The previous poster makes a vary good point. The system seems to depend on a corum which may not exist. How is corum maintained? This is unclear.
This is the same problem currently being experienced with Mojo Nation, a P2P file sharing system which implements a similar method of delivering blocks of data from various locations then re-assempling the requested file.
Perhaps OpenCola's solution to this problem is explained someware on their website but I looked and didn't see it.
What you consider hysteria (quite fairly, I guess) I'd consider extremely good PR. Blizard has always always done an exceptional job marketing their products. More power to'em.
If they were marketing crap games that'd be something entirely different, but their products are consistantly high quality, even if a lottle over-hyped. The expansion pack looks good. It's definately going on my list.
You're right. IF this came is as good as it looks, or if it's half as good as the books, or 3X as good as the movie, it'll be a blast!
Let the spice wars begin once again!
--
Re:what can you do about it?
on
AOL And The GPL
·
· Score: 4
Regardless of weather or not AOL violated the GPL (and it looks like they have), I can't say I'm vary impressed wth Observers.net.
In the article, instead of adressing the issues, they resort to an ad hominem attack, for no aparent reason:
Not known as one of the industry's deep thinkers when it comes to technical issues, [Steve] Case nevertheless managed to sound enthusiastic and only mildly inept, claiming that AOL hoped to "rally even more support among developers in the open source community.
OK, so the author thinks Case is an idiot (and he may not be wrong about that). Fine, but it doesn't add anything to the article, or the case the author is trying to make. In fact, it makes the author look petty and does damage to the creadibility of the organization. I'm not a big fan of AOL, but you have to wonder about watchdog groups what may be inappropriately biased, (or at least those who make the mistake to show that bias in public)
Maybe, but isn't this just a variant on 'security through obscurity'?
I'd have to say that this is a not-so-clasic example, and in fact a neat idea, but when it comes down to it it's still securing a system through making it difficult to find.
It's admittedly a neat technology, but it it really secure?
I've had the opportunity to use these. I didn't think twice about it (because aparently everyone else in the airport had, because it was the only pay phone not in use). It worked like a champ. No issues at all.
It's probably most dependant on Router manufacturers. IPv6 addressing is backward compatible, however the internals of the packats make for certain incompatibilities that would need to be handled internally to the routers. Some manufacturers are developing smarter routers but not even these are setup to handle IPv6 yet as far as I know...
I'm waiting for an ingenious lawyer to decide to use a complex disclaimer, crammed with legal jargon in every email he sends, as advertising where, he hopes to drum up business by demonstrating his extraordinary grasp of legal language. I have a feeling that must have been what the guy who drafted the UBS Warburg disclaimer was thinking. I'm suprised that I didn't find a URL ana paragraph at the bottom advertising legal services.
So, I have a 1.2GHZ athelon. Do I really need a Xeon. No. There compes a point where the marginal benefit of speed increases becomes negligable, and the cost effectiveness of upgrading to get that additional marginal performance, disappears. I believe that occurred when we entered the GHZ range of measurement for clock speeds. Aside from compiling kernels (which an earlier poster correctly pointed out, should only happen infrequently) What does your adverage user need this kind of speed for?
Is it so we can tell our friends "My Computer is bigger than yours" ?
Do we really need to continue to upgrade at this point? I grant you the marginal benefit of moving from 9 Mhz to 16Mhz is extremely large, as is the marginal benefit of moving to 33 and 66 mhz. As soon as we hit 90 though, that benefit began to dwindle. It became a crutch for bad code, an excuse for Microsoft to write bloated operating systems.
Then AMD began competing heavily and forced a shortening of the product cycle... Was this truly good for consumers? I ended up upgrading my system three times in two years. It gets expensive after a while, and with OS vendors all too happy to force consumers onto new hardware, through distribution of poorly written overdone and over-typed software, the consumer doesn't truly benefit at all.
Certainly hardware vendors benefit, but when it comes down to it you have to ask yourself, Do we really need all this speed?
OK, to be perfectly fair, some of us do; yah, those of us who are processing data from the Genome Project in our spare time...
That'd work, but really, Amazon never ceases to amaze me. They went out and hired a PhD from MIT to tell tham that:
Amazon should increase its holdings of best sellers and stop holding slow-selling titles. (It would still sell these titles but order them after the customer does)
Gee. I could have told them that, and it wouldn't have cost them as much as hiring a PhD to figure it out. You'd think that venture capitalists would insure that business people are placed in the roles where they are needed, rather than letting technology geeks and their friends run the show... In fact, most venture capitalists have done that, but not,a aparently at Amazon. I guess it's possible that's the reason Amaon is one of the few.com outfits still around... Maybe venture capitalists don't know everything either (...NO! Herecy!). It'll be interesting to see how this all falls out over the next 9 months...
After reading the article, and laughing, and laughing and laughing, I stopped and thought about it for a moment.
This would be a severe impediment to such things as a comercial public space station or that much touted space hotel idea from back in the late 60s.
Can you imagine having 200 guests paying for their week in space, then demanding their money back because the 201st guest refused to bathe, and stunk up the whole place...
Oh, and I thought security was bad when taking my liggage through customs now... "I'm sorry sir, your leather coat stinks when I spray water on it, we can not allow you to bring it into space" the agent says after sniffing all my belongings...
Oh, and a new kind of extortion: "You can rent a storage locker here for $2000 per day or I'll be happy to hold on to the coat for you."
Space travel opens up so many new possibilities...
Yah. Vary cool. Aprently just above minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit.
--
Re:Network Dynamism issues
on
Smart Routers
·
· Score: 2
That's a good point, although I'd think, in order to spoof a protocol, to the extent that a QOS capable router would assign it some higher priority than it would otherwise get, the protocol being modified would have to be extremely close to the target protocol (being spoofed); so much so that it would be unlikely to be successful.
Spoofing one protocol into another to the point where a router wouldn't be able to distinguish the two is far more complex than spoofing the source or destination of packets.
Presumably, we're not talking about something simple like wrapping FTP inside SSH. I guess it's concievable that someone might wrap FTO or some other protocol inside Real Networks PNM, or something (that's the first example that came to mind) but I'm not sure how much of a value-add even that would be for a developer, to have his transfer given that marginally higher packet priority. I guess it's an issue that could be debated extensively...
As I compose this, i'm convincing myself that perhaps prtocol spoofing might be a more substancial problem... hmmm. Well I can see a scenerio where a vendor sels an FTP client ans server product set, where the vendor can garuntee a higher transfer rate than with any competing FTP client/server packaged product set. Customers would only realize a benefit when using this hypethetical across similar systems, for example enterprise remote offices.
--CTH
--
Network Dynamism issues
on
Smart Routers
·
· Score: 4
The point was made that network dynamism will be reduced. While this is certainly true, in that new protocols will be slower to take hold, because with the introduction of new protocols would require each router to be re-tuned to handle them at a suitable priority, this is really no different than current firewalls. If you assume that the first thing a network engineer is going to do when he gets one of these QOS capable routers, is lock down his network, in essance firewalling each subnet, well then the hypothesis will be accurate.
If, on the other hand, the majority on network engineers are smart enough to know that while QOS is important, it only has business value where the benefit it offers meshed with the services offered by the provider in question, for example, the first thing every network engineer is going to do as soon as he/she gets her hand on one of these is to lock down a test enviroment, but hopefully, they will be smart enough to see if, for example, their company doesn't provide VOIP services, there's no point to tuning the routers to handle it (unless they're just trying to be neighborly or something.
The example given is, however completely valid, about choking off upstream trafic for residential broadband customers, however, this is already being done , although not with the level of rranularity with which it could be done.
While router based QOS is neat, it's really only a tiny step forward. We need IPv6 before QOS really becomes a reality. Router based QOS is just no substitute for protocol based QOS.
I look forward to being able to test this out... It looks to be a blast. When you look back, It's increadible how far gaming has come in the last 20 years. This will be great!
Ok, so he has profoundly republican views. What shouldn't be suprising, considering that he is a politicap appointment.
His view of 'Let the indistry sort it out' isn't the msot desirable, but so far the indistries in question, not to ention the government hasn't had much luck sorting any of this stuff out.
The Clipper Chip, SDMI, DeCSS; have any one of these come out the way the government or the relevent industries had intended. I'm still waiting to see if DeCSS can be reigned in (unlikely at this point). SDMI is floundering...
IF you take a holistic view, the Independant Software Developer hasn't fared that badly... (yet).
The transaction has been structured as a reorganization that will be tax free to MP3.com shareholders to the extent they receive Vivendi Universal shares. Consistent with its previous statements, Vivendi Universal will not issue new common shares in this transaction, but will use treasury shares for the share portion of the aggregate transaction consideration. The Board of Directors of MP3.com has unanimously approved the transaction. Holders of more than 50% of MP3.com's outstanding shares have agreed to vote in favor of the transaction.
MP3.com shareholders get a fair value, with tax advantages, and Vivendi aquires a valuable internet property without diluting it's currently outstanding shared, or risking any previously held positions.
Free Music advocates might object but from a financial perspective it looks like a sound deal
Sure it deserves a patent. Many simple ideas have been patented (rightly or wrongly, so to deny this technology a patent would be rediculous. Sure it's a simple small advancement but some of the most important advances were simple and small, for eample, Einstein. He didn't develop the mathmatical transform used in Special relitivity, he just found an application for the equasion (and made a few ajustments).
This is a halfway decent strategy, but it of course required Linux boot loader developers to accomodate it.
I havn't been following this issue closely enough so I can't day with authority that Microsoft made an affort to keep this change in their OS quiet, so as to make it more difficult for other OS providers to accomodate it; although that wouldn't suprise me at all...
Slashdot Mirror
The previous poster makes a vary good point. The system seems to depend on a corum which may not exist. How is corum maintained? This is unclear.
This is the same problem currently being experienced with Mojo Nation, a P2P file sharing system which implements a similar method of delivering blocks of data from various locations then re-assempling the requested file.
Perhaps OpenCola's solution to this problem is explained someware on their website but I looked and didn't see it.
--CTH
--
What you consider hysteria (quite fairly, I guess) I'd consider extremely good PR. Blizard has always always done an exceptional job marketing their products. More power to'em.
If they were marketing crap games that'd be something entirely different, but their products are consistantly high quality, even if a lottle over-hyped. The expansion pack looks good. It's definately going on my list.
--
As long as it's not a gremlin, it works for me!
--
You're right. IF this came is as good as it looks, or if it's half as good as the books, or 3X as good as the movie, it'll be a blast!
Let the spice wars begin once again!
--
In the article, instead of adressing the issues, they resort to an ad hominem attack, for no aparent reason:OK, so the author thinks Case is an idiot (and he may not be wrong about that). Fine, but it doesn't add anything to the article, or the case the author is trying to make. In fact, it makes the author look petty and does damage to the creadibility of the organization. I'm not a big fan of AOL, but you have to wonder about watchdog groups what may be inappropriately biased, (or at least those who make the mistake to show that bias in public)
--CTH
--
Maybe, but isn't this just a variant on 'security through obscurity'?
I'd have to say that this is a not-so-clasic example, and in fact a neat idea, but when it comes down to it it's still securing a system through making it difficult to find.
It's admittedly a neat technology, but it it really secure?
--CTH
--
It is a well written document, and really, the internet as a whole was once just a bunch of hopes and dreams.
The RFC process just puts some structure around publishing those hopes and dreams
--CTH
--
I've had the opportunity to use these. I didn't think twice about it (because aparently everyone else in the airport had, because it was the only pay phone not in use). It worked like a champ. No issues at all.
--
It's probably most dependant on Router manufacturers. IPv6 addressing is backward compatible, however the internals of the packats make for certain incompatibilities that would need to be handled internally to the routers. Some manufacturers are developing smarter routers but not even these are setup to handle IPv6 yet as far as I know...
--CTH
--
I'm waiting for an ingenious lawyer to decide to use a complex disclaimer, crammed with legal jargon in every email he sends, as advertising where, he hopes to drum up business by demonstrating his extraordinary grasp of legal language. I have a feeling that must have been what the guy who drafted the UBS Warburg disclaimer was thinking. I'm suprised that I didn't find a URL ana paragraph at the bottom advertising legal services.
(laugh, it's funny)
--
So, I have a 1.2GHZ athelon. Do I really need a Xeon. No. There compes a point where the marginal benefit of speed increases becomes negligable, and the cost effectiveness of upgrading to get that additional marginal performance, disappears. I believe that occurred when we entered the GHZ range of measurement for clock speeds. Aside from compiling kernels (which an earlier poster correctly pointed out, should only happen infrequently) What does your adverage user need this kind of speed for?
Is it so we can tell our friends "My Computer is bigger than yours" ?
Do we really need to continue to upgrade at this point? I grant you the marginal benefit of moving from 9 Mhz to 16Mhz is extremely large, as is the marginal benefit of moving to 33 and 66 mhz. As soon as we hit 90 though, that benefit began to dwindle. It became a crutch for bad code, an excuse for Microsoft to write bloated operating systems.
Then AMD began competing heavily and forced a shortening of the product cycle... Was this truly good for consumers? I ended up upgrading my system three times in two years. It gets expensive after a while, and with OS vendors all too happy to force consumers onto new hardware, through distribution of poorly written overdone and over-typed software, the consumer doesn't truly benefit at all.
Certainly hardware vendors benefit, but when it comes down to it you have to ask yourself, Do we really need all this speed?
OK, to be perfectly fair, some of us do; yah, those of us who are processing data from the Genome Project in our spare time...
--CTH
--
And if you really want to dive deep, here's the scary level of detail"> you're looking for...
--
The Required posting of theory behind antiferromagnetically-coupled media http://www.aps.org/meet/MAR01/baps/abs/S6820002.ht ml. Interesting Stuff...
--
--CTH
--
After reading the article, and laughing, and laughing and laughing, I stopped and thought about it for a moment.
This would be a severe impediment to such things as a comercial public space station or that much touted space hotel idea from back in the late 60s.
Can you imagine having 200 guests paying for their week in space, then demanding their money back because the 201st guest refused to bathe, and stunk up the whole place...
Oh, and I thought security was bad when taking my liggage through customs now... "I'm sorry sir, your leather coat stinks when I spray water on it, we can not allow you to bring it into space" the agent says after sniffing all my belongings...
Oh, and a new kind of extortion: "You can rent a storage locker here for $2000 per day or I'll be happy to hold on to the coat for you."
Space travel opens up so many new possibilities...
--
Comment, Version 2:
If I knew I could get free advertising by defacing public property, I'd be a billonaire right now.
--
If I knew I could get gree advertising by defacing public property, I'd be a billonaire right now.
--
--
That's a good point, although I'd think, in order to spoof a protocol, to the extent that a QOS capable router would assign it some higher priority than it would otherwise get, the protocol being modified would have to be extremely close to the target protocol (being spoofed); so much so that it would be unlikely to be successful.
Spoofing one protocol into another to the point where a router wouldn't be able to distinguish the two is far more complex than spoofing the source or destination of packets.
Presumably, we're not talking about something simple like wrapping FTP inside SSH. I guess it's concievable that someone might wrap FTO or some other protocol inside Real Networks PNM, or something (that's the first example that came to mind) but I'm not sure how much of a value-add even that would be for a developer, to have his transfer given that marginally higher packet priority. I guess it's an issue that could be debated extensively...
As I compose this, i'm convincing myself that perhaps prtocol spoofing might be a more substancial problem... hmmm. Well I can see a scenerio where a vendor sels an FTP client ans server product set, where the vendor can garuntee a higher transfer rate than with any competing FTP client/server packaged product set. Customers would only realize a benefit when using this hypethetical across similar systems, for example enterprise remote offices.
--CTH
--
The point was made that network dynamism will be reduced. While this is certainly true, in that new protocols will be slower to take hold, because with the introduction of new protocols would require each router to be re-tuned to handle them at a suitable priority, this is really no different than current firewalls. If you assume that the first thing a network engineer is going to do when he gets one of these QOS capable routers, is lock down his network, in essance firewalling each subnet, well then the hypothesis will be accurate.
If, on the other hand, the majority on network engineers are smart enough to know that while QOS is important, it only has business value where the benefit it offers meshed with the services offered by the provider in question, for example, the first thing every network engineer is going to do as soon as he/she gets her hand on one of these is to lock down a test enviroment, but hopefully, they will be smart enough to see if, for example, their company doesn't provide VOIP services, there's no point to tuning the routers to handle it (unless they're just trying to be neighborly or something.
The example given is, however completely valid, about choking off upstream trafic for residential broadband customers, however, this is already being done , although not with the level of rranularity with which it could be done.
While router based QOS is neat, it's really only a tiny step forward. We need IPv6 before QOS really becomes a reality. Router based QOS is just no substitute for protocol based QOS.
--CTH
--
I look forward to being able to test this out... It looks to be a blast. When you look back, It's increadible how far gaming has come in the last 20 years. This will be great!
--CTH
--
Ok, so he has profoundly republican views. What shouldn't be suprising, considering that he is a politicap appointment.
His view of 'Let the indistry sort it out' isn't the msot desirable, but so far the indistries in question, not to ention the government hasn't had much luck sorting any of this stuff out.
The Clipper Chip, SDMI, DeCSS; have any one of these come out the way the government or the relevent industries had intended. I'm still waiting to see if DeCSS can be reigned in (unlikely at this point). SDMI is floundering...
IF you take a holistic view, the Independant Software Developer hasn't fared that badly... (yet).
--CTH
--
Free Music advocates might object but from a financial perspective it looks like a sound deal
--CTH
--
Sure it deserves a patent. Many simple ideas have been patented (rightly or wrongly, so to deny this technology a patent would be rediculous. Sure it's a simple small advancement but some of the most important advances were simple and small, for eample, Einstein. He didn't develop the mathmatical transform used in Special relitivity, he just found an application for the equasion (and made a few ajustments).
--
This is a halfway decent strategy, but it of course required Linux boot loader developers to accomodate it.
I havn't been following this issue closely enough so I can't day with authority that Microsoft made an affort to keep this change in their OS quiet, so as to make it more difficult for other OS providers to accomodate it; although that wouldn't suprise me at all...
--CTH
--