When you talk solely about downloading mp3's, I've tried both Gnutella and Napigator. I've always found Napigator to be more stable, easier to use, and more likely to provide good downloads than Gnutella. Better yet, Napigator works with existing Napster clients to bring da music to da masses.
If its trading of MP3's at stake, I beleive that Napigator and nap servers like OpenNAP will save the movement, and not Gnutella.
The last two companies I have worked at have had policies like this. They kept them around while not enforcing them so that they could 'weed out the bad eggs' whenever they wanted an excuse to fire somebody.
It's nice to see some effort being put into durability rather than increasing data density. While high-density is great for certain apps, the idea of drop-testing an IDE or SCSI hd is a joke. Considering that hustle and bustle that most laptops get at the typical airport, this is going to become more and more important.
I cringe everytime I hear someone say that the net is a haven for pedophiles. It's a cheap way to get attention and make the anarchic parts of the net look bad and scary.
Perhaps we should amend Godwin's law to include Pedophiles along with Nazis?
Alas, alack... One of the only reasons keeping me from switching completely over to Linux running Gnome and Wine is the fact that my video capture device just doesn't cut the mustard under linux.
It's not an appropriate card for gaming, but I have another card for that in the same machine. It even outperforms newer video capture devices in terms of quality and capture stability. Better yet, it works pefectly on a machine as slow as a P1 133. (A 3dfx 3500 TV card has problems with synchronization on anything slower than a p3 550)
Unfortuneately, this problem is pretty standard across the board. Matrox is unwilling to support this card on newer OS's (Linux or Win2k) and Linux drivers just don't exist. Unfortuneately, I'm an artist and don't have anywhere near the coding skills necessary to craft my own. I doubt anyone else could because of this line I found in a Matrox email post: "Matrox has evaluated the required resources to produce a
"black-box" for Linux to enable the use of the non-Matrox components.
Unfortunately we concluded that many man months would be required and we
cannot assign such resources to this project."
Older, yet servicable hardware is getting more and more support on linux, but because of crap like this, it's still lacking in a big way.
Jeez... anybody with cats know that they'll get into any container, no matter how big, just to see what's inside!
Why do you think there's such a problem with people accidentally killing their pets by locking them in the fridge or the dryer?
This is a funny site, that pokes much needed fun at breeders and collectors alike. If you *don't* get it and think this guy needs to be punished, then you have obviously never owned a cat.
You're confusing 'Clutch' with 'Breakpads'. You wouldn't fly down the pavement at unhealthy speeds, you'd just go into neutral as all the grey goo spews up onto the window shield.
While the idea behind having a 'liquid' clutch is neat, the article focuses mainly on the information technology's dependance on moving parts, ie: spinning disks and levered sweeping read heads and lasers.
Personally, I don't think this is going to be an issue in the near future. We already have companies making fast, solid-state ram drives. It can't be much longer before the first fast solid-state eprom drives hit the market.
During human history, I've noticed that infrastructure follows a certain pattern. For a good example, take roads, something we all take for granted.
During the very earliest parts of the last two millenia, 'roads' were little more than well beaten paths. Relatively few people used them so that they weren't worth providing. Mostly you stayed in your own village and just occasionally, if you were very rich, you took the path to other villages to sell your goods. You had to worry about highwaymen, and didn't feel safe.
Even during the middle ages, what roads there were were maintained by baronies and kingdoms. There were stiff penalties for travel, and overbearing regulations. You didn't cross a landholder's property or bridge even if the road ran through it without paying the toll if there was one. The barons were responsble for keeping their own roads safe, but frequently did not.
In modern times, so many people use the roads for so many reasons that the local and country governments have become responsible for maintaining them out of tax money, with no profit whatsoever. Their existence buffers the economy by providing an avenue for commerce, shipping, and travel.
Apply this same pattern to the phone system. Before communication became important, only individuals used radio or line communication because of its relative cost and danger. Someone could easily overhear your private conversation. Before the telephone systems became 'accepted', the only real use for remote real-time two-way communication was to radio different parts of a battle for combat instructions.
Fast forward to today. We have the equivalent of 'divine right of kings'-granted baronies on our communication systems. Only a few hand-picked individuals or companies have control over a vast amount of infrastructure. This is true for the U.S. and most of the rest of the world. True, the phone companies are responsble for it's cost and upkeep, but let's get serious here. Just how good is the U.S.'s phone system, even with the modicum of competition we have? Phone companies *could* be laying DSL to every home, building, or apartment but they're not.
In the future, time being the only variable, we'll move into the stage where so many people use the communication infrastructure so much that it will be impossible to make a profit on. At the same time, it will be a necessary commodity for any given country's economy. The government will either rapidly or gradually assume control of the phone system, and like the roads, we'll assume 'free' use of them in exchange for tax dollars.
If you think about this, this is already happening with the power-system in California. The government is paying for juice at taxpayers expense. This isn't likely to change in the near future.
Verant might as well not sell CD's because of the constant patching. Over a cable modem, it took almost 40 minutes worth of downloading to download all the patched game files from Verant *after* I spent 20 minutes copying the entire contents of the 650 mb CD to HD.
6. Open Source Clients mean user built-in macros. If you're not a coder, you don't level as fast as the geek next cube who is.
5. Damnit! 'RMS_Troll' gets all the experience *and* loot!
4. Anti-cheat security often means 'Security through Obscurity', since game designers have to do things like encrypt game values in memory to keep them from being altered.
3. What's the 'Karma_Whore' guild, and why do they keep modding my exp points down?
2. Microsoft just steals the code and introduces 'ActiveMMORPG' components for Internet Explorer
The reason that WIPO is the center of all these cases and the root of so much bad fortune is that they are blatantly unfair to individuals.
WIPO rules against domain name defendants 80% of the time. This makes it an easy for any company or corporation with a domain dispute to take it to WIPO with the expecation of getting any and everything they ask for.
This is not nearly such a problem with the other domain arbitrator organizations
Gatesfinger: Ah, Mister James Bond. I see that you have applied a patch against the CVS tree for our nuclear control system.
Bond: How does the old rote go? "Security through obscurity is no security?"
[Bond types "Make" at the BASH prompt. The legion of goons behind Gatesfinger all raise their automatic weapons, but Gatesfinger raises his hand and pushes his glasses up on his nose. Bond's finger hovers threatingly above the "Enter key]
Bond: Release Dr. Greattits and I *could* just walk away without compiling this binary.
Gatesfinger: You think you have won, Mister Bond? Well, Think again.
Danny Dunn was serious Sci-fi, even though it masqueraded as pulp. The dragonfly was invented after Danny and his grandfather discovered a way to make the most revolutionary of materials, 'semiconductiors', which allowed electrical switches and relays (the book never mentions transistors or circuit lithography) to be minaturized! Mind you, they were first published in the late fifties and early sixties IIRC, so this was *cutting* edge for the time.
Other Danny Dunn books covered Low-temp Superconductors, Quantum Theory, etc...
The plot of 'Honey, I Shrunk the Kids' was stolen almost entirely from the Danny Dunn book where he and his friends were minaturized and had to cross the back yard.
The Niven Novel's version worked by jetting Uranus in and out of other planet's orbits to shift Earth's orbit until it was orbiting as one of Jupiter's moons.
Niven points out the dangers of this as well: 99% of the earth was scorched, uninhabitable deserts. The only places that could sustain life were the poles, and the south pole was a humid, tropical junge.
Who remembers the cockroach in 'Fifth Element' that transmitted the President's meeting back to the baddies?
Security concerns aside I'd *love* to have one of these guys to play with with a micro-camera/mic/xmitter combo. Drive it under the door and into your boss's office *while* you're working!
Also, with the smaller mass it's more feasible to build a flying or gliding robot.
"Like a fly on a wall" will have an entirely new meaning.
I have to disagree with this, because I think part of any effective testing regimen is durability/lifetime testing. This is obviously something that doesn't happen very much with software testing because of all the little 'memory holes' that don't get noticed until a system 49 days old needs to be rebooted.
We're right on the verge of sending out interstellar probes. Even if you could do rapid testing by automated means (AI calculated test types, etc... ), can you be assured that your system with last for dozens or hundreds of years necessary to cross the interstellar gap at sub-c speeds?
Part of the beauty of this old, seemingly useless system was that it was simply designed, and almost perfectly optimized for the task.
Now we have astronauts taking laptops into space and using MS software for email and networking while on board. The testing cycles for all this software is long because all faults have to be eliminated, but the simple fact remains that computer and software designs are becoming so complex that in the very near future, if not already, they are too complex for use in the space program.
Hunting down a bug in a 100000 lines of code is one thing. Hunting down a bug and all the other bugs it causes in 4 million lines? NASA has already faced this problem, because they use Win 95 laptops. How about 10 million lines. How about 20 M?
What about the computer processors that run the space shuttles. Frankly, they're all old technology, because upgrading to the newer stuff is just too damned dangerous. If the video processor that powers your HUD guidance systems crashes because of an obscure hardware bug that occurs only in freefall, you're screwed.
Personally, I think that this sort of complexity is going to become the limiting factor in the advancement of technology. A point will come in the very near future when systems, be they processors or OS's, become so complex that the testing time necessary for critical use makes rapid development unprofitable.
I read this wired story and thought about posting to Slashdot, but thought 'No, who wants to read about a Pirates of Silicon Valley' with Linux geeks and FSF heads.'
Apparently this is more a documentary, albeit narrated by old Six-shooter Chuck Heston himself, but my thought holds true. Regardless of how important you feel the history of the FS and OS movements are, a documentary about them belongs on latenight PBS or Discovery.
"Get your filthy paws off me, you damn, dirty MFC Coder!"
I think this is going to be received about as well as *any* documentary that goes to the bigscreen. IE: It will be shown only in art houses and campus theaters in very large cities. It will expose a *few* people to the ethos behind FS and OS, but not nearly as much as the Linux/FS community would hope.
If it does achieve any kind of success, it will be in the same vein as 'Trekkies'. People will see it as just another movie about geeks.
I went to school with a guy who is *still* looking forward to the day when Windoze WP's can keep up with his typing. When I first met him, he typed about 140 words per minute. The usual 'cliteky-click' of typing we all hear was more like a quiet buzz for him. He had to take breaks every few minutes so that the old 9in Mac he was using could catch up with him and he could look for errors.
The keyboard was fast enough to keep up with him, but the WP software itself wasn't. Go fig...
Most of the coders I know type anywhere from 60-140 words per minute. When coding, this measure of speed goes out the window, but it still is a fair shade faster than actually discussing what they are in the midst of coding.
Most writers I know type anywhere from 60-170 wpm. I type on the lower end of this scale, about 80-90 wpm. Again, this is significantly faster than I can comfortably speak.
When *editing* code or text, however, voice commands cannot hold a candle to a combination of mouse and keyboard commands, especially with newer trackballs and 'wheel' mice.
"Page up. Page up. Page up. Stop. No, go up. Stop! Not delete! Damnit!"
When CD technology was invented that the standards were finalized the only content control was the fact that a CD was 650 MB wide. Of course no one in the entertainment industry thought that computer hardware could *possibly* one day match and exceed their technology.
It did, and because of that, there was a rather weak encryption placed on DVD's. They entertainment industry couldn't beleive that there was a *possibility* of anyone cracking CSS.
Someone did.
If you think that any new media type available in the next decade will be free of industry-mandated content controls, you're sorely mistaken. I'm not saying they won't be broken, they'll just be better than CSS.
Slashdot Mirror
When you talk solely about downloading mp3's, I've tried both Gnutella and Napigator. I've always found Napigator to be more stable, easier to use, and more likely to provide good downloads than Gnutella. Better yet, Napigator works with existing Napster clients to bring da music to da masses.
If its trading of MP3's at stake, I beleive that Napigator and nap servers like OpenNAP will save the movement, and not Gnutella.
The last two companies I have worked at have had policies like this. They kept them around while not enforcing them so that they could 'weed out the bad eggs' whenever they wanted an excuse to fire somebody.
It's nice to see some effort being put into durability rather than increasing data density. While high-density is great for certain apps, the idea of drop-testing an IDE or SCSI hd is a joke. Considering that hustle and bustle that most laptops get at the typical airport, this is going to become more and more important.
I cringe everytime I hear someone say that the net is a haven for pedophiles. It's a cheap way to get attention and make the anarchic parts of the net look bad and scary.
Perhaps we should amend Godwin's law to include Pedophiles along with Nazis?
Alas, alack... One of the only reasons keeping me from switching completely over to Linux running Gnome and Wine is the fact that my video capture device just doesn't cut the mustard under linux.
It's not an appropriate card for gaming, but I have another card for that in the same machine. It even outperforms newer video capture devices in terms of quality and capture stability. Better yet, it works pefectly on a machine as slow as a P1 133. (A 3dfx 3500 TV card has problems with synchronization on anything slower than a p3 550)
Unfortuneately, this problem is pretty standard across the board. Matrox is unwilling to support this card on newer OS's (Linux or Win2k) and Linux drivers just don't exist. Unfortuneately, I'm an artist and don't have anywhere near the coding skills necessary to craft my own. I doubt anyone else could because of this line I found in a Matrox email post: "Matrox has evaluated the required resources to produce a "black-box" for Linux to enable the use of the non-Matrox components. Unfortunately we concluded that many man months would be required and we cannot assign such resources to this project."
Older, yet servicable hardware is getting more and more support on linux, but because of crap like this, it's still lacking in a big way.
Jeez... anybody with cats know that they'll get into any container, no matter how big, just to see what's inside!
Why do you think there's such a problem with people accidentally killing their pets by locking them in the fridge or the dryer?
This is a funny site, that pokes much needed fun at breeders and collectors alike. If you *don't* get it and think this guy needs to be punished, then you have obviously never owned a cat.
It's a lot of fun to see them get knocked on their asses when they're wrong from time to time.
You're confusing 'Clutch' with 'Breakpads'. You wouldn't fly down the pavement at unhealthy speeds, you'd just go into neutral as all the grey goo spews up onto the window shield.
^_^
Almost, but not *quite* as dangerous.
Yes, EMP the grey goo! Save us all!
While the idea behind having a 'liquid' clutch is neat, the article focuses mainly on the information technology's dependance on moving parts, ie: spinning disks and levered sweeping read heads and lasers.
Personally, I don't think this is going to be an issue in the near future. We already have companies making fast, solid-state ram drives. It can't be much longer before the first fast solid-state eprom drives hit the market.
During human history, I've noticed that infrastructure follows a certain pattern. For a good example, take roads, something we all take for granted.
During the very earliest parts of the last two millenia, 'roads' were little more than well beaten paths. Relatively few people used them so that they weren't worth providing. Mostly you stayed in your own village and just occasionally, if you were very rich, you took the path to other villages to sell your goods. You had to worry about highwaymen, and didn't feel safe.
Even during the middle ages, what roads there were were maintained by baronies and kingdoms. There were stiff penalties for travel, and overbearing regulations. You didn't cross a landholder's property or bridge even if the road ran through it without paying the toll if there was one. The barons were responsble for keeping their own roads safe, but frequently did not.
In modern times, so many people use the roads for so many reasons that the local and country governments have become responsible for maintaining them out of tax money, with no profit whatsoever. Their existence buffers the economy by providing an avenue for commerce, shipping, and travel.
Apply this same pattern to the phone system. Before communication became important, only individuals used radio or line communication because of its relative cost and danger. Someone could easily overhear your private conversation. Before the telephone systems became 'accepted', the only real use for remote real-time two-way communication was to radio different parts of a battle for combat instructions.
Fast forward to today. We have the equivalent of 'divine right of kings'-granted baronies on our communication systems. Only a few hand-picked individuals or companies have control over a vast amount of infrastructure. This is true for the U.S. and most of the rest of the world. True, the phone companies are responsble for it's cost and upkeep, but let's get serious here. Just how good is the U.S.'s phone system, even with the modicum of competition we have? Phone companies *could* be laying DSL to every home, building, or apartment but they're not.
In the future, time being the only variable, we'll move into the stage where so many people use the communication infrastructure so much that it will be impossible to make a profit on. At the same time, it will be a necessary commodity for any given country's economy. The government will either rapidly or gradually assume control of the phone system, and like the roads, we'll assume 'free' use of them in exchange for tax dollars.
If you think about this, this is already happening with the power-system in California. The government is paying for juice at taxpayers expense. This isn't likely to change in the near future.
Verant might as well not sell CD's because of the constant patching. Over a cable modem, it took almost 40 minutes worth of downloading to download all the patched game files from Verant *after* I spent 20 minutes copying the entire contents of the 650 mb CD to HD.
6. Open Source Clients mean user built-in macros. If you're not a coder, you don't level as fast as the geek next cube who is.
5. Damnit! 'RMS_Troll' gets all the experience *and* loot!
4. Anti-cheat security often means 'Security through Obscurity', since game designers have to do things like encrypt game values in memory to keep them from being altered.
3. What's the 'Karma_Whore' guild, and why do they keep modding my exp points down?
2. Microsoft just steals the code and introduces 'ActiveMMORPG' components for Internet Explorer
1. Damn penguins pit for 9999 HP a peice
The reason that WIPO is the center of all these cases and the root of so much bad fortune is that they are blatantly unfair to individuals. WIPO rules against domain name defendants 80% of the time. This makes it an easy for any company or corporation with a domain dispute to take it to WIPO with the expecation of getting any and everything they ask for. This is not nearly such a problem with the other domain arbitrator organizations
[SCENE: Interior Gatestech Laborotories]
Gatesfinger: Ah, Mister James Bond. I see that you have applied a patch against the CVS tree for our nuclear control system.
Bond: How does the old rote go? "Security through obscurity is no security?"
[Bond types "Make" at the BASH prompt. The legion of goons behind Gatesfinger all raise their automatic weapons, but Gatesfinger raises his hand and pushes his glasses up on his nose. Bond's finger hovers threatingly above the "Enter key]
Bond: Release Dr. Greattits and I *could* just walk away without compiling this binary.
Gatesfinger: You think you have won, Mister Bond? Well, Think again.
[Gatesfinger speaks into his watch]
Gatesfinger: GOATSEX! Attack James Bond
Goatsex: ROAR!
Danny Dunn was serious Sci-fi, even though it masqueraded as pulp. The dragonfly was invented after Danny and his grandfather discovered a way to make the most revolutionary of materials, 'semiconductiors', which allowed electrical switches and relays (the book never mentions transistors or circuit lithography) to be minaturized! Mind you, they were first published in the late fifties and early sixties IIRC, so this was *cutting* edge for the time. Other Danny Dunn books covered Low-temp Superconductors, Quantum Theory, etc... The plot of 'Honey, I Shrunk the Kids' was stolen almost entirely from the Danny Dunn book where he and his friends were minaturized and had to cross the back yard.
The Niven Novel's version worked by jetting Uranus in and out of other planet's orbits to shift Earth's orbit until it was orbiting as one of Jupiter's moons.
Niven points out the dangers of this as well: 99% of the earth was scorched, uninhabitable deserts. The only places that could sustain life were the poles, and the south pole was a humid, tropical junge.
Who remembers the cockroach in 'Fifth Element' that transmitted the President's meeting back to the baddies?
Security concerns aside I'd *love* to have one of these guys to play with with a micro-camera/mic/xmitter combo. Drive it under the door and into your boss's office *while* you're working!
Also, with the smaller mass it's more feasible to build a flying or gliding robot.
"Like a fly on a wall" will have an entirely new meaning.
I have to disagree with this, because I think part of any effective testing regimen is durability/lifetime testing. This is obviously something that doesn't happen very much with software testing because of all the little 'memory holes' that don't get noticed until a system 49 days old needs to be rebooted.
We're right on the verge of sending out interstellar probes. Even if you could do rapid testing by automated means (AI calculated test types, etc... ), can you be assured that your system with last for dozens or hundreds of years necessary to cross the interstellar gap at sub-c speeds?
Part of the beauty of this old, seemingly useless system was that it was simply designed, and almost perfectly optimized for the task.
Now we have astronauts taking laptops into space and using MS software for email and networking while on board. The testing cycles for all this software is long because all faults have to be eliminated, but the simple fact remains that computer and software designs are becoming so complex that in the very near future, if not already, they are too complex for use in the space program.
Hunting down a bug in a 100000 lines of code is one thing. Hunting down a bug and all the other bugs it causes in 4 million lines? NASA has already faced this problem, because they use Win 95 laptops. How about 10 million lines. How about 20 M?
What about the computer processors that run the space shuttles. Frankly, they're all old technology, because upgrading to the newer stuff is just too damned dangerous. If the video processor that powers your HUD guidance systems crashes because of an obscure hardware bug that occurs only in freefall, you're screwed.
Personally, I think that this sort of complexity is going to become the limiting factor in the advancement of technology. A point will come in the very near future when systems, be they processors or OS's, become so complex that the testing time necessary for critical use makes rapid development unprofitable.
The Anime Geeks will note that one of the Valkyrie fighter jets/mecha in the Macross Plus series was controlled via electrodes and biofeedback.
I'm not sure, but I know for a fact that it's open source of one kind or another.
How about a modification or a sublicense of the GPL that specifies that security information may not be shared privately? GPL Experts?
I read this wired story and thought about posting to Slashdot, but thought 'No, who wants to read about a Pirates of Silicon Valley' with Linux geeks and FSF heads.'
Apparently this is more a documentary, albeit narrated by old Six-shooter Chuck Heston himself, but my thought holds true. Regardless of how important you feel the history of the FS and OS movements are, a documentary about them belongs on latenight PBS or Discovery.
"Get your filthy paws off me, you damn, dirty MFC Coder!"
I think this is going to be received about as well as *any* documentary that goes to the bigscreen. IE: It will be shown only in art houses and campus theaters in very large cities. It will expose a *few* people to the ethos behind FS and OS, but not nearly as much as the Linux/FS community would hope.
If it does achieve any kind of success, it will be in the same vein as 'Trekkies'. People will see it as just another movie about geeks.
I went to school with a guy who is *still* looking forward to the day when Windoze WP's can keep up with his typing. When I first met him, he typed about 140 words per minute. The usual 'cliteky-click' of typing we all hear was more like a quiet buzz for him. He had to take breaks every few minutes so that the old 9in Mac he was using could catch up with him and he could look for errors.
The keyboard was fast enough to keep up with him, but the WP software itself wasn't. Go fig...
Most of the coders I know type anywhere from 60-140 words per minute. When coding, this measure of speed goes out the window, but it still is a fair shade faster than actually discussing what they are in the midst of coding.
Most writers I know type anywhere from 60-170 wpm. I type on the lower end of this scale, about 80-90 wpm. Again, this is significantly faster than I can comfortably speak.
When *editing* code or text, however, voice commands cannot hold a candle to a combination of mouse and keyboard commands, especially with newer trackballs and 'wheel' mice.
"Page up. Page up. Page up. Stop. No, go up. Stop! Not delete! Damnit!"
When CD technology was invented that the standards were finalized the only content control was the fact that a CD was 650 MB wide. Of course no one in the entertainment industry thought that computer hardware could *possibly* one day match and exceed their technology.
It did, and because of that, there was a rather weak encryption placed on DVD's. They entertainment industry couldn't beleive that there was a *possibility* of anyone cracking CSS.
Someone did.
If you think that any new media type available in the next decade will be free of industry-mandated content controls, you're sorely mistaken. I'm not saying they won't be broken, they'll just be better than CSS.