The whole project being jeopardised by one (or a few thousand) erroneous results is a tell-tale sign that the distributed.net system is flawed. From what you say, it sounds like they're banking on all hardware to be perfect all the time, which is impossible, regardless of what speed it's running at. Also I should dearly hope that they've prepared themselves for faux clients, which will always return incorrect results, and thus be a little bit more worrysome than some overclocked box.
Being in the same city as the recent World Petroleum Congress, I've been propagandised to quite a bit by the media (and hence the oil companies). Supposedly, many of the bigger oil companies are already deep into developing non-oil technologies (no, I guess they're not stupid enough to think that their oil wells are bottomless), and they're just waiting on the consumers to ask for it (apparently consumers have a nasty habit of, well, being complete hypocrites). I'd take their words with a grain of salt, though.
I suspect the two will intertwine before too long. I agree that the current high prices of OPEC are a bit uncalled for (and will consequently drop), but I wouldn't get to used to it. Unless someone at OPEC starts smoking some crack and declares oil to be renewing itself, oil prices should gradually increase over the next few decades (of course, in our society, who wants a car that's going to last decades?!).
That said, an efficient engine is better than an inefficient engine, no matter what the oil prices are.
No, it doesn't require a static IP address. To be a node (and there don't have to be *that* many nodes), it's preferably to have a static IP address.
If you read the Freenet protocol, though, you'll see that it doesn't matter much. The whole idea is that if I request a document from a node, the nodehas no idea whether it is actually I who is requesting it or whether I'm just passing on the request from someone else. Kind of like the people who phone into self-help shows with a "friend" who has a problem.
In practice, I think the measures taken to preserve anonymity (and there are quite a few) on Freenet work very well. They, of course, will work better once more people start using it, though.
And just so you know, in Canada (and hopefully all sane countries) ignorance *is* nearly always a valid excuse. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse, but ignorance of the facts is.
OK first off, do not compare physical property to intellectual property. The analogy never works, and in this case, it falls down immediately.
The argument of 'what if I didn't know it was being distributed illegally' is a valid one. Assume that you're doing some research on caramel corn. You go to your trusty friend google.com and start looking for pages relating to "caramel corn". You find an article that looks very promising, so you follow the link. Once you've loaded the entire page, you find that, sadly, the article is copyrighted by Caramel Media Inc., but John Francis, who is a caramel corn fanatic, copied the article on to his page without permission from Caramel Media.
In my mind, this would be analogous to what the OP described. You were looking for some poetry (do people distribute poetry on Gnutella?), found one that sounded interesting, and, after downloading it, found at that it was being distributed illegally.
In the first example, it would be ludicruous to phone up the ISP of *every* page you were about to view and say ("yes, I was thinking of reading an article you have saved on your website at ~users/bill/caramel.html, but I was hoping if you could check to see if has been illegally distributed first"). Likewise, it would be ludicruous to track down the ISP of the Gnutella user every time you wanted to download something, just so you could phone him up and say "yes, I want to download roses_are_red.txt from you, but I need to know if you are distributing it illegally or not first").
The concern you bring up wrt operator overloading doesn't really apply, since you're only interested in if he is smart, not if any of his fields are smart (if you did, you could just as easily do something like lessig.legs[0] == smart).
This is false. MP3s are a continuous stream, so latency doesn't factor in at all. Here's an experiment: immediately start playing a sound that won't start playing for another 10 seconds (it has a latency of ten seconds); now try waiting ten seconds, then play a sound that will start playing immediately (it has no latency whatsoever). There will not be any difference.
The only place where latency will come into effect is when an unexpected sound is to be injected into the audio stream, a common example of which is sound effects in games. If I can predict when a sound is going to played in advance (i.e. "beat the latency"), then latency will have no effect whatsoever on the output, and in fact will improve performance.
Did you read the article? The GIMP is going to be ripped apart and recoded from scratch after 1.2. 1.2 is "close" to being released. To me that says that the GIMP is going to be recoded from scratch "anytime soon", but I'm not an idiot, so what do I know?
...you can't convert Windoze victims to a real operating system if the crotches are not supplied to make it simple.
I couldn't agree more. All this focus people are putting into various Unix technologies really aren't progressing the popularity of Linux very much. What they really need is a crotch, preferrably Natalie Portman's, that will lure them to into using a "real operating system".
It's not about using code. Probably 80% of the Linux kernel is BSD code (OK, slight exaggeration). As I understand it, it's a problem specifically of linking a GPL'd program against a QPL'd library. I just took a quick skim of the GPL and couldn't find anything that would suggest this, though. If anyone can quote chapter and verse, I'd much appreciate it.
You should read the article. It's not a point of KDE being non-free or not. KDE *is* free. The problem is that, in the current incarnation of both KDE and Qt, it is illegal to distribute KDE. It's not that Debian is the only one distrobution taking an ethical stance; it's more like its the only distribution not breaking the law. It's against the law to distribute KDE right now, and that should change.
Yes, exactly. People released their software under the GPL because they wanted it under the GPL. RMS can take the BSD licence and call it the new GPL, but that doesn't mean anyone's going to use it.
Well, you could take up working on the Harmony project. It's still a lot of work, but wouldn't constitute "re-inventing the wheel" I wouldn't think, since quite a bit of work has already been done on it.
Yes, that was kind of neat. Mind you, when the file refuses to load anyway (assuming you're using a decent viewer) or contains incomprehensible garbage, that might be a clue that "hey, something's wrong". To be fair, though, "you may have transferred this file in ASCII mode" is a nicer error message than "could not load image".
Serious work on MNG started in 1996, and, IINM, it reached a 1.0 status some time last year. Seriously, though, I can't see why people wouldn't use MNG. The idea behind it is completely useless, so if some users can't view it properly, you're really doing them a favour.
You've obviously not read up on the preamble of the GPL, the philosophy behind it, and the history of the GNU project as a whole. The GPL was created to give people an incentive to produce free software. Many other free licences don't provide any incentive; in other words, they're (for the most part) truly free.
If you disagree with the GPL, you're more than welcome to distribute your own code under another licence, or boycott GNU software altogether. By recommending that the incompatibility restrictions of the GPL, the very foundation of the essence of the GPL, be removed, though, you're completely trivialising the GNU project. GNU is *not* about software; it's about politics. If you don't like that, don't use GPL'd software. I wouldn't hold my breath for the GPL to change dramatically, though.
There used to be someone around/. who would point out abuses of our good friend, cat. In his memory, I would like to point out that cat msg | mail -s "sub" $addr would be better written as mail -s "sub" $addr < msg. Please, cat is doing his best to fulfill all your catenation needs; there's no reason to burden him further.
Hmm, I've heard the opposite (.ogg sounds better than.mp3 at the same bitrate). Since the algorithms differ so greatly, it would be all but imposible to judge the sound quality objectively. Most important to me, though, (note that I haven't actually tried Vorbis, so I'm going on rumour) is that it gets rid of that MP3 high-frequency problem, which would be nice for listening to music with high-hats (e.g. 95% of all music).
In terms of stand-alone graphics (e.g. not embedded in an HTML document), I see.png *far* more frequently than.gif. It still lags behind.jpg in terms of popularity quite a bit, and is almost non-existent when it comes to photographs (which makes sense since, IIRC, JFIF was created specifically for compressing photographs).
You have to give it a little time, though. PNG is most definitely not declining in popularity. It's a little slow, but it seems to be gaining in popularity at a steady rate, which is very important.
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The whole project being jeopardised by one (or a few thousand) erroneous results is a tell-tale sign that the distributed.net system is flawed. From what you say, it sounds like they're banking on all hardware to be perfect all the time, which is impossible, regardless of what speed it's running at. Also I should dearly hope that they've prepared themselves for faux clients, which will always return incorrect results, and thus be a little bit more worrysome than some overclocked box.
Being in the same city as the recent World Petroleum Congress, I've been propagandised to quite a bit by the media (and hence the oil companies). Supposedly, many of the bigger oil companies are already deep into developing non-oil technologies (no, I guess they're not stupid enough to think that their oil wells are bottomless), and they're just waiting on the consumers to ask for it (apparently consumers have a nasty habit of, well, being complete hypocrites). I'd take their words with a grain of salt, though.
I suspect the two will intertwine before too long. I agree that the current high prices of OPEC are a bit uncalled for (and will consequently drop), but I wouldn't get to used to it. Unless someone at OPEC starts smoking some crack and declares oil to be renewing itself, oil prices should gradually increase over the next few decades (of course, in our society, who wants a car that's going to last decades?!).
That said, an efficient engine is better than an inefficient engine, no matter what the oil prices are.
No, it doesn't require a static IP address. To be a node (and there don't have to be *that* many nodes), it's preferably to have a static IP address.
If you read the Freenet protocol, though, you'll see that it doesn't matter much. The whole idea is that if I request a document from a node, the nodehas no idea whether it is actually I who is requesting it or whether I'm just passing on the request from someone else. Kind of like the people who phone into self-help shows with a "friend" who has a problem.
In practice, I think the measures taken to preserve anonymity (and there are quite a few) on Freenet work very well. They, of course, will work better once more people start using it, though.
And just so you know, in Canada (and hopefully all sane countries) ignorance *is* nearly always a valid excuse. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse, but ignorance of the facts is.
OK first off, do not compare physical property to intellectual property. The analogy never works, and in this case, it falls down immediately.
The argument of 'what if I didn't know it was being distributed illegally' is a valid one. Assume that you're doing some research on caramel corn. You go to your trusty friend google.com and start looking for pages relating to "caramel corn". You find an article that looks very promising, so you follow the link. Once you've loaded the entire page, you find that, sadly, the article is copyrighted by Caramel Media Inc., but John Francis, who is a caramel corn fanatic, copied the article on to his page without permission from Caramel Media.
In my mind, this would be analogous to what the OP described. You were looking for some poetry (do people distribute poetry on Gnutella?), found one that sounded interesting, and, after downloading it, found at that it was being distributed illegally.
In the first example, it would be ludicruous to phone up the ISP of *every* page you were about to view and say ("yes, I was thinking of reading an article you have saved on your website at ~users/bill/caramel.html, but I was hoping if you could check to see if has been illegally distributed first"). Likewise, it would be ludicruous to track down the ISP of the Gnutella user every time you wanted to download something, just so you could phone him up and say "yes, I want to download roses_are_red.txt from you, but I need to know if you are distributing it illegally or not first").
My guess is because VAGINL doesn't make any sense.
You should reread the article. They aren't contradicting themselves; other people are contradicting them.
Bah. The People's Court is such a waste of time. In order to *really* get results, you need to go to Judge Judy.
Try something like this:
He didn't download Windows 98; he downloaded some drivers.
This is false. MP3s are a continuous stream, so latency doesn't factor in at all. Here's an experiment: immediately start playing a sound that won't start playing for another 10 seconds (it has a latency of ten seconds); now try waiting ten seconds, then play a sound that will start playing immediately (it has no latency whatsoever). There will not be any difference.
The only place where latency will come into effect is when an unexpected sound is to be injected into the audio stream, a common example of which is sound effects in games. If I can predict when a sound is going to played in advance (i.e. "beat the latency"), then latency will have no effect whatsoever on the output, and in fact will improve performance.
Did you read the article? The GIMP is going to be ripped apart and recoded from scratch after 1.2. 1.2 is "close" to being released. To me that says that the GIMP is going to be recoded from scratch "anytime soon", but I'm not an idiot, so what do I know?
In fact, having no video card at all would give you much better results and, obviously, save you money.
I couldn't agree more. All this focus people are putting into various Unix technologies really aren't progressing the popularity of Linux very much. What they really need is a crotch, preferrably Natalie Portman's, that will lure them to into using a "real operating system".
It's not about using code. Probably 80% of the Linux kernel is BSD code (OK, slight exaggeration). As I understand it, it's a problem specifically of linking a GPL'd program against a QPL'd library. I just took a quick skim of the GPL and couldn't find anything that would suggest this, though. If anyone can quote chapter and verse, I'd much appreciate it.
You should read the article. It's not a point of KDE being non-free or not. KDE *is* free. The problem is that, in the current incarnation of both KDE and Qt, it is illegal to distribute KDE. It's not that Debian is the only one distrobution taking an ethical stance; it's more like its the only distribution not breaking the law. It's against the law to distribute KDE right now, and that should change.
Yes, exactly. People released their software under the GPL because they wanted it under the GPL. RMS can take the BSD licence and call it the new GPL, but that doesn't mean anyone's going to use it.
Well, you could take up working on the Harmony project. It's still a lot of work, but wouldn't constitute "re-inventing the wheel" I wouldn't think, since quite a bit of work has already been done on it.
Yes, that was kind of neat. Mind you, when the file refuses to load anyway (assuming you're using a decent viewer) or contains incomprehensible garbage, that might be a clue that "hey, something's wrong". To be fair, though, "you may have transferred this file in ASCII mode" is a nicer error message than "could not load image".
Serious work on MNG started in 1996, and, IINM, it reached a 1.0 status some time last year. Seriously, though, I can't see why people wouldn't use MNG. The idea behind it is completely useless, so if some users can't view it properly, you're really doing them a favour.
You've obviously not read up on the preamble of the GPL, the philosophy behind it, and the history of the GNU project as a whole. The GPL was created to give people an incentive to produce free software. Many other free licences don't provide any incentive; in other words, they're (for the most part) truly free.
If you disagree with the GPL, you're more than welcome to distribute your own code under another licence, or boycott GNU software altogether. By recommending that the incompatibility restrictions of the GPL, the very foundation of the essence of the GPL, be removed, though, you're completely trivialising the GNU project. GNU is *not* about software; it's about politics. If you don't like that, don't use GPL'd software. I wouldn't hold my breath for the GPL to change dramatically, though.
There used to be someone around /. who would point out abuses of our good friend, cat. In his memory, I would like to point out that cat msg | mail -s "sub" $addr would be better written as mail -s "sub" $addr < msg. Please, cat is doing his best to fulfill all your catenation needs; there's no reason to burden him further.
Hmm, I've heard the opposite (.ogg sounds better than .mp3 at the same bitrate). Since the algorithms differ so greatly, it would be all but imposible to judge the sound quality objectively. Most important to me, though, (note that I haven't actually tried Vorbis, so I'm going on rumour) is that it gets rid of that MP3 high-frequency problem, which would be nice for listening to music with high-hats (e.g. 95% of all music).
In terms of stand-alone graphics (e.g. not embedded in an HTML document), I see .png *far* more frequently than .gif. It still lags behind .jpg in terms of popularity quite a bit, and is almost non-existent when it comes to photographs (which makes sense since, IIRC, JFIF was created specifically for compressing photographs).
You have to give it a little time, though. PNG is most definitely not declining in popularity. It's a little slow, but it seems to be gaining in popularity at a steady rate, which is very important.