If you've taken any physics course you should recognize that rotating a floor involves no actual work except the torque needed to start or stop rotation. Once it is rotating at the desired speed you just have to overcome whatever friction that would have been minimized by design.
I think the more puzzling issue is plumbing. If you look closely at the photos of the control touchscreen and the tower viewed from outside you can see there is a significant fraction of each unit that is in a stationary part that might be 20% of the floor space (bottom left on the screen, not the 'spindle'). You could probably do all the plumbing (kitchen and bathroom) in that fraction.
Maybe it's a bit over the top but what a nifty way to be able to handle natural lighting issues at various times of the day. Also it would be step up for Austin Powers from a bed that rotates to an entire flat that rotates. Now for the most important question: do they have inexpensive broadband access in Curitiba?
"Just proves one doesn't have to be good at math to be a top astronaut!... AIDs grows geometrically while a deadly flu grows exponentially"
I was about to agree somewhat with your first observation and then you make that odd remark which seems to imply geometric growth is different from exponential. I suppose I'll make some silly error before I finish this posting.
The 1 in 455 odds of human life expiring in the next 100 years seems awfully high unless you could attribute the high probability to some side effect of increased human population and activity. But he specifically mentions volcanoes, comets and asteroids. So is he saying that out of 455 centuries (less than 50,000 years) a species killing geological disaster is so probable?
I suppose for very little money I could test this possibility but I am curious if anyone has been able to routinely uncripple (ie remove DRM from) tracks purchased from Real.
"By what rational is it that "because you upload and download in parallel" that makes BT 'fast'."
It makes file transfers faster for at least two reasons. You need to understand at least a little about how it works. The file is divided into a number of hashed chunks. The torrent file contains the hash information (and the IP address of the tracker used). The bittorrent client provides chunks to other clients randomly. So no matter how much of a file a particular client has it is likely to have chunks others need and they are likely to have chunks it needs. As soon as a client joins a torrent and has part of the file it can both upload and download.
A consequence of this is that as more clients are added you also get that much more upload capacity. It scales up nicely so transfers can be faster due to added upload capacity compared to centralized transfer protocols.
Another aspect is that even clients on slow links can contribute to making transfers faster for others. Somebody with a big pipe can get pieces from a number of others who only have a limited amount of bandwidth to use. This works also for clients that have limited time periods for being connected. A transfer can be stopped and started any number of times and the client makes progress and helps others when connected. Very beneficial robust behavior.
Notice that I mentioned hash values for these chunks. As a client receives each chunk it can compare the actual hash with the advertised value and accept or reject a chunk based on that. This makes it more difficult to spoof the network with bad data.
Another journalistic pile of crap trying to derive great meaning from so very little. I remember an article of this sort from the early 80's predicting the entire center of technological innovation was soon to be in Tokyo with the USA at the periphery. Do you think they might have missed a few details in that prediction? Here is one of the most mind-numbing sentences from this article:
"America has its share of early adopters, but they tend to be the exception rather than the rule;..."
If they were the rule rather than the exception they could hardly be called early adopters, could they?
I'm not going to argue that there are some preferences that seem to be culturally ingrained. For instance I remain mystified why almost all my neighbors and friends feel a need for a military attack style vehicle for their day to day transportation needs. Judging by the stories I see in T3 magazine and elsewhere it seems like the Japanese are more willing to part with their money for small clever bits of electronics.
But wherever you find yourself there is an abundance of gadgets that compete for your money and attention. I suppose it is related to having three children with their gadgets and desire for ever more but I don't see a dearth of options. The only example from the list of seven at the end of the article that causes any excitement for me is the PSP. Can I stand to wait six or seven weeks? I suppose having a fully deployed HDTV system and a PCI receiver board in my PC for viewing and capture could serve as a distraction. Couldn't do that at all in Japan until very recently and still can't outside a few of the largest cities.
I don't disagree that this action is probably a pre-emptive move against future developments that the DVDCCA sees as threatening. A nasty element of the action is the potential crushing of a company that appeared to be playing "by the rules". I don't know the details but a venture like this does not proceed as far as Kaleidescape managed without dotting all the I's and crossing all the T's. I remember reading months ago (maybe more than a year) that they had negotiated a license from the DVDCCA for this product. The DVDCCA cannot pretend this technology came as a surprise.
That's why I was hoping that a counter-suit is filed and the DVDCCA loses in a very expensive fashion so that cynical moves of this sort are not seen as a viable alternative. Kaleidescape had what appeared to be a lot of talent putting in years of their lives to build something that a lot of people want (at a much lower price).
What I think is truly ironic is that the DVDCCA's action will prove utterly ineffectual in the coming confrontation with their customers. DeCSS is about as hard to find as a water fountain in a shopping mall. Anyone who is thirsty can get a drink and anyone who wants to rip a DVD and re-author the elements to get rid of all the annoyances can do that with free tools (again courtesy of the DVDCCA which effectively force these tools to be free). The DVD format is so successful and widespread that there does not appear to be any way to update its effectively open format.
If we never expected to get cheap terabyte drives this would be relatively unimportant. The realization that IT IS COMING is probably what caused this litigious act. How does this lawsuit prevent the arrival of vast cheap storage? The answer, of course, is that it stops nothing. When people see they can put their thousands of dollars worth of DVD's on a $200 drive making it easy to find and view the content anywhere in their house, these elements will combine and make it so.
One final irony in this projected future is that while studios rage and spew venom over the state of affairs they will make even more profits than ever before and largely because their format was successfully "opened". Truly massive video on demand (VOD) home systems will be an incentive for even more DVD purchases. If they had succeeded in tying the content exclusively to a particular plastic artifact as they had hoped there would only be the clunky DVD jukeboxes in a small number of homes instead of VOD in almost every home.
Did you actually RTFA? Kaleidescape had a license with the DVD-CCA and obviously went to considerable lengths to keep them happy. This is a well funded, high end effort. I'd be willing to bet that the DVD-CCA just changed their minds and have decided to add punitive legal expenses to the profit calculations to nullify the previously legitimate business enterprise.
In other words the DVD-CCA probably knows they won't prevail in court but because of their deep pockets hope to win by attrition. I wasn't a great fan of Kaleidescape (too expensive by a wide margin) but I hope they countersue and win an amount large enough to cause real discomfort for the weasels at DVD-CCA.
Three words: pot, kettle, black. If you are going to fling insults couldn't you bother to actually read? The device is specifically for making remote content available. It could also be used to send video across a room, street, or city. But it gets more interesting when it is sent from thousands of miles away.
Didn't bother to even scan the articles, did you? Unless your Watchman is able to pick up stations in Moscow it isn't quite equivalent. Even if your video reception location is closer to home this device enables viewing of cable stations which the standalone products would find challenging. I suppose you could carry a DirecTV dish and hold it very steady.
Seriously, you should read the article in the Times or Cringely's column. It is a seriously cool product. You can either roll your own or wait for the price to drop to something more reasonable, like under $200. Or if you have an apartment in Rio, the desire to keep up with the Portuguese soap operas and the spare cash to buy at the current price (you do maintain an apartment in Brazil) then this is your solution.
"Now getting it over you cell phone would be the next step"
I think you just put your finger on what makes this "dangerous" technology. There are some very rich people/companies that want this sort of capability (delivering content to your cellphone, PSP, or Nintendo DS) to be a service that only they are allowed to sell. Having people use equipment they have purchased and services they are paying for reconfigured to take advantage of what the technology has to offer is something that won't simply be accepted without a challenge.
No, he did not commit a goof. He clarified something that was unnecessarily obscure from the story submission. I scanned through the three page article in the Times and then noticed that the Cringely link was hidden by being attached to the inverntor's name. That isn't really much of a problem but neither is someone making that link more explicit. You should welcome the added information rather than being pissy about it, I had already read Cringely's article and I'm grateful you brought attention to the corresponding article in the Times.
There were many remarkable aspects to the performance of Fiennes but the depiction of the character's decision to "lose" the contest and later to confess wrongdoing in front of a Congressional hearing raise the story to the level of a Greek tragedy. It may sound silly but I think the film accomplishes that. I am curious if the specifics of the incorrect answer were accurate or embellished for dramatic purposes. It is that moment of inexplicable error that seems familliar in this current contestant's error. Was he just tired of winning?
Similarity to the movie "Quiz Show"?
on
Adieu to Ken Jennings
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Am I the only one who saw the odd similarity to the moment when the character played by Ralph Fiennes in the movie "Quiz Show" purposely loses? It is a movie from 1994 so it is easy to rent a copy and it is a terrific movie. It is based on a real event from the 50's.
I suppose one possibility for this is the effectiveness of fear-mongers. I recall that after it was acknowledged that there was no more realistic possibility of danger from the Three Mile Island incident there was an almost hilarious claim by the religiously anti-nuclear activists. They claimed that although no one was directly harmed there was still all that fear and concern that took its toll. So we are to believe that the nuclear power industry was responsible for all the hysteria and dishonest claims of anti-nuclear propnonents?
Too many people fail to come to terms with the fact that we only get choices among certain options. If you categorically oppose any attempt to use nuclear power then you are choosing coal and oil. You can claim to support the use of hamster farts but that isn't one of the options. I don't in any way oppose the investigation of unconventional sources of power but you have to make the numbers add up and consider what the consequences might be if you scale up something like wind power. None of the options are free of undesired side effects.
If you are getting transfer rates like that a possible cause is that your listeners on ports 6881 to 6889 are not network visible. Are you behind a NAT or firewall? If you can forward ports in that range you might see your transfer rate go up closer to your capacity. Also you might want to use Azureus rather than the original Bittorrent as your client program.
The bandwidth costs for suppliers is diminshed tremendously so you might want to address this efficiency issue as more legitimate publishers of gigabyte range files learn about the bittorrent protocol.
"bittorrent more or less emulates a decentralized structure as each torrent operates independently of each other, but bittorrent itself is not"
I don't want to be snippy here but you seem to have some strange definitions. The discovery mechanism for BitTorrent is not significantly decentralized and each torrent file requires a tracker at a known IP address (it is stored in the torrent file). But file content is utterly decentralized. While a torrent might be seeded starting from a single source that content is supposed to be spread quite randomly over the entire population of connected nodes. So any particular chunk could come from any of the other nodes.
There have been other attempts at this idea of using a mesh for file transfer but it was BitTorrent that did it best first. It scales beautifully in response to popular content and effectively uses bandwidth "at the edge" which is an important aspect of P2P.
Please, Kazaa came after Gnutella. Kazaa was an attempt to commercialize and generate profit from a Gnutella style de-centralized protocol. It added the notion of supernodes but seems otherwise unoriginal. Gnutella was the work of Justin Frankel. author of Winamp, in response to the threats to Napster. His company had been purchased by AOL so when he posted it AOL had the site taken down within a day. But the program had "escaped", was reverse engineered and formed the nucleus of what became the gnutella scene.
Because Napster was such runaway success (by some measures the fastest growing adoption of a program ever) that P2P never went through a stage where it could be derided.
I realize that is meant at least in part as a jest. However, there are at least two observations that should be made. First the Mac is much more than one percent of the target market. Second, the Keyhole client program was developed with the Qt development system which is cross platform for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. With the added resources that Keyhole has now they could probably afford to do the remaining work that would be needed to support the other platforms. So I don't think Mac users should despair quite yet. On the other hand, Keyhole and low cost HDTV were all I needed to justify getting an Athlon box to share my desk with Mac OS X.
That's an intriguing web site you have (thanks for the link) but you should know that Keyhole already has Mars covered. When you log on you have the choice of viewing the Earth or Mars.
Well, how about because Keyhole is so much better that to call WorldWind better makes it clear you don't know what you are talking about? I think it is great that NASA has made WorldWind available and I hope it improves but there are at least three components to consider. The database of images requires a significant effort to acquire, organize, and host. Since satellite photos are only a fraction of what Keyhole offers (for higher resolution areas there are arial photos also) that is a significant challenge for NASA to meet. The second is the user interface which may be the most impressive part of Keyhole. It does a heck of a job providing the illusion of smooth flight from one place to another. Third, you have all the metadata from the provider, locally created by the user (bookmarks) and assembled by the community of users.
In a comparison of the two products WorldWind is a barebones version with great potential and taxpayer funding. I'll probably explore WorldWind assuming it evolves but as an experience it doesn't really make it past the starting line. If you have a PC with a good graphics card and a broadband connection do yourself a favor and try the one week free trial of Keyhole and see what Keyhole users find so compelling.
I appreciate your relatively civil tone but I'm not buying your argument that what we are seeing here is the result of market forces. In the seventies when I was buying LPs and living in Los Angeles we could easily find them for $3 each (Licorice Pizza in North Hollywood and elsewhere). When CDs were introduced the claim was made that they were much more expensive to produce and hence had to be sold for more. I'm skeptical that the popular music marketplace has fundamentally changed (ie supply and demand) but many years later when manufacturing costs are unquestionably less than what they were for LPs we are looking at prices of $15 easily.
My own suspicion is that the record companies have probably managed to skew the market because of the concentration of ownership. That is part of why I have no sympathy for them in their challenge from Russia and other emerging players.
Another significant fact in all your preaching about the market you overlook the fundamental fact that this is one of the industries which depends on a government guarantee of monopoly (ie copyright). Often this is treated as though it were like Newton's laws, ie the natural and only way it could be. When copyright law was extended to sound recordings it was supposed to be based on the clause in the Constitution about promoting art and science. If it does not serve that purpose then it is probably worth reconsidering.
If your argument had any validity why would sound track CDs routinely cost more than the corresponding DVD of the entire movie? It takes a strong dose of reality distortion to swallow such facts but a surprising number of people seem to be able to do just that. At least people at the RIAA are paid to believe their fairy tales.
You are suffering from some form of amnesia. When CDs appeared in the early eighties they were competing with LPs which could easily be found for $5 or less per album. I bought a few hundred so I recall that accurately. CDs were more expensive but the idea that they were $25 is complete crap. I don't have any receipts but I recall street prices close to $10. Were you even buying music 25 years ago? What I've watched over that time period is the price of CDs going steadily up so that a classical music album is often close to $20.
The attempt to wave the magic wand of inflation is also nonsense. First, there hasn't been inflation to speak of since the Carter administration. Second, technology products don't get more expensive. Their price tends toward zero, often quite quickly.
Just as a reality check notice that soundtrack CDs for movies are regularly more expensive than the complete DVD. That fact does not require memory extending over decades. You can walk into any Best Buy and confirm it.
No matter how much moralizing and posturing (including false memory) is employed it doesn't change the harsh fact that the recorded music business is broken, probably due to greed and bad habits. You can't sell for $15 something that can be trivially copied by a hundred million or so people for less than a dollar. It is possible to make a business selling bottled water so the task of selling music in some form will be possible but $15 mass market CD's are a bad joke.
You're skipping the historical data. I'm not making any claim about the "validity" of marketing costs. Just pointing out that from historical data it seems hard to argue that they must have expanded greatly over the years. The CD used to cost less but its per unit cost was much higher. Now that the per unit cost has shrunk we see that the cost has gone up considerably. There seems to have been a viable business twenty (and more) years ago. Why is promotion/marketing cost (which is not a per unit expense) grown so much other than because of a successfully run cartel? That is part of why I utterly reject any and all of their moralizing.
You might want to wipe that stuff off your nose before you continue the discussion but for those interested in a historical perspective consider the production costs and price of CD's since they were introduced in the 80's. First it would be useful to make a disctinction between the fixed costs and the recurring costs. The fixed costs don't vary greatly regardless of the delivery media. The per unit or recurring costs have changed enormously during the past twenty years. Originally you needed a billion dollar plant on at geologically stable location (exaggeration added for emphasis) to be able to produce CD's. They probably needed that $10 price to generate the capital needed to encourage more production.
Well, the market worked its magic causing the recurring prices to shrink to a scant fraction of their former amount. As a result the price of CD's has correspondingly dropped so that do-it-yourself burners cannot... Wait, the price has actually gone up considerably. Something just doesn't add up and pointing at recording engineers, album cover artists and warehouse operators is just not going to clean up that fishy smell.
What people suspect is that there is a middle man in there who is adding considerably to the cost who is not adding correspondingly to the value. Because the dissonance is so large it seems possible that the whole thing will implode at some point. Forget about burning CD's, the media cost for the storage space have collapsed to a fraction of a dollar per album (more than a gigabyte per dollar for current hard drives). You simply cannot maintain a business that charges $20 for those same bits no matter how many draconian laws you pay your lackeys to pass.
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If you've taken any physics course you should recognize that rotating a floor involves no actual work except the torque needed to start or stop rotation. Once it is rotating at the desired speed you just have to overcome whatever friction that would have been minimized by design.
I think the more puzzling issue is plumbing. If you look closely at the photos of the control touchscreen and the tower viewed from outside you can see there is a significant fraction of each unit that is in a stationary part that might be 20% of the floor space (bottom left on the screen, not the 'spindle'). You could probably do all the plumbing (kitchen and bathroom) in that fraction.
Maybe it's a bit over the top but what a nifty way to be able to handle natural lighting issues at various times of the day. Also it would be step up for Austin Powers from a bed that rotates to an entire flat that rotates. Now for the most important question: do they have inexpensive broadband access in Curitiba?
"Just proves one doesn't have to be good at math to be a top astronaut! ...
AIDs grows geometrically while a deadly flu grows exponentially"
I was about to agree somewhat with your first observation and then you make that odd remark which seems to imply geometric growth is different from exponential. I suppose I'll make some silly error before I finish this posting.
The 1 in 455 odds of human life expiring in the next 100 years seems awfully high unless you could attribute the high probability to some side effect of increased human population and activity. But he specifically mentions volcanoes, comets and asteroids. So is he saying that out of 455 centuries (less than 50,000 years) a species killing geological disaster is so probable?
I suppose for very little money I could test this possibility but I am curious if anyone has been able to routinely uncripple (ie remove DRM from) tracks purchased from Real.
"By what rational is it that "because you upload and download in parallel" that makes BT 'fast'."
It makes file transfers faster for at least two reasons. You need to understand at least a little about how it works. The file is divided into a number of hashed chunks. The torrent file contains the hash information (and the IP address of the tracker used). The bittorrent client provides chunks to other clients randomly. So no matter how much of a file a particular client has it is likely to have chunks others need and they are likely to have chunks it needs. As soon as a client joins a torrent and has part of the file it can both upload and download.
A consequence of this is that as more clients are added you also get that much more upload capacity. It scales up nicely so transfers can be faster due to added upload capacity compared to centralized transfer protocols.
Another aspect is that even clients on slow links can contribute to making transfers faster for others. Somebody with a big pipe can get pieces from a number of others who only have a limited amount of bandwidth to use. This works also for clients that have limited time periods for being connected. A transfer can be stopped and started any number of times and the client makes progress and helps others when connected. Very beneficial robust behavior.
Notice that I mentioned hash values for these chunks. As a client receives each chunk it can compare the actual hash with the advertised value and accept or reject a chunk based on that. This makes it more difficult to spoof the network with bad data.
Another journalistic pile of crap trying to derive great meaning from so very little. I remember an article of this sort from the early 80's predicting the entire center of technological innovation was soon to be in Tokyo with the USA at the periphery. Do you think they might have missed a few details in that prediction? Here is one of the most mind-numbing sentences from this article:
..."
"America has its share of early adopters, but they tend to be the exception rather than the rule;
If they were the rule rather than the exception they could hardly be called early adopters, could they?
I'm not going to argue that there are some preferences that seem to be culturally ingrained. For instance I remain mystified why almost all my neighbors and friends feel a need for a military attack style vehicle for their day to day transportation needs. Judging by the stories I see in T3 magazine and elsewhere it seems like the Japanese are more willing to part with their money for small clever bits of electronics.
But wherever you find yourself there is an abundance of gadgets that compete for your money and attention. I suppose it is related to having three children with their gadgets and desire for ever more but I don't see a dearth of options. The only example from the list of seven at the end of the article that causes any excitement for me is the PSP. Can I stand to wait six or seven weeks? I suppose having a fully deployed HDTV system and a PCI receiver board in my PC for viewing and capture could serve as a distraction. Couldn't do that at all in Japan until very recently and still can't outside a few of the largest cities.
I don't disagree that this action is probably a pre-emptive move against future developments that the DVDCCA sees as threatening. A nasty element of the action is the potential crushing of a company that appeared to be playing "by the rules". I don't know the details but a venture like this does not proceed as far as Kaleidescape managed without dotting all the I's and crossing all the T's. I remember reading months ago (maybe more than a year) that they had negotiated a license from the DVDCCA for this product. The DVDCCA cannot pretend this technology came as a surprise.
That's why I was hoping that a counter-suit is filed and the DVDCCA loses in a very expensive fashion so that cynical moves of this sort are not seen as a viable alternative. Kaleidescape had what appeared to be a lot of talent putting in years of their lives to build something that a lot of people want (at a much lower price).
What I think is truly ironic is that the DVDCCA's action will prove utterly ineffectual in the coming confrontation with their customers. DeCSS is about as hard to find as a water fountain in a shopping mall. Anyone who is thirsty can get a drink and anyone who wants to rip a DVD and re-author the elements to get rid of all the annoyances can do that with free tools (again courtesy of the DVDCCA which effectively force these tools to be free). The DVD format is so successful and widespread that there does not appear to be any way to update its effectively open format.
If we never expected to get cheap terabyte drives this would be relatively unimportant. The realization that IT IS COMING is probably what caused this litigious act. How does this lawsuit prevent the arrival of vast cheap storage? The answer, of course, is that it stops nothing. When people see they can put their thousands of dollars worth of DVD's on a $200 drive making it easy to find and view the content anywhere in their house, these elements will combine and make it so.
One final irony in this projected future is that while studios rage and spew venom over the state of affairs they will make even more profits than ever before and largely because their format was successfully "opened". Truly massive video on demand (VOD) home systems will be an incentive for even more DVD purchases. If they had succeeded in tying the content exclusively to a particular plastic artifact as they had hoped there would only be the clunky DVD jukeboxes in a small number of homes instead of VOD in almost every home.
Did you actually RTFA? Kaleidescape had a license with the DVD-CCA and obviously went to considerable lengths to keep them happy. This is a well funded, high end effort. I'd be willing to bet that the DVD-CCA just changed their minds and have decided to add punitive legal expenses to the profit calculations to nullify the previously legitimate business enterprise.
In other words the DVD-CCA probably knows they won't prevail in court but because of their deep pockets hope to win by attrition. I wasn't a great fan of Kaleidescape (too expensive by a wide margin) but I hope they countersue and win an amount large enough to cause real discomfort for the weasels at DVD-CCA.
Three words: pot, kettle, black. If you are going to fling insults couldn't you bother to actually read? The device is specifically for making remote content available. It could also be used to send video across a room, street, or city. But it gets more interesting when it is sent from thousands of miles away.
Didn't bother to even scan the articles, did you? Unless your Watchman is able to pick up stations in Moscow it isn't quite equivalent. Even if your video reception location is closer to home this device enables viewing of cable stations which the standalone products would find challenging. I suppose you could carry a DirecTV dish and hold it very steady.
Seriously, you should read the article in the Times or Cringely's column. It is a seriously cool product. You can either roll your own or wait for the price to drop to something more reasonable, like under $200. Or if you have an apartment in Rio, the desire to keep up with the Portuguese soap operas and the spare cash to buy at the current price (you do maintain an apartment in Brazil) then this is your solution.
"Now getting it over you cell phone would be the next step"
I think you just put your finger on what makes this "dangerous" technology. There are some very rich people/companies that want this sort of capability (delivering content to your cellphone, PSP, or Nintendo DS) to be a service that only they are allowed to sell. Having people use equipment they have purchased and services they are paying for reconfigured to take advantage of what the technology has to offer is something that won't simply be accepted without a challenge.
No, he did not commit a goof. He clarified something that was unnecessarily obscure from the story submission. I scanned through the three page article in the Times and then noticed that the Cringely link was hidden by being attached to the inverntor's name. That isn't really much of a problem but neither is someone making that link more explicit. You should welcome the added information rather than being pissy about it, I had already read Cringely's article and I'm grateful you brought attention to the corresponding article in the Times.
There were many remarkable aspects to the performance of Fiennes but the depiction of the character's decision to "lose" the contest and later to confess wrongdoing in front of a Congressional hearing raise the story to the level of a Greek tragedy. It may sound silly but I think the film accomplishes that. I am curious if the specifics of the incorrect answer were accurate or embellished for dramatic purposes. It is that moment of inexplicable error that seems familliar in this current contestant's error. Was he just tired of winning?
Am I the only one who saw the odd similarity to the moment when the character played by Ralph Fiennes in the movie "Quiz Show" purposely loses? It is a movie from 1994 so it is easy to rent a copy and it is a terrific movie. It is based on a real event from the 50's.
I suppose one possibility for this is the effectiveness of fear-mongers. I recall that after it was acknowledged that there was no more realistic possibility of danger from the Three Mile Island incident there was an almost hilarious claim by the religiously anti-nuclear activists. They claimed that although no one was directly harmed there was still all that fear and concern that took its toll. So we are to believe that the nuclear power industry was responsible for all the hysteria and dishonest claims of anti-nuclear propnonents?
Too many people fail to come to terms with the fact that we only get choices among certain options. If you categorically oppose any attempt to use nuclear power then you are choosing coal and oil. You can claim to support the use of hamster farts but that isn't one of the options. I don't in any way oppose the investigation of unconventional sources of power but you have to make the numbers add up and consider what the consequences might be if you scale up something like wind power. None of the options are free of undesired side effects.
If you are getting transfer rates like that a possible cause is that your listeners on ports 6881 to 6889 are not network visible. Are you behind a NAT or firewall? If you can forward ports in that range you might see your transfer rate go up closer to your capacity. Also you might want to use Azureus rather than the original Bittorrent as your client program.
The bandwidth costs for suppliers is diminshed tremendously so you might want to address this efficiency issue as more legitimate publishers of gigabyte range files learn about the bittorrent protocol.
"bittorrent more or less emulates a decentralized structure as each torrent operates independently of each other, but bittorrent itself is not"
I don't want to be snippy here but you seem to have some strange definitions. The discovery mechanism for BitTorrent is not significantly decentralized and each torrent file requires a tracker at a known IP address (it is stored in the torrent file). But file content is utterly decentralized. While a torrent might be seeded starting from a single source that content is supposed to be spread quite randomly over the entire population of connected nodes. So any particular chunk could come from any of the other nodes.
There have been other attempts at this idea of using a mesh for file transfer but it was BitTorrent that did it best first. It scales beautifully in response to popular content and effectively uses bandwidth "at the edge" which is an important aspect of P2P.
Please, Kazaa came after Gnutella. Kazaa was an attempt to commercialize and generate profit from a Gnutella style de-centralized protocol. It added the notion of supernodes but seems otherwise unoriginal. Gnutella was the work of Justin Frankel. author of Winamp, in response to the threats to Napster. His company had been purchased by AOL so when he posted it AOL had the site taken down within a day. But the program had "escaped", was reverse engineered and formed the nucleus of what became the gnutella scene.
Because Napster was such runaway success (by some measures the fastest growing adoption of a program ever) that P2P never went through a stage where it could be derided.
I realize that is meant at least in part as a jest. However, there are at least two observations that should be made. First the Mac is much more than one percent of the target market. Second, the Keyhole client program was developed with the Qt development system which is cross platform for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. With the added resources that Keyhole has now they could probably afford to do the remaining work that would be needed to support the other platforms. So I don't think Mac users should despair quite yet. On the other hand, Keyhole and low cost HDTV were all I needed to justify getting an Athlon box to share my desk with Mac OS X.
That's an intriguing web site you have (thanks for the link) but you should know that Keyhole already has Mars covered. When you log on you have the choice of viewing the Earth or Mars.
Well, how about because Keyhole is so much better that to call WorldWind better makes it clear you don't know what you are talking about? I think it is great that NASA has made WorldWind available and I hope it improves but there are at least three components to consider. The database of images requires a significant effort to acquire, organize, and host. Since satellite photos are only a fraction of what Keyhole offers (for higher resolution areas there are arial photos also) that is a significant challenge for NASA to meet. The second is the user interface which may be the most impressive part of Keyhole. It does a heck of a job providing the illusion of smooth flight from one place to another. Third, you have all the metadata from the provider, locally created by the user (bookmarks) and assembled by the community of users.
In a comparison of the two products WorldWind is a barebones version with great potential and taxpayer funding. I'll probably explore WorldWind assuming it evolves but as an experience it doesn't really make it past the starting line. If you have a PC with a good graphics card and a broadband connection do yourself a favor and try the one week free trial of Keyhole and see what Keyhole users find so compelling.
I appreciate your relatively civil tone but I'm not buying your argument that what we are seeing here is the result of market forces. In the seventies when I was buying LPs and living in Los Angeles we could easily find them for $3 each (Licorice Pizza in North Hollywood and elsewhere). When CDs were introduced the claim was made that they were much more expensive to produce and hence had to be sold for more. I'm skeptical that the popular music marketplace has fundamentally changed (ie supply and demand) but many years later when manufacturing costs are unquestionably less than what they were for LPs we are looking at prices of $15 easily.
My own suspicion is that the record companies have probably managed to skew the market because of the concentration of ownership. That is part of why I have no sympathy for them in their challenge from Russia and other emerging players.
Another significant fact in all your preaching about the market you overlook the fundamental fact that this is one of the industries which depends on a government guarantee of monopoly (ie copyright). Often this is treated as though it were like Newton's laws, ie the natural and only way it could be. When copyright law was extended to sound recordings it was supposed to be based on the clause in the Constitution about promoting art and science. If it does not serve that purpose then it is probably worth reconsidering.
If your argument had any validity why would sound track CDs routinely cost more than the corresponding DVD of the entire movie? It takes a strong dose of reality distortion to swallow such facts but a surprising number of people seem to be able to do just that. At least people at the RIAA are paid to believe their fairy tales.
You are suffering from some form of amnesia. When CDs appeared in the early eighties they were competing with LPs which could easily be found for $5 or less per album. I bought a few hundred so I recall that accurately. CDs were more expensive but the idea that they were $25 is complete crap. I don't have any receipts but I recall street prices close to $10. Were you even buying music 25 years ago? What I've watched over that time period is the price of CDs going steadily up so that a classical music album is often close to $20.
The attempt to wave the magic wand of inflation is also nonsense. First, there hasn't been inflation to speak of since the Carter administration. Second, technology products don't get more expensive. Their price tends toward zero, often quite quickly.
Just as a reality check notice that soundtrack CDs for movies are regularly more expensive than the complete DVD. That fact does not require memory extending over decades. You can walk into any Best Buy and confirm it.
No matter how much moralizing and posturing (including false memory) is employed it doesn't change the harsh fact that the recorded music business is broken, probably due to greed and bad habits. You can't sell for $15 something that can be trivially copied by a hundred million or so people for less than a dollar. It is possible to make a business selling bottled water so the task of selling music in some form will be possible but $15 mass market CD's are a bad joke.
You're skipping the historical data. I'm not making any claim about the "validity" of marketing costs. Just pointing out that from historical data it seems hard to argue that they must have expanded greatly over the years. The CD used to cost less but its per unit cost was much higher. Now that the per unit cost has shrunk we see that the cost has gone up considerably. There seems to have been a viable business twenty (and more) years ago. Why is promotion/marketing cost (which is not a per unit expense) grown so much other than because of a successfully run cartel? That is part of why I utterly reject any and all of their moralizing.
You might want to wipe that stuff off your nose before you continue the discussion but for those interested in a historical perspective consider the production costs and price of CD's since they were introduced in the 80's. First it would be useful to make a disctinction between the fixed costs and the recurring costs. The fixed costs don't vary greatly regardless of the delivery media. The per unit or recurring costs have changed enormously during the past twenty years. Originally you needed a billion dollar plant on at geologically stable location (exaggeration added for emphasis) to be able to produce CD's. They probably needed that $10 price to generate the capital needed to encourage more production.
... Wait, the price has actually gone up considerably. Something just doesn't add up and pointing at recording engineers, album cover artists and warehouse operators is just not going to clean up that fishy smell.
Well, the market worked its magic causing the recurring prices to shrink to a scant fraction of their former amount. As a result the price of CD's has correspondingly dropped so that do-it-yourself burners cannot
What people suspect is that there is a middle man in there who is adding considerably to the cost who is not adding correspondingly to the value. Because the dissonance is so large it seems possible that the whole thing will implode at some point. Forget about burning CD's, the media cost for the storage space have collapsed to a fraction of a dollar per album (more than a gigabyte per dollar for current hard drives). You simply cannot maintain a business that charges $20 for those same bits no matter how many draconian laws you pay your lackeys to pass.