AFAIK the difference between MobileLinux and regular L. is pretty slim. (Working battery checks and such stuff basically.)
This is why I want one of these as well. If it's pulled off it will really slap those PocketPC 'puters. The ones that run WinCE. They are big-bloated and slow. A bad compromice between a Palm and Laptop. With the Crusoe, a touch screen and wireless LAN I'll be set. Then I just need to be able to stream MPEG2/DivX to it to be *really* happy.;-)
A webpad/slate is one of the things I'm going to buy this summer, and I bet it'll have a Crusoe in it. Currently that's the best bet.
Seriously, these kind of ideas are the things that make the movie industry include "mad scientists" in movies. You'd think that people that are intelligent enough to understand nuclear physics would be intelligent enough to avoid nuking anything people would get close to. (Perhaps not significant in the moon case.)
OTOH perhaps the reason they wanted to nuke stuff is that they didn't understand nuclear physics. (I'm perfetly aware that Sagan was an intelligent man, and I don't think he proposed this.)
Seems like you want to send the client info upstream to the server instead. Since several of the newer broadband [sic] technologies are more limited upstreams than down this would be bad.
In any case, you don't send a lot of information. The package name, the current version, dependencies. Sure, you can do it the other way around but then:
1) The server will have to do the calculations for all of the clients, that is, it will be bogged down.
2) The server will know what packages/programs you have installed. Yeah, I really want MS to know that. (I bet that they will *promice* that they will not look at that info "...and I have some nice swamp land for you...".)
Do it in a truly efficiant way is hard. I agree. But I bet that the Debian way is better than the Microsoft way.
As I view it it's not an excersize in "doublethink".
The GPL is not about restricting you to do what you want with my code. It's about protecting the 3rd person that may want to alter upon your changes. I have no problems with you altering or redistrubuting my work, as long as you make it possible for someone else to do the same with your altered version.
Copyright OTOH is for keeping you from altering or redistributing my work in the first place. (Which as we've seen in RL can be quite tough.)
A GPL'd piece of music would be sold with a complete set of notes/lyrics and whatever is needed to "compile" the song. I could then change some parts, perhaps by adding a drum, and then distributing it again. Remixes and the like are a RL example of this practice. (Although I have no idea in what legal way those are made.)
Besides the fact that your analogy stinks to high heaven (Come on, do you mean that there is some sort of chip on the GeForce that prohibits use under Linux?) I'd have to say that I can't see why you protect Nivida although they have ripped you off.
They said they were developing Linux drivers because they didn't want to miss out on that market. Apparently the next gen of cards will be out before they've gotten their asses in gear. So basically, you were screwed.
Personally I got myself a Matrox G400Max. Sure, lot's of other cards beat it at 3d. But for Linux it's great. And for me that was important.
If Nivida hadn't made any claims about supporting Linux then I recon you couldn't really demand it from them. But they did, and you should. If for no other reason than to stop other companies from doing the same.
I've read some of his referneces to this before as well. (Most likely in his.plan file.) Seems very neat.
One other idea I remember he had was to take the headtracking from the cam and map it to the model's head. So if you moved your head in front of your screen, so would your "avatar" in the game.
The parrallax effect seems even neater though. Sort of like what the MS freestyle pad does for people that shake the pad while playing.
From reading the FAQ/paper on Freenet I've gathered that the point would be that all nodes should be equal.
Have you considered using different types of nodes to better optimize the network. And if that would actually work.
I.e., have some fast caching nodes with little data to make searching fast, and instead aim for high throughput. While other nodes have higher capacity and don't delete any information. (Storage sites like those in the Eternity project.)
I recon that since the source is free it would be fully possible to implement, but for it to be well used you would need to be able to send the deleted data to these storage nodes instead of just rerouting it to/dev/null.
Which kind of brings me to my second question.
Have you considered opening up the data on the nodes for agents/crawlers etc. AFAIK there are some API's for creating both sandboxes and agents in Java so that they would be secured. I recon this could greatly help for indexing or storing data (as noted above).
These agents could also be used for housekeeping such as updating documents, doing checksums on files to see if they were identical, deleting spam. (If it became a large problem.)
Perhaps I should join that Mailing list and lurk for a while.;-)
Ok I'll admit it right now, I didn't read the FAQ.;-) (But it's because I couldn't find one.) I did find the papers, but those will take a while to read I'm afraid.
Now, from your text above I assume that Ompages are supposed to provide 1) an easy way to find someone 2) an easy way to communicate with high security with that person/computer.
Freenet/Napster aim to provide an alternative protocol (alt. to HTTP/FTP etc not TCP/UDP). It doesn't seem as you are really aiming for the same thing. Freenet is about information, while Ompages are about connectivity. Is that a fair summary, or did I miss something crucial?
I do say that this type of research is very interesting however.
This subject is explored to some point in the FAQ, and if you read the paper there is a more thurough analysis. (And it's quite interesting I might add.)
The short answer is that queries are re-routed if the first servant (client+server) can't find the info. It makes a "quess" (based on the key) on to which server it should send the query and then waits for an answer. If it fails it tries the next best quess. (Life limits and attempt limits are in effect, so it's won't completely bog-down the network.)
But it may be that I misunderstood your question. Perhaps you ment that you wanted to be sure that the info is infact kept somewhere? Or that you will always find the information (provided it exists) AFAIK you can't.
The latest incarnation of Traveller (Marc Miller's version 4)has a very simple system as well. Particularly the combat system has been slashed quite a bit from TNE. In some ways it's a bit too simple, but with a few expansions (Fan made) it becomes very nice IMHO.
Howewer, since Marc Miller and c/o has a nasty habit of going bancrupt every now and then I'd have to say that it would be nice if they made it possible for fans to expand on the game. The 4.0 is very open and fairly easy to expand. And it's a neat system, so it would be a great pity if it "died".
You, sir, seem to be in great need of a nice Digital Watch.:-)
And I think you missed the point. Perhaps not entirely off, you certainly grazed it a bit.
Point is: When you use an interface you do it to get work *done*. When we are talking about WWW sites the point should be to read the information contained on said site. (Some marketoids/flash-over-substance-fans may disagree with me here.;-)
If you have people that spend a lot of time on a site, and never come back it's likely because they fought the interface and the got what they wanted, left, and never looked back.
If you have a lot of people that come *back* to the site and spend time there it could be because they actually liked what they saw.
Don't mix time spend on content, with time spend arguing with the UI.
And I agree, get SCSI on the MB right away. You generally have to put a bit more money in to get a dual board anyways, any then the step up to one with SCSI on it isn't too bad. (A good SCSI2 card with bootrom cost more than my dual MB after all.)
I'm thinking of upgrading to 2 new processors currently, two celerons most likely.
Apparently the architecture for the AMD/Digital slot-A is much better with SMP (and more) since each processor have their own bus to the chipset, so they will most likely have better SMP perfromance. God knows when any will be released though.
I seriously doubt that Transmeta would be trashed if it we're not for the fact that Linus work there.
Most Free Software / Open Source guys are upset because they don't have the opportunity to fix the bugs themselves. When it comes to patents it's mainly when we're talking software patents.
Transmeta deals in HARDWARE. It's a CPU, not a bloody text editor. Sure, you could, theoretically, "morph" the morphing code, but that is not something that many would do. (It'd be seriously more extreme than flashing your BIOS.) And that is assuming that you even *could* do it.
It would be very interesting to look at what they had done though. So from an academic standpoint it is a bit sad. Particularly if they have patents protecting the idea/implementation and thus would be somewhat protected from companies doing the same.
It essentially a software implementation of a hardware problem though. And as such I personally don't have a problem with them keeping it closed source.
I believe that Sony actually did start to market it this way. But not until Zip showed up did we get the "need for a need" so to speak. Unfortuantely we then already had Zip disks.
For the enthusiast there are MD players for computers (MD-Data) they are not compatible with MD-Music though. (Since it's proprietary I doubt that we'll see anyone changing that too unfortunately.)
The MD-Data discs are mainly sold in Japan though, I don't know if you can get them in the US/Europe. Using MD for cameras is a great idea though, bigger cheaper and not very large. Great stuff!
I'm no Kernel Hacker, (#include ) but I recon that it would be more trouble than it would be worth.
Sure, OOP is nice if you design it that way from the get-go, to port something would require massive rewrites. (Well, if you wanted it to be truly OOP and not just a c to c++ hack.)
And C remain as the leader for coders currently. (Well, there might well be loads more old Fortran source in use, or a lot more people scripting in VB, but that's not OS material.) And thus it will most likely remain for a few more years.
It might be interesting when the next generation of languages come / become common. Stuff that's made for parallell processing, with better OOP features. (C++ is pretty nasty compared with for instance Java.)
I agree with you though, OOP is very nice once you've got the hang of it. Personally I wouldn't want to develop in C, it just feels/dirty/.;-)
Well, they could always do it the hard way and use a proxy/firewall combo that scans the packets for content that use the Napster protocol.
So then you could send it encrypted.
Then network admins would scan for connections looking like Nap.
In the end noone would win, and a lot of "innocent" user will get pissed off. (The admins have access to new Nap. clients as well you know. To examine for signatures/ports etc.) Instead try to work with them. Limit Nap. so it won't hog bandwith. Use better protocols. Make it *better*, not more cumbersome to stop.
And the "evil admins" have one last trumph-card to play if they want to. They can search the data and if/when they find copyrightproteted matherial they shut you down. Keep that in mind as well.
Pissing people off is generally not a good way to make progress.
Say that something that hogs bandwith (Video conferancing perhaps, or lots of people were streaming movies.) was run to the point that the network was satuated.
What would you as a network admin do? Go say that "We have to invest another big pile of $$$ to get another T3." to your boss/whoever gives you money. Do you seriously expect that you would get it because "Streaming movies is hot right now."? I don't think so at least. (Unless the video/streaming were done for educational/relevant purposes naturally.)
I help out serving the local LAN where I live. And one of the other admins here did some testing on Napster.
When admins say that it hogs bandwith and thus they are forced to shut it down they are not kidding. It is apparently eating bandwith like those first walkman-cd players eat batteries. (By the pound?;-)
I mean it. Nap. doesn't seem to try to limit it's bandwith. If you could do that and *force* users to limit the bandwith then I recon it wouldn't be so much of a problem anymore.
There have been some complaints about the network being slow here lately. Perhaps Nap. is the cause, I haven't checked yet. (Due to our network setup (hubbed mainly, a few switches) if someone starts to hog bandwith a lot of people go down.
And that's bad, for everyone. Particularly for the one doing the hogging when the mob comes knocking on his door.;-)
Ok, so it may not be as easy as to only falsify packets. (Since it requires a "proof" of some bytes of raw data.) But what if you do this?
Someone connects to the mp3.com database through a proxy. But instead of sending the information directly you re-route the signal to another "spoofing client" that makes a request to the mp3.com server for a registration (but in another name). The "proof" requests are then transmitted back to the originating beam-it client which can provide the info.
Now, a good reason _not_ to do this would be that if your friend has access to the album in the first place you could just as well ask him to register in your name... But this way is much, err, neater!;-)
I'm not sure how hard it is to change the registering login/password. But well, it's an interesting (IMHO) experiment anyways.
Yeah, most of these neat glasses things are hard to use for those of us that wear glasses. (And you're not a real geek unless you have duct-taped glasses, right;-)
But for something like this I imagine that they would be able to compensate by altering the image. You wouldn't have much use for the "see-through" feature, but nevertheless they would be useful.
Well, perhaps "useful" isn't the word to describe these toys.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK the difference between MobileLinux and regular L. is pretty slim. (Working battery checks and such stuff basically.)
;-)
This is why I want one of these as well. If it's pulled off it will really slap those PocketPC 'puters. The ones that run WinCE. They are big-bloated and slow. A bad compromice between a Palm and Laptop. With the Crusoe, a touch screen and wireless LAN I'll be set. Then I just need to be able to stream MPEG2/DivX to it to be *really* happy.
A webpad/slate is one of the things I'm going to buy this summer, and I bet it'll have a Crusoe in it. Currently that's the best bet.
Harbour in Alaska anyone?
Seriously, these kind of ideas are the things that make the movie industry include "mad scientists" in movies. You'd think that people that are intelligent enough to understand nuclear physics would be intelligent enough to avoid nuking anything people would get close to. (Perhaps not significant in the moon case.)
OTOH perhaps the reason they wanted to nuke stuff is that they didn't understand nuclear physics. (I'm perfetly aware that Sagan was an intelligent man, and I don't think he proposed this.)
Seems like you want to send the client info upstream to the server instead. Since several of the newer broadband [sic] technologies are more limited upstreams than down this would be bad.
In any case, you don't send a lot of information. The package name, the current version, dependencies. Sure, you can do it the other way around but then:
1) The server will have to do the calculations for all of the clients, that is, it will be bogged down.
2) The server will know what packages/programs you have installed. Yeah, I really want MS to know that. (I bet that they will *promice* that they will not look at that info "...and I have some nice swamp land for you...".)
Do it in a truly efficiant way is hard. I agree. But I bet that the Debian way is better than the Microsoft way.
As I view it it's not an excersize in "doublethink".
The GPL is not about restricting you to do what you want with my code. It's about protecting the 3rd person that may want to alter upon your changes. I have no problems with you altering or redistrubuting my work, as long as you make it possible for someone else to do the same with your altered version.
Copyright OTOH is for keeping you from altering or redistributing my work in the first place. (Which as we've seen in RL can be quite tough.)
A GPL'd piece of music would be sold with a complete set of notes/lyrics and whatever is needed to "compile" the song. I could then change some parts, perhaps by adding a drum, and then distributing it again. Remixes and the like are a RL example of this practice. (Although I have no idea in what legal way those are made.)
Besides the fact that your analogy stinks to high heaven (Come on, do you mean that there is some sort of chip on the GeForce that prohibits use under Linux?) I'd have to say that I can't see why you protect Nivida although they have ripped you off.
They said they were developing Linux drivers because they didn't want to miss out on that market. Apparently the next gen of cards will be out before they've gotten their asses in gear. So basically, you were screwed.
Personally I got myself a Matrox G400Max. Sure, lot's of other cards beat it at 3d. But for Linux it's great. And for me that was important.
If Nivida hadn't made any claims about supporting Linux then I recon you couldn't really demand it from them. But they did, and you should. If for no other reason than to stop other companies from doing the same.
I've read some of his referneces to this before as well. (Most likely in his .plan file.) Seems very neat.
One other idea I remember he had was to take the headtracking from the cam and map it to the model's head. So if you moved your head in front of your screen, so would your "avatar" in the game.
The parrallax effect seems even neater though. Sort of like what the MS freestyle pad does for people that shake the pad while playing.
Sure it can probably be cool, if anyone ever uses it for something useful...
Using 66% of the screen for a "see again" button when you can press the play button again instead is not what I'd call "cool".
But it seems to me like the web-site was created by someone who had memorized "Creating Killer Websites" so I wasn't very surprised.
Seems like the link on their page is b0rked. (At least it didn't work for me.)
The interview can be found here.
From reading the FAQ/paper on Freenet I've gathered that the point would be that all nodes should be equal.
/dev/null.
;-)
Have you considered using different types of nodes to better optimize the network. And if that would actually work.
I.e., have some fast caching nodes with little data to make searching fast, and instead aim for high throughput. While other nodes have higher capacity and don't delete any information. (Storage sites like those in the Eternity project.)
I recon that since the source is free it would be fully possible to implement, but for it to be well used you would need to be able to send the deleted data to these storage nodes instead of just rerouting it to
Which kind of brings me to my second question.
Have you considered opening up the data on the nodes for agents/crawlers etc. AFAIK there are some API's for creating both sandboxes and agents in Java so that they would be secured. I recon this could greatly help for indexing or storing data (as noted above).
These agents could also be used for housekeeping such as updating documents, doing checksums on files to see if they were identical, deleting spam. (If it became a large problem.)
Perhaps I should join that Mailing list and lurk for a while.
Ever compared networkcode in Java and in C?
Ever heard of OOP?
'Nuff said.
And what's to stop the same Trojan from posting the information on Usenet? Or IRC or whatever.
;-)
As thecap said, don't use trojans.
Ok I'll admit it right now, I didn't read the FAQ. ;-) (But it's because I couldn't find one.) I did find the papers, but those will take a while to read I'm afraid.
Now, from your text above I assume that Ompages are supposed to provide 1) an easy way to find someone 2) an easy way to communicate with high security with that person/computer.
Freenet/Napster aim to provide an alternative protocol (alt. to HTTP/FTP etc not TCP/UDP). It doesn't seem as you are really aiming for the same thing. Freenet is about information, while Ompages are about connectivity. Is that a fair summary, or did I miss something crucial?
I do say that this type of research is very interesting however.
I'm sorry to say this but, RTFM!
This subject is explored to some point in the FAQ, and if you read the paper there is a more thurough analysis. (And it's quite interesting I might add.)
The short answer is that queries are re-routed if the first servant (client+server) can't find the info. It makes a "quess" (based on the key) on to which server it should send the query and then waits for an answer. If it fails it tries the next best quess. (Life limits and attempt limits are in effect, so it's won't completely bog-down the network.)
But it may be that I misunderstood your question. Perhaps you ment that you wanted to be sure that the info is infact kept somewhere? Or that you will always find the information (provided it exists) AFAIK you can't.
The latest incarnation of Traveller (Marc Miller's version 4)has a very simple system as well. Particularly the combat system has been slashed quite a bit from TNE. In some ways it's a bit too simple, but with a few expansions (Fan made) it becomes very nice IMHO.
Howewer, since Marc Miller and c/o has a nasty habit of going bancrupt every now and then I'd have to say that it would be nice if they made it possible for fans to expand on the game. The 4.0 is very open and fairly easy to expand. And it's a neat system, so it would be a great pity if it "died".
I haven't looked at the GURPS version though.
You, sir, seem to be in great need of a nice Digital Watch. :-)
;-)
;-)
And I think you missed the point. Perhaps not entirely off, you certainly grazed it a bit.
Point is: When you use an interface you do it to get work *done*. When we are talking about WWW sites the point should be to read the information contained on said site. (Some marketoids/flash-over-substance-fans may disagree with me here.
If you have people that spend a lot of time on a site, and never come back it's likely because they fought the interface and the got what they wanted, left, and never looked back.
If you have a lot of people that come *back* to the site and spend time there it could be because they actually liked what they saw.
Don't mix time spend on content, with time spend arguing with the UI.
And good luck with the cheese.
Exactly what I have done!
And I agree, get SCSI on the MB right away. You generally have to put a bit more money in to get a dual board anyways, any then the step up to one with SCSI on it isn't too bad. (A good SCSI2 card with bootrom cost more than my dual MB after all.)
I'm thinking of upgrading to 2 new processors currently, two celerons most likely.
Apparently the architecture for the AMD/Digital slot-A is much better with SMP (and more) since each processor have their own bus to the chipset, so they will most likely have better SMP perfromance. God knows when any will be released though.
I seriously doubt that Transmeta would be trashed if it we're not for the fact that Linus work there.
Most Free Software / Open Source guys are upset because they don't have the opportunity to fix the bugs themselves. When it comes to patents it's mainly when we're talking software patents.
Transmeta deals in HARDWARE. It's a CPU, not a bloody text editor. Sure, you could, theoretically, "morph" the morphing code, but that is not something that many would do. (It'd be seriously more extreme than flashing your BIOS.) And that is assuming that you even *could* do it.
It would be very interesting to look at what they had done though. So from an academic standpoint it is a bit sad. Particularly if they have patents protecting the idea/implementation and thus would be somewhat protected from companies doing the same.
It essentially a software implementation of a hardware problem though. And as such I personally don't have a problem with them keeping it closed source.
I believe that Sony actually did start to market it this way. But not until Zip showed up did we get the "need for a need" so to speak. Unfortuantely we then already had Zip disks.
For the enthusiast there are MD players for computers (MD-Data) they are not compatible with MD-Music though. (Since it's proprietary I doubt that we'll see anyone changing that too unfortunately.)
The MD-Data discs are mainly sold in Japan though, I don't know if you can get them in the US/Europe. Using MD for cameras is a great idea though, bigger cheaper and not very large. Great stuff!
I'm no Kernel Hacker, (#include ) but I recon that it would be more trouble than it would be worth.
/dirty/. ;-)
Sure, OOP is nice if you design it that way from the get-go, to port something would require massive rewrites. (Well, if you wanted it to be truly OOP and not just a c to c++ hack.)
And C remain as the leader for coders currently. (Well, there might well be loads more old Fortran source in use, or a lot more people scripting in VB, but that's not OS material.) And thus it will most likely remain for a few more years.
It might be interesting when the next generation of languages come / become common. Stuff that's made for parallell processing, with better OOP features. (C++ is pretty nasty compared with for instance Java.)
I agree with you though, OOP is very nice once you've got the hang of it. Personally I wouldn't want to develop in C, it just feels
Well, they could always do it the hard way and use a proxy/firewall combo that scans the packets for content that use the Napster protocol.
So then you could send it encrypted.
Then network admins would scan for connections looking like Nap.
In the end noone would win, and a lot of "innocent" user will get pissed off. (The admins have access to new Nap. clients as well you know. To examine for signatures/ports etc.) Instead try to work with them. Limit Nap. so it won't hog bandwith. Use better protocols. Make it *better*, not more cumbersome to stop.
And the "evil admins" have one last trumph-card to play if they want to. They can search the data and if/when they find copyrightproteted matherial they shut you down. Keep that in mind as well.
Pissing people off is generally not a good way to make progress.
Say that something that hogs bandwith (Video conferancing perhaps, or lots of people were streaming movies.) was run to the point that the network was satuated.
What would you as a network admin do? Go say that "We have to invest another big pile of $$$ to get another T3." to your boss/whoever gives you money. Do you seriously expect that you would get it because "Streaming movies is hot right now."? I don't think so at least. (Unless the video/streaming were done for educational/relevant purposes naturally.)
I help out serving the local LAN where I live. And one of the other admins here did some testing on Napster.
;-)
;-)
When admins say that it hogs bandwith and thus they are forced to shut it down they are not kidding. It is apparently eating bandwith like those first walkman-cd players eat batteries. (By the pound?
I mean it. Nap. doesn't seem to try to limit it's bandwith. If you could do that and *force* users to limit the bandwith then I recon it wouldn't be so much of a problem anymore.
There have been some complaints about the network being slow here lately. Perhaps Nap. is the cause, I haven't checked yet. (Due to our network setup (hubbed mainly, a few switches) if someone starts to hog bandwith a lot of people go down.
And that's bad, for everyone. Particularly for the one doing the hogging when the mob comes knocking on his door.
Ok, so it may not be as easy as to only falsify packets. (Since it requires a "proof" of some bytes of raw data.) But what if you do this?
;-)
Someone connects to the mp3.com database through a proxy. But instead of sending the information directly you re-route the signal to another "spoofing client" that makes a request to the mp3.com server for a registration (but in another name). The "proof" requests are then transmitted back to the originating beam-it client which can provide the info.
Now, a good reason _not_ to do this would be that if your friend has access to the album in the first place you could just as well ask him to register in your name... But this way is much, err, neater!
I'm not sure how hard it is to change the registering login/password. But well, it's an interesting (IMHO) experiment anyways.
This one perhaps? Linked to from lspace.org.
Yeah, most of these neat glasses things are hard to use for those of us that wear glasses. (And you're not a real geek unless you have duct-taped glasses, right ;-)
;-)
But for something like this I imagine that they would be able to compensate by altering the image. You wouldn't have much use for the "see-through" feature, but nevertheless they would be useful.
Well, perhaps "useful" isn't the word to describe these toys.