? Do the IP business and the Software business not ultimately benefit the paying consumer? If it not, why does it exist?
It seems that both the software and content distribution industries have fallen into the trap of assuming that they are somehow entitled to endless, unchallenged revenue. "We're monopolists dammit, how dare our business models become obselete?"
The root of the matter for microsoft is that their product line is highly priced and of low quality. Even if microsoft considered security and quality to be important, they still dont have as great a resource pool to draw upon as the linux crowd does. On top of this, they have to charge for their crapware or the shareholders go nuts.
Imagine, for a second, that linux has already reached usability and userfriendliness that is indistinguishable from windows. Combine that with a (still imaginary) decently functional version of staroffice for kde/gnome, and a free alternative to Oracle/sqlserver, and what do you have? A nightmare.
Microsoft knows that it is only a matter of time until Linux would be able to compete directly with it at the same price point. To compete with it for free is almost unfair. Microsoft is probably worried that the consumers and businesses will eventually catch on to this and start making informed decisions.
Any non-zero-sum game will eventually evolve into a zero-sum game. I say this as a veteran of countless muds and cooperative games of starcraft. My rationale is that in any universe containing finite "resources" and no limits on the player's actions, players will eventually consume enough of the resources (be they vespian gas or +1 daggers) such that things will eventually result in either competition to take resources quicker or fighting to take resources that have already been claimed.
Every game Ive played that didnt take drastic measures to prevent players from competing with one another always had players competing with one another. Any game that did an effective job of preventing this competition was quickly abandoned as boring.
Games that completely prevent competition between players arent games anymore... theyre called *drum roll* chat rooms! Or mucks or whatever.
Anyway, competition is fun, right? What better reason to get up in the morning?
I agree that the creative (or not so creative)uses lawyers have found for patent law lately are
a little offensive, but I dont think each occurrence is newsworthy in itself.
We live in a society which has patent laws and copyright laws. It therefore follows that people will use them to further their interests and keep down competitors.
Is this a sneaky way of gettting the laws changed? "yes yes we'll change the laws- now just stop whining"
Small claims court is really only useful if both parties involved are under the jurisdiction of the court in which the small claim is filed.
For example, if you sue bob the neighbor for damage to a tree on your lawn, the court can take some of his stuff, garnish his wages, or declare him in contempt of court- and then have the locals enforce its decisions.
However, what if defending party has no assets to seize that fall under that court's jurisdiction? For example, lets say that the company is incorporated in deleware and has no assets in California, where you claim that you have been wronged and sue for compensation. Assuming you win, there is nothing you can do to get money except make a lot of annoying phone calls.
Continuing this example, lets say you fly over to Delaware and sue there. Oh wait, youre suing for something that happened in California. 90% chance that the local court in DE has no jurisdiction over the matter being argued in your claim. It then gets dismissed.
These are the same campus cops that don't bat an eye when you smoke a joint in the field in front of the library, but theyre arresting people for talking smack in a video game?
I guessing this will be hushed up once the parents start calling in and the school administration realizes what is going on.
The real problem here is that Jobs has painted apple into a corner. Computers have become a commodity- pretty much anything you can buy is fast enough for the average user, and most of the competition (outside of the server and workstation space) is going on at the very low end of the price range. Apple took a comptuer that isnt appreciably better than a 1000 dollar pc and is attempting to add 2000 dollars worth of value by changing the way the user interface looks.
Jobs has overlooked the fact that all of its competitors in the OS space already have user friendly UIs. All that really separates a machine with OSX from a machine with windows 9x is that the OSX has glowy semi-transparent buttons. Most 14-year olds with passable photoshop skills can clone this for a winamp skin in an hour or two.
My point is that user-friendliness isnt a distinguishing feature that you cant substitute for competing with price. It used to be that apple had the only nice gui in town and that more than balanced the high prices in many people's minds. User friendliness and snappy guis are available for every single OS on the market today, even the free ones like linux. Admittedly, OSX may be superior in some small ways to win2000, gnome, KDE or BeOS, but to most people if it allows you to drag and drop files, THEY DONT GIVE A SHIT. If people start copying the "aqua" interface (interface? its fucking see-through buttons) apple suddenly has to sacrifice its margins and compete on price, like everyone else. That will hurt big-time.
These are just hilary rosen type "oh shit, we made a bad business decision- quick your honor help protect our bottom line" lawsuits. The shareholders would force Jobs to sue even if he was personally against it.
No my friend. In the US, you have the right to confront your accuser. You have no accuser if you are being nabbed by a robot camera. As long as you dont say "I was speeding, but..." to the judge, you will walk for whatever reason you give. If you dont beleive me, tell me how the judge will swear in the robot as a witness against you.
Air based speeding tickets are ridiculously easy to contest in court, if you have the time to show up.
No one in california drives at speeds below 85 where I live (bay area). Every day on the way to work across the bay, I get up to about 100-115. Admittedly, there are slowpokes going only about 85, but they usually stay out of the way.
I have never gotten a speeding ticket or had an accident (Im in my mid 20s now). Speed doesnt kill and policing speed doesnt save lives. All you get is people braking to fool the cops every couple of minutes or so. In case you didnt notice, this is dangerous.
I think the best way to make people better drivers is to encourage people to get involved in driving schools and autocross. This will help people understand the limits of their cars and safely get out of dangerous situations without dying.
Actually, a very significant portion of the cars on the road today have speed limiters. For example, most cars from germany have limiters that cut in at 150mph, to prevent tire failure that occurs during long stretches of high speed driving. Many american cars have limiters that cut in at about 100 mph (pickup trucks) and 130 (mustangs). This is to prevent the car from exceeding its own handling abilities.
However, what no one has mentioned at all is that there is a huge market in aftermarket chips, some of which increase horsepower, all of which remove the limiters. Also, any aftermarket ignition control unit that you can buy will not obey a speed limit since it is inherently a racing oriented part.
This technology will only people that have no interest in speeding or are too stupid to disable it. I suspect this is about 10% of the population (the ten percent that plods along at 70 in the fast lane). Without going into reasons that it is economically unfeasable, I dont think anyone here in the US has anything to worry about.
Im glad at least a few people seem to understand stenography here. Im hearing a lot of me-too! type technical explanations which dont seem to be based on any real knowledge. I propose that watermarking is a cool tool, but unless you completely control the user, you cannot control the audio/video content. Its really that simple.
Two possible mechanisms come immediately to mind for the watermarking of digital music/video.
First, watermarking using a private watermark. The watermark is scrabled and hidden bit by bit into the pixels or sound samples of the recording. I have seen schemes where the bits of the watermark are hidden as small random variations in the intensity of regions of the image (not per pixel, per region). While it is very hard to get rid of this type of watermark, since only the owner knows the original work and how it was altered, it is entirely useless for copy protection, since all it tells you is who the original publisher was.
Another way would be to individually watermark pieces sold to individuals to tie the works to the individual buyer. However, this exposes the watermark to another attack because you need a different watermark for each user. Thus, it becomes possible to derive the original, which would not contain a watermark.
RIAA can prevent copying if it can either a)trace piracy back to individuals that are sharing a lot of their stuff or b)prevent stuff from working after it has been copied x amount of times.
As we see above, (a) is not possible. With help from microsoft, it might be possible to somehow keep track of mp3s and prevent their copying at the file system and network layer. I say microsoft because implementing such a scheme in linux would be impossible, since i know whats in my kernel and i would never put anything like that in it. However, I can think of way way way too many ways that a windows based control scheme would not work. I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
I run AIM yahoo and msn on my desktop and they dont interfere with one another. Im on AIM because I want to be, not because AOL forces me to be.
Also, the only problem with a monopoly is when someone tries to leverage that monopoly to unfairly exclude others (eg- MSFT). However, AOL has done nothing of the sort.
Ask any warez d00d what the three main packaging formats are and he wont tell you tar, debian or RPM.
Lets take a moment to acknowledge the other formats in widespread usage at the moment: ACE, RAR and ZIP.
Seriously though, those amongst who even know what an RPM is are in the small minority compared to the unwashed ZIPophile masses. In this light, was this file-format problem really a relevant issue to raise?
It is unlikely that such control schemes will succeed in the near future. Maybe in china, but not here- there is already too much momentum in our favor.
What I mean is that unrestricted file sharing is already the norm. The current infrastructure isnt build around restricting the behaviour of the end-users. Its built around reliability and speed for the most part, not whether Joe Pirate is giving away the latest zero-day. Restrictions are pretty much taken care of by individual entities around the internet such as individuals or companies- they each monitor their own users and take care of their own security/access schemes.
Those who wish to restrict the end-user and the consumer are fighting an uphill battle. Most of the talent is playing for our team. We do this for fun. We arent in this for a short term gain or for some financial goal- we are in this because we enjoy it. We dont need any reason to go on except that we are having fun.
The corporations have been asleep the whole time this "problem" has been percolating right under their noses. It is only a matter of time before they realize that it is already over and that the revolution has already happened.
Java uses two methods to garbage collect. One is to garbage collect methods that are not directly referenced by anything. This is actually very efficient and doesnt hurt programs.
The other is much less efficient and it removes objects that are reffered to only by objects that have no refernces. For example, lets say that you have a btree in which all the nodes reference back to the node at the top, and there is a reference to that node somewhere in your code. When you declare that reference null, the jvm must determine that all the objects in the tree are no longer referenced.
This is done via "tag and sweep" in which the whole program is frozen and every reference is followed to its object and that object is tagged, as are all objects referenced by that object. When all references have been resolved and tagged, the remainder are garbage collected.
Notice that I said that the program stops. This is necessary so that the state of the objects/references does not change while you are performing the check. This hurts performance when it occurrs.
You cannot force gc to occur however. When it happens is determined by the jvm, not your code.
I couldnt agree more with everything you said (except applets). Java is definitely offers a lot to many people and I love to program in it.
About applets, there are many very cool possibilities for applets. Have you ever considered distributed processing via applets? You just load up the web page and you get some of the load distributed to you automagically. Could be used for raytracing, passwd cracking, you name it. All you need to participate is a browser. Although the bandwidth requirements are a little high right now, i would like to make a distributed mpeg encoder for those extra big jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that star wars was ever a paragon of realism, but Ive always wondered (especially after reading that page a while back) why Lucas sidestepped the issue of what happened to Endor after the death star fell on it.
Of course I wondered even more how the ewoks beat the stormtroopers in the first place, but Im just such a cynic I guess.
Whatever happened to the Ewok Hunters pages? Mostly written by the crowd that cheered when the ewok died in ROTJ. Probably the same crowd that cheered when we thought Jar-Jar wasnt going to be able to get his hand loose from the pod-racer engine in time. What a disappointment.
I have to agree that having broadband is a big help when youre playing q3 or ut. However, a well written engine and a little strategy go a long way towards compensating for running on a 33.6. A lot of games have features that really help even the field for high ping players.
For example, I had a 33.6 for 2 years after I graduated and before I finally got cable. I played Q3, UT and team fort regularly.
-I found that although I would occaisionally get dropped from my ISP or have a weird crash, I could do pretty well in Q3. I had to "lead" people through the 300-500ms lag when using the railgun, but the client does a pretty good job of predicting, especially with the machine gun and RL. I found that on a server with medium-skill players, I could easily dominate. Sometimes it was unplayable and sometimes i would get 0wnz3d, but thats the price you pay for free internet, I guess
-In team fort, i found the game pretty unplayable as a sniper but I found that some classes just plain kick ass on a laggy 33.6 connection. For example, playing as an engineer is all about camping and choosing your sentry gun location right, and its fun as hell to EMP people. Also, playing as the spy and heavy weapons fatty are great ideas for hi ping players. They dont require a low ping so much as clever forethought. Besides, the spy is such a riot, especially when the other team is running around shooting each other isntead of invading your base.
-Unreal is pretty hard to play with high ping, due to the dominance of the sniper gun in a lot of the levels. Also, a lot of weapons like the shock rifle require timing to work to maximum efficiency. Still, the quality of the bots more than makes up for this, I feel.
I hate to stoop to this, but search the directory system32 for files containing "Regents" or "Berkeley" or "California" depending on what you have installed, you get about 50 or so hits on the various network related utils. Im not saying that Microsoft is a ripoff of BSD. I mean, Edlin is 100 microsoft kwalitie, since 1981 baby. However, they certainly havent been shy about borrowing source code when it was convenient.
Youre damn right that microsoft loves the BSD license. Take open any microsoft command line utility (ftp.exe used as example here) and what do you see????
Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Sweet Jesus! Is this what I think I see? Shame this isnt linux code instead of BSD code.
Exactly. Napster is an IRC server. People keep forgetting how trivial the technology here is.
Did I mention that people still use IRC? What do you think people do in #mp3?
Also, remember that napster isnt the real killer app that pirates are waiting for. Wait till we have fiber in our homes. Want to borrow my 10GB mp3 library? Here you go, 10 minutes.
Napster dying isnt the begining or the end. In the old days, big BBSes got shut down all the time. Most people I know left Napster a year ago. Its positively crawling with AOL lusers on dialups these days.
Last but not least, if napster has 50 million or 100 billion, or whatever many users, how come there are never more than 10 thousand logged on at once?
This is a troll. Moderators save us!
I personally didnt take Microsoft's latest brain-fart seriously, but I think the real problem here is that Microsoft and others are seeing the whole battlefield backwards. quote: Linux threatens the "Intellectual Property" business and the "software business". These entities are somehow assumed to be entirely beneficial in themselves and harm to them is thus a bad thing. But how do we measure the worth of a thing? Do the IP business and the Software business not ultimately benefit the paying consumer? If it not, why does it exist?
It seems that both the software and content distribution industries have fallen into the trap of assuming that they are somehow entitled to endless, unchallenged revenue. "We're monopolists dammit, how dare our business models become obselete?"
The root of the matter for microsoft is that their product line is highly priced and of low quality. Even if microsoft considered security and quality to be important, they still dont have as great a resource pool to draw upon as the linux crowd does. On top of this, they have to charge for their crapware or the shareholders go nuts.
Imagine, for a second, that linux has already reached usability and userfriendliness that is indistinguishable from windows. Combine that with a (still imaginary) decently functional version of staroffice for kde/gnome, and a free alternative to Oracle/sqlserver, and what do you have? A nightmare.
Microsoft knows that it is only a matter of time until Linux would be able to compete directly with it at the same price point. To compete with it for free is almost unfair. Microsoft is probably worried that the consumers and businesses will eventually catch on to this and start making informed decisions.
This poster couldnt be more correct. Moderate him up.
Any non-zero-sum game will eventually evolve into a zero-sum game. I say this as a veteran of countless muds and cooperative games of starcraft. My rationale is that in any universe containing finite "resources" and no limits on the player's actions, players will eventually consume enough of the resources (be they vespian gas or +1 daggers) such that things will eventually result in either competition to take resources quicker or fighting to take resources that have already been claimed.
Every game Ive played that didnt take drastic measures to prevent players from competing with one another always had players competing with one another. Any game that did an effective job of preventing this competition was quickly abandoned as boring.
Games that completely prevent competition between players arent games anymore... theyre called *drum roll* chat rooms! Or mucks or whatever.
Anyway, competition is fun, right? What better reason to get up in the morning?
I agree that the creative (or not so creative)uses lawyers have found for patent law lately are a little offensive, but I dont think each occurrence is newsworthy in itself.
We live in a society which has patent laws and copyright laws. It therefore follows that people will use them to further their interests and keep down competitors.
Is this a sneaky way of gettting the laws changed? "yes yes we'll change the laws- now just stop whining"
Small claims court is really only useful if both parties involved are under the jurisdiction of the court in which the small claim is filed.
For example, if you sue bob the neighbor for damage to a tree on your lawn, the court can take some of his stuff, garnish his wages, or declare him in contempt of court- and then have the locals enforce its decisions.
However, what if defending party has no assets to seize that fall under that court's jurisdiction? For example, lets say that the company is incorporated in deleware and has no assets in California, where you claim that you have been wronged and sue for compensation. Assuming you win, there is nothing you can do to get money except make a lot of annoying phone calls.
Continuing this example, lets say you fly over to Delaware and sue there. Oh wait, youre suing for something that happened in California. 90% chance that the local court in DE has no jurisdiction over the matter being argued in your claim. It then gets dismissed.
Good luck, in other words.
I didnt realize that key escrow would help prevent the use of steganograpy to communicate between terrorists.
However, this article makes it so damn clear! I feel stupid for not having caught it earlier.
And I thought I was a computer expert too. I feel so ashamed.
These are the same campus cops that don't bat an eye when you smoke a joint in the field in front of the library, but theyre arresting people for talking smack in a video game?
I guessing this will be hushed up once the parents start calling in and the school administration realizes what is going on.
The real problem here is that Jobs has painted apple into a corner. Computers have become a commodity- pretty much anything you can buy is fast enough for the average user, and most of the competition (outside of the server and workstation space) is going on at the very low end of the price range. Apple took a comptuer that isnt appreciably better than a 1000 dollar pc and is attempting to add 2000 dollars worth of value by changing the way the user interface looks.
Jobs has overlooked the fact that all of its competitors in the OS space already have user friendly UIs. All that really separates a machine with OSX from a machine with windows 9x is that the OSX has glowy semi-transparent buttons. Most 14-year olds with passable photoshop skills can clone this for a winamp skin in an hour or two.
My point is that user-friendliness isnt a distinguishing feature that you cant substitute for competing with price. It used to be that apple had the only nice gui in town and that more than balanced the high prices in many people's minds. User friendliness and snappy guis are available for every single OS on the market today, even the free ones like linux. Admittedly, OSX may be superior in some small ways to win2000, gnome, KDE or BeOS, but to most people if it allows you to drag and drop files, THEY DONT GIVE A SHIT. If people start copying the "aqua" interface (interface? its fucking see-through buttons) apple suddenly has to sacrifice its margins and compete on price, like everyone else. That will hurt big-time.
These are just hilary rosen type "oh shit, we made a bad business decision- quick your honor help protect our bottom line" lawsuits. The shareholders would force Jobs to sue even if he was personally against it.
No my friend. In the US, you have the right to confront your accuser. You have no accuser if you are being nabbed by a robot camera. As long as you dont say "I was speeding, but..." to the judge, you will walk for whatever reason you give. If you dont beleive me, tell me how the judge will swear in the robot as a witness against you.
Air based speeding tickets are ridiculously easy to contest in court, if you have the time to show up.
This is flamebait.
No one in california drives at speeds below 85 where I live (bay area). Every day on the way to work across the bay, I get up to about 100-115. Admittedly, there are slowpokes going only about 85, but they usually stay out of the way.
I have never gotten a speeding ticket or had an accident (Im in my mid 20s now). Speed doesnt kill and policing speed doesnt save lives. All you get is people braking to fool the cops every couple of minutes or so. In case you didnt notice, this is dangerous.
I think the best way to make people better drivers is to encourage people to get involved in driving schools and autocross. This will help people understand the limits of their cars and safely get out of dangerous situations without dying.
Actually, a very significant portion of the cars on the road today have speed limiters. For example, most cars from germany have limiters that cut in at 150mph, to prevent tire failure that occurs during long stretches of high speed driving. Many american cars have limiters that cut in at about 100 mph (pickup trucks) and 130 (mustangs). This is to prevent the car from exceeding its own handling abilities.
However, what no one has mentioned at all is that there is a huge market in aftermarket chips, some of which increase horsepower, all of which remove the limiters. Also, any aftermarket ignition control unit that you can buy will not obey a speed limit since it is inherently a racing oriented part.
This technology will only people that have no interest in speeding or are too stupid to disable it. I suspect this is about 10% of the population (the ten percent that plods along at 70 in the fast lane). Without going into reasons that it is economically unfeasable, I dont think anyone here in the US has anything to worry about.
move over, people are racing
Im glad at least a few people seem to understand stenography here. Im hearing a lot of me-too! type technical explanations which dont seem to be based on any real knowledge. I propose that watermarking is a cool tool, but unless you completely control the user, you cannot control the audio/video content. Its really that simple.
Two possible mechanisms come immediately to mind for the watermarking of digital music/video.
First, watermarking using a private watermark. The watermark is scrabled and hidden bit by bit into the pixels or sound samples of the recording. I have seen schemes where the bits of the watermark are hidden as small random variations in the intensity of regions of the image (not per pixel, per region). While it is very hard to get rid of this type of watermark, since only the owner knows the original work and how it was altered, it is entirely useless for copy protection, since all it tells you is who the original publisher was.
Another way would be to individually watermark pieces sold to individuals to tie the works to the individual buyer. However, this exposes the watermark to another attack because you need a different watermark for each user. Thus, it becomes possible to derive the original, which would not contain a watermark.
RIAA can prevent copying if it can either a)trace piracy back to individuals that are sharing a lot of their stuff or b)prevent stuff from working after it has been copied x amount of times.
As we see above, (a) is not possible. With help from microsoft, it might be possible to somehow keep track of mp3s and prevent their copying at the file system and network layer. I say microsoft because implementing such a scheme in linux would be impossible, since i know whats in my kernel and i would never put anything like that in it. However, I can think of way way way too many ways that a windows based control scheme would not work. I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
Cheers
I run AIM yahoo and msn on my desktop and they dont interfere with one another. Im on AIM because I want to be, not because AOL forces me to be.
Also, the only problem with a monopoly is when someone tries to leverage that monopoly to unfairly exclude others (eg- MSFT). However, AOL has done nothing of the sort.
Ask any warez d00d what the three main packaging formats are and he wont tell you tar, debian or RPM.
Lets take a moment to acknowledge the other formats in widespread usage at the moment: ACE, RAR and ZIP.
Seriously though, those amongst who even know what an RPM is are in the small minority compared to the unwashed ZIPophile masses. In this light, was this file-format problem really a relevant issue to raise?
Yay. The truth.
It is unlikely that such control schemes will succeed in the near future. Maybe in china, but not here- there is already too much momentum in our favor.
What I mean is that unrestricted file sharing is already the norm. The current infrastructure isnt build around restricting the behaviour of the end-users. Its built around reliability and speed for the most part, not whether Joe Pirate is giving away the latest zero-day. Restrictions are pretty much taken care of by individual entities around the internet such as individuals or companies- they each monitor their own users and take care of their own security/access schemes.
Those who wish to restrict the end-user and the consumer are fighting an uphill battle. Most of the talent is playing for our team. We do this for fun. We arent in this for a short term gain or for some financial goal- we are in this because we enjoy it. We dont need any reason to go on except that we are having fun.
The corporations have been asleep the whole time this "problem" has been percolating right under their noses. It is only a matter of time before they realize that it is already over and that the revolution has already happened.
Java uses two methods to garbage collect. One is to garbage collect methods that are not directly referenced by anything. This is actually very efficient and doesnt hurt programs.
The other is much less efficient and it removes objects that are reffered to only by objects that have no refernces. For example, lets say that you have a btree in which all the nodes reference back to the node at the top, and there is a reference to that node somewhere in your code. When you declare that reference null, the jvm must determine that all the objects in the tree are no longer referenced.
This is done via "tag and sweep" in which the whole program is frozen and every reference is followed to its object and that object is tagged, as are all objects referenced by that object. When all references have been resolved and tagged, the remainder are garbage collected.
Notice that I said that the program stops. This is necessary so that the state of the objects/references does not change while you are performing the check. This hurts performance when it occurrs.
You cannot force gc to occur however. When it happens is determined by the jvm, not your code.
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api/java/lang/S
Actually, there is a StrictMath in 1.3 now. It produces slightly slower results than regular Math, but it conforms to c floating point exactly.
it looks pretty useful
-jim
I couldnt agree more with everything you said (except applets). Java is definitely offers a lot to many people and I love to program in it.
About applets, there are many very cool possibilities for applets. Have you ever considered distributed processing via applets? You just load up the web page and you get some of the load distributed to you automagically. Could be used for raytracing, passwd cracking, you name it. All you need to participate is a browser. Although the bandwidth requirements are a little high right now, i would like to make a distributed mpeg encoder for those extra big jobs.
What do you think?