So how can we apply these findings to a P2P application?
Let's say we have a central user database (without this things get more difficult, maybe not impossible). Each user has a score. Everyone starts at 0. It must be made be very difficult to create multiple accounts for the same user.
Whenever a user (provider) successfully "uploads" a file to another user (requester), the score of the provider is increased (based on the size of the file), the score of the requester of the file stays the same. So users who offer a lot of files get a high score.
Users with higher scores should get a higher priority/speed for downloads at other users. Like this a high score would get a reward. A score of 0 should give just usable rates (say 20 minutes for one mp3 file), negative scores under 10 should give rates of nearly 0. Positive rates over 10 should result in the maximum rates. No-one wants elite users who can get faster downloads than anyone else, we just want to get rid of freeloaders. The goal ist hat every regular cooperative user should get the maximum rate while newbies get a low rate and freeloaders get nearly no downloads at all.
OK... we know that users would pay for punishing. So let's allow users to pay with their score to decrease the score of others who they recognize as freeloaders. This would give trust to users who offer a lot. On the other side freeloaders get a bad priority/download rate very soon. Maybe one should give new users a certain time interval (2 weeks) in which they can neither earn nor lose points so that they can build a certain library and will not be recognized as freeloaders.
Where it costs ten times more for Internet connectivity than it does in the US? Where the government runs the ISPs? For chrissake, you can't even have red LEDs on the front of equipment there because it's against the law!
Ten times? We have DSL access available nearly everywhere now, for about 60 US$ (768k down/128k up) including a 2-channel digital telephone line (ISDN) and flatrate internet access. OK, there may be better offers in the US, but we play in the same league.
The government does not own any ISP (ok, it's a majority stock holder of the largest one). But there's a lot of private telcos out there, many of which also offer internet access. Or you just choose from the wide range of private ISPs. I don't see a problem with red LEDs here... The only red LED I hate is the one of my DSL modem which means "out of sync".
The major problem here is that many politicians have no grasp of the technical possibilities and limitations of the internet.
OK, it's not said in the article. BTX is closed down bit by bit. Since 2 or 3 years most of the providers don't offer any more content over BTX. It is still possible to use the old BTX protocol if you dial in on 01943131 (14 Pfennig/minute, that's about 6 US cents). This dial-in infrastructure will be closed at 31/12/2001.
You will be still able to reach some of the online banking offers over a special gateway called "classic gate". So BTX is not dead yet, but it's dying slowly.
If you look at websites with a javascript and frames overkill like this you can get the impression that web designers (snowboarders) already have some decent criminal experience.
Also don't forget to check how many of today's websites fully comply with W3C recommendations. Just try the validator on popular sites. This shows that web designers are not the innocent sheep that they try to mimic.
OK, so that's what I get for not making myself clear. What i meant was computer-type technology. I know they've been doing it for a while, but the gap is really getting startlingly wide by now.
You really want to see me burst in tears? Here in Germany everyone fears to be outpaced by the US as far as technology and economy in general are concerned. The US are still far ahead in the usage of the internet and electronic services in general as an everyday means of communication.
Somehow everyone is frightened to stay behind in the global game.
Maybe they should be. Imagine you search your telephone directory for the number of a friend. But instead of your friend's number (or maybe the first 10 hits before his one) you would get a few telephone sex hotlines. They wouldn't be marked as such so you have to dial through all these lines. Even if they were for free (as it is with sponsored links) I would not accept this on a telephone directory, and I will not accept this sort of behavior on a search engine.
This is only one reason why I prefer Google. At least they mark the sponsored links. I just don't like the two o's in the name... reminds me of something bad *cough*yahoo*cough*. --
Yeah, I hate them damn butterflies too. All those damages and injuries they cause. Let's kill them all. --
Re:Software for Mac - 3 Button Mice - Design
on
Apple Dumps the Cube
·
· Score: 1
Agreed, the number of mouse buttons is a non-issue. A scroll wheel wouldn't hurt but it is not necessary. And actually, most home PC users I've met don't even know what the second mouse button is for.
But I have never seen a single user who did NOT use the scroll wheel (if his/her mouse had one). This is absolutely necessary for any mouse today.
--
WAP doesn't run over TCP/IP or HTTP for that matter.
WAP doesn't run over HTTP (it's an alternative to HTTP), but it sure runs over TCP/IP. The WAP connection is established between the WAP gateway and the phone over TCP/IP. OK, I'm not absolutely sure about the TCP, but it's definitely over IP. Just check the address of a WAP gateway that you have to enter in your phone... Voilà: IP-Address.
All they do is talk the WAP equivalents with the gateway, that will, in turn, go out and get the HTTP content. Of course, this is one of the reasons why WAP sucks.
This is true, but the gateway bottleneck isn't the problem that WAP actually has. The problem is usability, not network performance. The problem is that today's WAP implementations are connection-oriented. The problem is that WAP is a poor adaption of HTML for the mobile devices.
And it's too expensive. I'm not going to pay 15.6 times the amount of a normal internet connection for a speed of 1/6. That's a price-value relation of about 1/90! And the only advantage i get is being mobile. Even the UI is much worse. Why should I use it? Of course, if we speak of a Palm organizer here, the whole thing suddenly makes sense. But on the other hand, Palm browser often even support HTML 3.2. Why use WAP then?
Today's phones simply suck as far as WAP is concerned. It is not sexy to do WAP.
I don't really see how ads can affect the sale of existing products, however. One doesn't drink Coke instead of Pepsi or vice versa because of their respective adds, one drinks one because of the taste, or merely because it's what's available whereever one happens to be.
Why does no-one ever think of the kids? *cry* It's about youth and kids. But I don't know anyone who prefers this brown sugared water called Pepsi over Coke... er... this other brown sugared water. I always drink SevenUp or similar stuff when I happen to be in a Pizza Hut.
I suppose that advertisements of sales and such do also have an affect, as they are also awareness related ads.
Does anyone see the relation to banner ads? Think brand awareness, don't think in clicks!
Oh, please. This is still a toy, because you only have encryption between the phone and the cellular provider. The NSA, if they want, can still try to intercept the signal once it gets to your phone company, or the FBI can get a court order (or not) and silently tap your sad ass, just as easily.
I assume that you have not read the article (ok it's in German, so no blame on you). It is made quite clear that the encrypted connection is made on a data channel (9.6 kbit/s) between the two phones. The provider does only see the encrypted stream.
However it must be researched how the key exchange is done. I assume it's some sort of Diffie-Hellmann-Algorithm which might (under certain circumstances) be broken with a Man-In-The-Middle attack. Question is, how do they do the authentication. There's no information about this important feature available now.
One, you put two poor programmers together in which case, they both write bad code, only twice as slowly.
No. In this case the two bad programmers will see most of the mistakes the other one makes (it's very improbable that their weaknesses are identical), so the code will be improved and they will learn.
Two, you put a good programmer and a poor programmer together in which case one programmer carries the load.
Even a good programmer makes the occasional mistakes just because he does so many routine jobs. A not so experienced programmer will slow him down and discuss the complicated issues with him. The poor programmer will not make the code worse!
Or three, you put two good programmers together and they try to kill each other and things get done twice as slowly.
Two good programmers could inspire themselves and develop genius and elegant ideas that one of them would never come up with.
OK, if you think of programming performance in some sort of a lines-per-minute output pair programming will spoil your results. But if you consider the quality and number of errors in the code (and believe me, coding errors can be very hard to find) pair programming will drastically reduce the number of errors.
Why does everyone only think: "Hey, there's someone worse than me. I don't want to teach him, if he's bad, he should be fired." Pair programming is one of the few examples for true teamwork.
I suppose the main functionality was implemented later in the evolution. Probably this thing is some sort of an early beta version of the final bacteria.
Great thing, isn't it? But what does this mean for the average John Schmoe on our streets? Even the scientists don't know: "Now we have at least one organism that goes back that far that we can ask biological questions of...something that we couldn't do before," Vreeland added.
But it's great that it's something which we could not do before. So we are much more sapient then back in the early days when this bacteria was not revived. I can't even imagine any more living without this bacteria.
Sorry, I sometimes feel like ranting for no reason...
This is absolutely true. The translation is probably intentionally misleading.
I'll give you an example: It was only the vigilance of my mother
that prevented me from joining the left-wing terrorist
organization Red Army Faction at around the age of 11. [The paragraph ends here]
The german text adds the following afterthought: Admitted, I was a bit young.
So he makes clear that he never really wanted to be a terrorist, he just liked some of the terrorists' ideas.
There's a lot of this kind of stuff. The translation is not actually wrong, but a lot of stuff is just gone in the english text. All the self-ironic humorous subtleties are missing.
This is not a translation, this is more sort of a commentary on what he actually said. If you don't believe me, just count the paragraphs. There are a least 4 or 5 paragraphs missing in the english translation.
Booker wrote in "Has the hardware outpaced applications?":
Maybe I just finally got that hardware monkey off my back, but I haven't had the urge to go buy upgrades for quite a while. 17" monitor, 128M ram, 2x450Mhz Celerons, AGP TNT, and about 15 gigs of disk space. That's pretty old hardware, by today's standards, but I don't really feel like it's slowing me down (except when I recompile glibc.... yeesh...)
It is not pretty old hardware, I would guess probably about 2 years old. I mean, I have just replaced a 486/66 MHz running Windows 3.1 with a Celeron 500. That is old hardware (about 5-6 years), and you cannot run today's applications on this kind of thing. (I know that MHz numbers don't give you the whole thing, but it's quite reliable to estimate the other components.)
Come on sir, you probably still have that hardware monkey on your back. 2x450 MHz Celeron? I run fine with a 366 MHz Celeron, and that's more than most of my friends have.
More than 4 GB harddisk? What for? All my serious application fit in 2 GB, I have about 400 MB of personal data, that's it.
But if you want to play seriously with mp3s (ripping them from CDs), produce DIVX;-) videos, use today's games, your computer just can't be fast enough. --
The problem is that there are always some people in a society who are not strong enough to secure themselves. Just because you are able to take care of it by yourself this does not mean others can do this to. I would prefer the state/authorities/police to take care of security.
There are many reasons for stupid laws... Most of the time, someone at some time has thought it would be a good idea that [group x] should not be allowed to do [action y]. Afterwards the groups change, the public opinion changes, but the law remains.
Maybe you should give (at least some) laws something like an expiration date after that they must be reconsidered. Interesting idea, come to think of it.
Too bad that their webserver has some sort of timeout for long downloads like this. I only managed to get about 90% of the file (at a speed of about 80 KB/s), then it aborted the download.
Not my problem, I can get it on Napster too, with or without advertising (this has been marked by most users). Napster relies on a large number of users, so there's no problem if one or two of them offer fake files. People will download them, listen to them, delete them if they are fake (or in this case mark them as ads). So the napster community (isn't this a great expression for this bunch of music thieves?) cares for itself. --
Yeah, a 50 MB wav download. Do they want to crush CNN's webserver or what? If it's only a trojan it would sure be sufficient to encode it into some 1 or 2 MB low quality file. Not even MP3 128bps would have been necessary.
But apparently they have to much bandwith... at least there's some good use for my dsl connection now. --
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say we have a central user database (without this things get more difficult, maybe not impossible). Each user has a score. Everyone starts at 0. It must be made be very difficult to create multiple accounts for the same user.
Whenever a user (provider) successfully "uploads" a file to another user (requester), the score of the provider is increased (based on the size of the file), the score of the requester of the file stays the same. So users who offer a lot of files get a high score.
Users with higher scores should get a higher priority/speed for downloads at other users. Like this a high score would get a reward. A score of 0 should give just usable rates (say 20 minutes for one mp3 file), negative scores under 10 should give rates of nearly 0. Positive rates over 10 should result in the maximum rates. No-one wants elite users who can get faster downloads than anyone else, we just want to get rid of freeloaders. The goal ist hat every regular cooperative user should get the maximum rate while newbies get a low rate and freeloaders get nearly no downloads at all.
OK... we know that users would pay for punishing. So let's allow users to pay with their score to decrease the score of others who they recognize as freeloaders. This would give trust to users who offer a lot. On the other side freeloaders get a bad priority/download rate very soon. Maybe one should give new users a certain time interval (2 weeks) in which they can neither earn nor lose points so that they can build a certain library and will not be recognized as freeloaders.
Do you think this might work?
Ten times? We have DSL access available nearly everywhere now, for about 60 US$ (768k down/128k up) including a 2-channel digital telephone line (ISDN) and flatrate internet access. OK, there may be better offers in the US, but we play in the same league.
The government does not own any ISP (ok, it's a majority stock holder of the largest one). But there's a lot of private telcos out there, many of which also offer internet access. Or you just choose from the wide range of private ISPs. I don't see a problem with red LEDs here... The only red LED I hate is the one of my DSL modem which means "out of sync".
The major problem here is that many politicians have no grasp of the technical possibilities and limitations of the internet.
Arthur
You will be still able to reach some of the online banking offers over a special gateway called "classic gate". So BTX is not dead yet, but it's dying slowly.
Also don't forget to check how many of today's websites fully comply with W3C recommendations. Just try the validator on popular sites. This shows that web designers are not the innocent sheep that they try to mimic.
You really want to see me burst in tears? Here in Germany everyone fears to be outpaced by the US as far as technology and economy in general are concerned. The US are still far ahead in the usage of the internet and electronic services in general as an everyday means of communication.
Somehow everyone is frightened to stay behind in the global game.
Arthur
Maybe they should be. Imagine you search your telephone directory for the number of a friend. But instead of your friend's number (or maybe the first 10 hits before his one) you would get a few telephone sex hotlines. They wouldn't be marked as such so you have to dial through all these lines. Even if they were for free (as it is with sponsored links) I would not accept this on a telephone directory, and I will not accept this sort of behavior on a search engine.
This is only one reason why I prefer Google. At least they mark the sponsored links. I just don't like the two o's in the name... reminds me of something bad *cough*yahoo*cough*.
--
Yeah, I hate them damn butterflies too. All those damages and injuries they cause. Let's kill them all.
--
But I have never seen a single user who did NOT use the scroll wheel (if his/her mouse had one). This is absolutely necessary for any mouse today.
--
WAP doesn't run over HTTP (it's an alternative to HTTP), but it sure runs over TCP/IP. The WAP connection is established between the WAP gateway and the phone over TCP/IP. OK, I'm not absolutely sure about the TCP, but it's definitely over IP. Just check the address of a WAP gateway that you have to enter in your phone... Voilà: IP-Address.
All they do is talk the WAP equivalents with the gateway, that will, in turn, go out and get the HTTP content. Of course, this is one of the reasons why WAP sucks.
This is true, but the gateway bottleneck isn't the problem that WAP actually has. The problem is usability, not network performance. The problem is that today's WAP implementations are connection-oriented. The problem is that WAP is a poor adaption of HTML for the mobile devices.
And it's too expensive. I'm not going to pay 15.6 times the amount of a normal internet connection for a speed of 1/6. That's a price-value relation of about 1/90! And the only advantage i get is being mobile. Even the UI is much worse. Why should I use it? Of course, if we speak of a Palm organizer here, the whole thing suddenly makes sense. But on the other hand, Palm browser often even support HTML 3.2. Why use WAP then?
Today's phones simply suck as far as WAP is concerned. It is not sexy to do WAP.
--
On first look, yes. But a bit of work with a calculator:
768*16/9 = 1365,33
It seems to me that the vertical size of 768 was chosen and the other value is just what you need for a nice modern 16:9 display.
--
Why does no-one ever think of the kids? *cry* It's about youth and kids. But I don't know anyone who prefers this brown sugared water called Pepsi over Coke... er... this other brown sugared water. I always drink SevenUp or similar stuff when I happen to be in a Pizza Hut.
I suppose that advertisements of sales and such do also have an affect, as they are also awareness related ads.
Does anyone see the relation to banner ads? Think brand awareness, don't think in clicks!
--
I assume that you have not read the article (ok it's in German, so no blame on you). It is made quite clear that the encrypted connection is made on a data channel (9.6 kbit/s) between the two phones. The provider does only see the encrypted stream.
However it must be researched how the key exchange is done. I assume it's some sort of Diffie-Hellmann-Algorithm which might (under certain circumstances) be broken with a Man-In-The-Middle attack. Question is, how do they do the authentication. There's no information about this important feature available now.
--
No. In this case the two bad programmers will see most of the mistakes the other one makes (it's very improbable that their weaknesses are identical), so the code will be improved and they will learn.
Two, you put a good programmer and a poor programmer together in which case one programmer carries the load.
Even a good programmer makes the occasional mistakes just because he does so many routine jobs. A not so experienced programmer will slow him down and discuss the complicated issues with him. The poor programmer will not make the code worse!
Or three, you put two good programmers together and they try to kill each other and things get done twice as slowly.
Two good programmers could inspire themselves and develop genius and elegant ideas that one of them would never come up with.
OK, if you think of programming performance in some sort of a lines-per-minute output pair programming will spoil your results. But if you consider the quality and number of errors in the code (and believe me, coding errors can be very hard to find) pair programming will drastically reduce the number of errors.
Why does everyone only think: "Hey, there's someone worse than me. I don't want to teach him, if he's bad, he should be fired." Pair programming is one of the few examples for true teamwork.
--
So what's this bacteria DO?
I suppose the main functionality was implemented later in the evolution. Probably this thing is some sort of an early beta version of the final bacteria.
Great thing, isn't it? But what does this mean for the average John Schmoe on our streets? Even the scientists don't know: "Now we have at least one organism that goes back that far that we can ask biological questions of...something that we couldn't do before," Vreeland added.
But it's great that it's something which we could not do before. So we are much more sapient then back in the early days when this bacteria was not revived. I can't even imagine any more living without this bacteria.
Sorry, I sometimes feel like ranting for no reason...
--
I'll give you an example:
It was only the vigilance of my mother that prevented me from joining the left-wing terrorist organization Red Army Faction at around the age of 11. [The paragraph ends here]
The german text adds the following afterthought:
Admitted, I was a bit young.
So he makes clear that he never really wanted to be a terrorist, he just liked some of the terrorists' ideas.
There's a lot of this kind of stuff. The translation is not actually wrong, but a lot of stuff is just gone in the english text. All the self-ironic humorous subtleties are missing.
This is not a translation, this is more sort of a commentary on what he actually said. If you don't believe me, just count the paragraphs. There are a least 4 or 5 paragraphs missing in the english translation.
--
Maybe I just finally got that hardware monkey off my back, but I haven't had the urge to go buy upgrades for quite a while. 17" monitor, 128M ram, 2x450Mhz Celerons, AGP TNT, and about 15 gigs of disk space. That's pretty old hardware, by today's standards, but I don't really feel like it's slowing me down (except when I recompile glibc.... yeesh...)
It is not pretty old hardware, I would guess probably about 2 years old. I mean, I have just replaced a 486/66 MHz running Windows 3.1 with a Celeron 500. That is old hardware (about 5-6 years), and you cannot run today's applications on this kind of thing. (I know that MHz numbers don't give you the whole thing, but it's quite reliable to estimate the other components.)
Come on sir, you probably still have that hardware monkey on your back. 2x450 MHz Celeron? I run fine with a 366 MHz Celeron, and that's more than most of my friends have.
More than 4 GB harddisk? What for? All my serious application fit in 2 GB, I have about 400 MB of personal data, that's it.
But if you want to play seriously with mp3s (ripping them from CDs), produce DIVX ;-) videos, use today's games, your computer just can't be fast enough.
--
There are many reasons for stupid laws... Most of the time, someone at some time has thought it would be a good idea that [group x] should not be allowed to do [action y]. Afterwards the groups change, the public opinion changes, but the law remains.
Maybe you should give (at least some) laws something like an expiration date after that they must be reconsidered. Interesting idea, come to think of it.
--
Not my problem, I can get it on Napster too, with or without advertising (this has been marked by most users). Napster relies on a large number of users, so there's no problem if one or two of them offer fake files. People will download them, listen to them, delete them if they are fake (or in this case mark them as ads). So the napster community (isn't this a great expression for this bunch of music thieves?) cares for itself.
--
But apparently they have to much bandwith... at least there's some good use for my dsl connection now.
--