When I was building my first computer back in HS (heh, I'd finally saved enough money) I was looking at their barebones bundles--motherboard [Super7 with 1MB cache and some other nice stuff], case, ps (and I think fdd too, but i don't remember). At the same time, we ordered another computer from them, already made, to just sit and act as a server for out house (it actually did have some utility).
Parts came from several different places, and I began putting them together. I finally got everything together, flipped the switch...and nothing. Not even a beep.
Ok. So I checked all the cables, power to board and drives--unplugged drives, rotated memory--testing it in the other computer we ordered from them (one of their "Pro" models). No go.
I called them up the next business day and waited on hold for over 90 minutes (this was a normal wait time for my dealings with them). When I finally reached someone, I went through the steps of testing my video card [which he was obsessed with], memory, and cables. After it was all over, he said that he'd ship me a new motherboard, and I'd send the old one back which was apparently DOA. I was happy.
I get the new motherboard, and the first thing I notice was that it was not the same model. In particular, the on board cache was now only 128KB (it might have been 256KB, it has been a while) instead of 1MB which was the reason I chose the original board.
My mother called them up from work while I was at school or some other activity [probably soccer after school], and was told that they had experienced problems with the other board "precisely because of the one meg cache" which my mother had told them is why I bought the original board (I haven't ever confirmed if the original board had known issues so the tech support guy may have been right...but still I was rather annoyed).
I tried it in the computer, it didn't work, see the fourth paragraph. This time however, I complained about the board not being the right one as well, and they said if I'd send it back, they'd give me the correct one. I also mentioned how this was the second time this had happened and asked if they could think that it was anything else [like the powersupply...]. They were certain it was the board and the board alone. Annoyed, I waited for my new board so that I could send the old one back.
Then the board came. I was supposed to live with this new board, so I figured I'd try.
Sometime in the next two days, I tried the latest and greatest board that they'd sent me. The same things happened. I called them up, waited 90min, and struggled to remain calm this third time. When I finally got someone on the phone, he refused to service me because the warranty from the original date of purchase had expire sometime between shipping the last board and my receiving it. I explained that they had sent me replacement items under warranty which never worked, argued for 15min, but eventually was forced to take my business someplace else. I have never purchased anything from them since, and despite any price, never will. These were the first people that I would ever hate with avengence.
I ended up replacing the motherboard and the case/ps. This computer has run fine for four years...until last week when a sudden power outage wrecked havoc on my computers. A couple years ago I stripped the other powersupply from the tiger direct [nb: my opinion of them] case and replaced it with an Antec ps. This box, runs FreeBSD beautifully... though it's current IBM 75GXP 75GP HDD worries me. One already lead to the downfall of my Win2k box [now WD100GB].
Hey if they're monitoring johndoe@sampleisp.com and sniff the whole network
then jane.something@sampleisp.com should be able to hold them liable for
invasion of privacy. Thats something I can't speak on since I'm not a lawyer.
Just from a legal standpoint . . . where are you guaranteed privacy under (US) federal law?
The irony was,
their publisher,
Eidos Interactive, was pumping all their money into Ion Storm's effort
to finish Daikatana. Now, according to this story in Salon, Eidos has
bought the rights to Thief III . . . and has handed the work over to Ion Storm
(from submitter, em added)
I don't think the problem is that Ion Storm is making the sequel, but that Eidos turned their back on Looking Glass when they needed help, only to buy the rights at a yardsale.
I don't think Ion Storm did anything wrong in this situation, Eidos did. That's what I'm upset about, and what I think the original commenter is upset about. Ion Storm was duing what it was supposed (well, maybe not Romero's team), Eidos cheated looking glass.
Perhaps Eidos thought that it was doing its job in throwing its weight behind the much-hyped game, much as record labels throw their support behind the hottest artists. Perhpas it didn't think LG's titles would sell? Well, they bought the rights to it (and we saw what happened to Daikatana). . .
Every user selects their own
threshold for how much work they want others to have to do before their *own* client will choose to display
results. In turn any user receiving a request can set a threshold for how much work they choose to do in
computing collisions; if the user decides that computing a 19-bit collision would take too long on his/her computer,
the program would simply drop the request.
. ..they decide personally is sufficient for imposing a great enough cost of spammers
while only causing a reasonable delay for other users
So what you are arguing for is an elitist network? Even if users do play nice, and set what they consider to be "reasonable" settings, you still have no provision for older hardware. Only those with the processing power to handle complex computations will be able to use the network; this is even worse than it is now where you must have a high speed connection to be able to nudge your way on.
Perhaps you can afford to buy the most expensive computers. ..perhaps even a beowulf cluster of them (can you imagine . ..), but some of us are trying to save money for other things and not blow our entire savings on the latest hardware to be able to exchange files in a "free" system.
What you advocate would completely ruin the Gnutella system and community--not save it.
Basically, it is a way of ensuring
that the server receiving and acting on a request must spend a certain amount of time computing some
function of the input in order to be able to send information back. . . The amount of work that needs to be done could be
increased to keep up with the growth in speed of computers.
I fear that your entire premise is flawed. A system like this might work for a clearing-house system (e.g. Napster), but fundamentally infeasible for a distributed system such as Gnutella (see title).
In a Napsterish system, this would be an easier task, as you would only have to deal with one server. Gnutella, on the other hand, deals with numerous servers, and source is available allowing any would-be spammers to easily circumvent any safe guards built into it (and they could just tell their server to route to different servers for each request until the time limit is up or whatever).
[We are assuming that spammers have half a brain, but enterprising companies like the makers of Spamzilla, whose server was first slashdotted, and then apparently taken down, would probably be more than happy to create such as system.]
Furthermore, how can "The amount of work that needs to be done . . . [inccrease] to keep up with the growth in speed of computers?" Aside from any problems mentioned above (distributed nature, source availability), how would you ensure that someone would run the "correct" version for their hardware? Hell, Linux can run on a multi-processor Sparc or crawl on a 386. People don't upgrade all of their systems everytime a new top-of-the-line system comes out and it would be impossible to force people to choose the right settings.
Many users of Gnutella wouldn't be completely sure how to set the correct versions, and though an auto-detect feature could be implemented, it still is not perfect. Many people may find an old version and decide to use that.
There are many holes in your argument (and this may not be the most lucid rebuttal) that stem from your attempt to divide Gnutella in to a client/server setup, when it is actually a client+server setup. Moreover, your system would be impractical to see through to completion.
Too many people fear that GNU/Linux will never be a formidable opponent to Windows (despite the fact that it is now), because they are afraid of too many forks. To that extent, people are looking for one version of Linux to be the 'True' Linux . . . this has often become Red Hat who has one of the strongest influences in the business world.
What many people don't realize, is that each distro is not really a fork of Linux, but simply different programs installed by default. The kernels vary a little; but with a couple extra programs here, an extra library there, and they are all interchangable from an admin's point of view.
Ok, so there are some idiosyncratic differences between some of the different versions of stuff included (esp. some of the stuff now included w/RH), but for the most part, they all have general similarities. Corps are just afraid of the possibility of retraining people once they have the ability to say 'Yeah, we support Linux'.
Seems almost like 'closed-source co-locating' as far as options go.
Is this a good thing, or is it an unfortunate imposition of the depersonalizing aspects of technology onto an unsuspecting culture?
It's a new gizmo. It's something new. Remember when you got your first AOL account and you kept exploring? Well, like your first AOL account, this won't last forever.
Seriously, I don't see this as going on forever. Once people get used to tech the novelty begins to fade. Reading the article brought back memories of that Stanford study saying how the Internet was going to be the downfall of society (just as people have said about almost every other invention).
This is certainly an interesting project: Not because it's Mozilla, not because its cross-platform, not because Pac-Man kicks ass (I'd rather it be good ol' Pong, myself), but because this has been what a number of major companies have been looking forward to, or fearing depending on who they are and what they have.
This is something that Microsoft realized too late,and has only recently recovered from. What is it? The movement towards web browsers as a platform. MS passed off the Internet has a fad and only later realized that the future was moving away from the desktop. You don't actually think that IE was "integrated" for added value you, do you? Of course not: it's only there to ensure that their desktop OS marketshare continues to their browser marketshare as they see that this is the platform of the future.
Sun couldn't be happier that the desktop is going, they want all the programs to be hosted on Sun servers like the good ol' mainframe days. However, they are not a major player in this area (HotJava was never designed as a end user browser, and their servers don't care which of the other browsers are being used). Netscape had the lead until MS was able to buy it back, but their merger with AOL could lead to Bad Things as this continues.
Perhaps I'm letting my bias interfere when I assume that Bad Things will happen out of necessity,just because this is AOL, but you can probably see why I feel that way. Chances are that you've probably logged on to AOL at least once, maybe at a relatives house, and been spammed by all those annoying popups. Just imagine going through that every time you want to finish a document under a deadline. That's just one obvious problem that I can think of, but let your mind wander . . .
This is the next frontier, and some have seen it coming for quite some time . . .
Slashdot Mirror
When I was building my first computer back in HS (heh, I'd finally saved enough money) I was looking at their barebones bundles--motherboard [Super7 with 1MB cache and some other nice stuff], case, ps (and I think fdd too, but i don't remember). At the same time, we ordered another computer from them, already made, to just sit and act as a server for out house (it actually did have some utility).
Parts came from several different places, and I began putting them together. I finally got everything together, flipped the switch...and nothing. Not even a beep.
Ok. So I checked all the cables, power to board and drives--unplugged drives, rotated memory--testing it in the other computer we ordered from them (one of their "Pro" models). No go.
I called them up the next business day and waited on hold for over 90 minutes (this was a normal wait time for my dealings with them). When I finally reached someone, I went through the steps of testing my video card [which he was obsessed with], memory, and cables. After it was all over, he said that he'd ship me a new motherboard, and I'd send the old one back which was apparently DOA. I was happy.
I get the new motherboard, and the first thing I notice was that it was not the same model. In particular, the on board cache was now only 128KB (it might have been 256KB, it has been a while) instead of 1MB which was the reason I chose the original board.
My mother called them up from work while I was at school or some other activity [probably soccer after school], and was told that they had experienced problems with the other board "precisely because of the one meg cache" which my mother had told them is why I bought the original board (I haven't ever confirmed if the original board had known issues so the tech support guy may have been right...but still I was rather annoyed).
I tried it in the computer, it didn't work, see the fourth paragraph. This time however, I complained about the board not being the right one as well, and they said if I'd send it back, they'd give me the correct one. I also mentioned how this was the second time this had happened and asked if they could think that it was anything else [like the powersupply...]. They were certain it was the board and the board alone. Annoyed, I waited for my new board so that I could send the old one back.
Then the board came. I was supposed to live with this new board, so I figured I'd try.
Sometime in the next two days, I tried the latest and greatest board that they'd sent me. The same things happened. I called them up, waited 90min, and struggled to remain calm this third time. When I finally got someone on the phone, he refused to service me because the warranty from the original date of purchase had expire sometime between shipping the last board and my receiving it. I explained that they had sent me replacement items under warranty which never worked, argued for 15min, but eventually was forced to take my business someplace else. I have never purchased anything from them since, and despite any price, never will. These were the first people that I would ever hate with avengence.
I ended up replacing the motherboard and the case/ps. This computer has run fine for four years...until last week when a sudden power outage wrecked havoc on my computers. A couple years ago I stripped the other powersupply from the tiger direct [nb: my opinion of them] case and replaced it with an Antec ps. This box, runs FreeBSD beautifully ... though it's current IBM 75GXP 75GP HDD worries me. One already lead to the downfall of my Win2k box [now WD100GB].
-Jason
Hey if they're monitoring johndoe@sampleisp.com and sniff the whole network then jane.something@sampleisp.com should be able to hold them liable for invasion of privacy. Thats something I can't speak on since I'm not a lawyer.
Just from a legal standpoint . . . where are you guaranteed privacy under (US) federal law?
Ok, so you were trying for the (+1, Funny), I'll respond anyway. . .
It would make sense:
'eye-bib-lee-o' does make the most sense.
When they can put text books on CDs, I'll really be impressed.
I could have sworn I just saw this . . .
. . . like reusing the backgrounds.
I don't think the problem is that Ion Storm is making the sequel, but that Eidos turned their back on Looking Glass when they needed help, only to buy the rights at a yardsale.
I don't think Ion Storm did anything wrong in this situation, Eidos did. That's what I'm upset about, and what I think the original commenter is upset about. Ion Storm was duing what it was supposed (well, maybe not Romero's team), Eidos cheated looking glass.
Perhaps Eidos thought that it was doing its job in throwing its weight behind the much-hyped game, much as record labels throw their support behind the hottest artists. Perhpas it didn't think LG's titles would sell? Well, they bought the rights to it (and we saw what happened to Daikatana). . .
Every user selects their own threshold for how much work they want others to have to do before their *own* client will choose to display results. In turn any user receiving a request can set a threshold for how much work they choose to do in computing collisions; if the user decides that computing a 19-bit collision would take too long on his/her computer, the program would simply drop the request.
. . .they decide personally is sufficient for imposing a great enough cost of spammers
while only causing a reasonable delay for other users
So what you are arguing for is an elitist network? Even if users do play nice, and set what they consider to be "reasonable" settings, you still have no provision for older hardware. Only those with the processing power to handle complex computations will be able to use the network; this is even worse than it is now where you must have a high speed connection to be able to nudge your way on.
Perhaps you can afford to buy the most expensive computers. . .perhaps even a beowulf cluster of them (can you imagine . . .), but some of us are trying to save money for other things and not blow our entire savings on the latest hardware to be able to exchange files in a "free" system.
What you advocate would completely ruin the Gnutella system and community--not save it.
Basically, it is a way of ensuring that the server receiving and acting on a request must spend a certain amount of time computing some function of the input in order to be able to send information back. . . The amount of work that needs to be done could be increased to keep up with the growth in speed of computers.
I fear that your entire premise is flawed. A system like this might work for a clearing-house system (e.g. Napster), but fundamentally infeasible for a distributed system such as Gnutella (see title).
In a Napsterish system, this would be an easier task, as you would only have to deal with one server. Gnutella, on the other hand, deals with numerous servers, and source is available allowing any would-be spammers to easily circumvent any safe guards built into it (and they could just tell their server to route to different servers for each request until the time limit is up or whatever).
[We are assuming that spammers have half a brain, but enterprising companies like the makers of Spamzilla, whose server was first slashdotted, and then apparently taken down, would probably be more than happy to create such as system.]
Furthermore, how can "The amount of work that needs to be done . . . [inccrease] to keep up with the growth in speed of computers?" Aside from any problems mentioned above (distributed nature, source availability), how would you ensure that someone would run the "correct" version for their hardware? Hell, Linux can run on a multi-processor Sparc or crawl on a 386. People don't upgrade all of their systems everytime a new top-of-the-line system comes out and it would be impossible to force people to choose the right settings.
Many users of Gnutella wouldn't be completely sure how to set the correct versions, and though an auto-detect feature could be implemented, it still is not perfect. Many people may find an old version and decide to use that.
There are many holes in your argument (and this may not be the most lucid rebuttal) that stem from your attempt to divide Gnutella in to a client/server setup, when it is actually a client+server setup. Moreover, your system would be impractical to see through to completion.
Too many people fear that GNU/Linux will never be a formidable opponent to Windows (despite the fact that it is now), because they are afraid of too many forks. To that extent, people are looking for one version of Linux to be the 'True' Linux . . . this has often become Red Hat who has one of the strongest influences in the business world.
What many people don't realize, is that each distro is not really a fork of Linux, but simply different programs installed by default. The kernels vary a little; but with a couple extra programs here, an extra library there, and they are all interchangable from an admin's point of view.
Ok, so there are some idiosyncratic differences between some of the different versions of stuff included (esp. some of the stuff now included w/RH), but for the most part, they all have general similarities. Corps are just afraid of the possibility of retraining people once they have the ability to say 'Yeah, we support Linux'.
Seems almost like 'closed-source co-locating' as far as options go.
Is this a good thing, or is it an unfortunate imposition of the depersonalizing aspects of technology onto an unsuspecting culture?
It's a new gizmo. It's something new. Remember when you got your first AOL account and you kept exploring? Well, like your first AOL account, this won't last forever.
Seriously, I don't see this as going on forever. Once people get used to tech the novelty begins to fade. Reading the article brought back memories of that Stanford study saying how the Internet was going to be the downfall of society (just as people have said about almost every other invention).
The pros out way the cons in this situation.
This is certainly an interesting project: Not because it's Mozilla, not because its cross-platform, not because Pac-Man kicks ass (I'd rather it be good ol' Pong, myself), but because this has been what a number of major companies have been looking forward to, or fearing depending on who they are and what they have.
This is something that Microsoft realized too late,and has only recently recovered from. What is it? The movement towards web browsers as a platform. MS passed off the Internet has a fad and only later realized that the future was moving away from the desktop. You don't actually think that IE was "integrated" for added value you, do you? Of course not: it's only there to ensure that their desktop OS marketshare continues to their browser marketshare as they see that this is the platform of the future.
Sun couldn't be happier that the desktop is going, they want all the programs to be hosted on Sun servers like the good ol' mainframe days. However, they are not a major player in this area (HotJava was never designed as a end user browser, and their servers don't care which of the other browsers are being used). Netscape had the lead until MS was able to buy it back, but their merger with AOL could lead to Bad Things as this continues.
Perhaps I'm letting my bias interfere when I assume that Bad Things will happen out of necessity,just because this is AOL, but you can probably see why I feel that way. Chances are that you've probably logged on to AOL at least once, maybe at a relatives house, and been spammed by all those annoying popups. Just imagine going through that every time you want to finish a document under a deadline. That's just one obvious problem that I can think of, but let your mind wander . . .
This is the next frontier, and some have seen it coming for quite some time . . .