Don't forget all the toxic nasties that come with computers. If I'm not mistaken, most Computer power supplies contain (or at least, used to contain) PCBs and other friendly chemicals, a small amount of which would waft into the air whenever they warmed up.
How much do you hate telemarketers who call up and say "hi, can I clean your chimney?" and you say "sure, if you can find it. I have no fireplace!", frustrated at the irrelevance of the sales call. If, on the other hand, you get the call "Hi, it's Bob from Shyzmecca BMW. I see you bought a 328i last year, and at your last oil change, you had 16,000 miles on it.
I used to work for a major long-distance provider. They were kind enough to reimburse most of my long-distance & local charges, which made choosing my phone company a breeze. From time to time (ie, once a week), I would get a telemarketing call from another long-distance company, eager to sell me on their newest hairbrained scheme (what, pay for my long-distance calls, are you nuts??)
It was one of the singular joys of my telemarketing experience to stop that guy, not 5 seconds into his spiel: "I don't want to waste your time, I work for [X], and get my long-distance free. If you've got a more competitive plan, I'd love to hear about it."
I suppose if you've been put off or hung up on fifty times in a row, that's at least a new one. There'd generally be a slight pause, then oftentimes a genuine laugh from the guy/gal on the other end. I could hang up the phone without that pesky anger/guilt I get when I have to blow off a marketer (who's generally some poor schmuck who's only being obnoxious to pay his bills.) The calls were so poorly targetted that getting rid of them was painless.
Er, so my point... I hate getting poorly targetted phone calls, but it's so damn easy to get rid of the things you have no interest in. I don't have a fireplace, so it's easy to deal with that chimney-sweeper. On the other hand, if a marketer knows that I bought a new BMW last year (I wish), and that I regularly have the oil changed by his competitor, he's got incentive to be a whole lot more persistent. Now, if the number of marketing calls I get per week goes down as a result of this technology, that's great. But somehow I doubt that'll be the result.
Akward phrasing, simple message
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Emergence
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· Score: 1
Bzzt! The referer header tells you the URL of the document containing the link. It tells you nothing about who followed the link.
I think you misunderstood the comment. He meant that you only receive information on those links that people follow. A hundred pages could link to your site, but if nobody ever follows those links, you'll never know they exist.
The subject of his message may have been confusing. But if you read the rest of you'll see that he didn't imply that HTTP-REFERER gives you additional information about the person who followed the link, it only provides the URL of the page they came from.
You're certainly right in one sense. Definitely, people who are willing to do time for their actions garner a certain amount of respect, which draws attention to their plight. But ultimately the effectiveness of their actions is not directly related to their suffering.
To generalize, the primary goal of an action of civil disobedience is to draw society's attention to an injustice. I don't think either of us would argue on that point. There are various ways to get attention. Certainly, getting yourself jailed or shot is one. But there are others.
The bottom line is, does the rest of society see what's happened to you as an injustice, and have you accomplished your goal? Somebody who's arrested for killing doctors to make a point doesn't get a lot of respect from me and a lot of other Americans. On the other hand, some guy who finds himself incarcerated for violating some silly, unjust law (and who never intended to make a statement, or go to jail) can make a very big difference.
So again, I suppose we're talking about the ends and the means. I submit that the ends are what defines a successful disobedience, while the means may vary. The point here is, if I think that somebody's being punished unfairly, I will sympathize with them regardless of whether they have the cojones to be stoic about their plight. And if their whining is what ultimately gets more people to pay attention to what's going on, then that's as effective a technique as any other.
Microsoft didn't go to the RIAA and say, "Hey, people are stealing your music, don't you want some digital rights management solutions?"
In point of fact, Microsoft did go to the RIAA and say that. They made a concerted effort to sell their Windows Media DRM solution, as did IBM and a bunch of other people. DRM solutions were the next big thing at the time, and nobody knew that the music industry was gonna drop the ball on it so completely. Microsoft just had enough money and patience to continue the selling, long after the competition began to flag.
It's not a terribly big point to make, though, as Microsoft really is just responding to content-providers' demands by producing integrated DRM systems. The problem is, what's in the content-providers' interest is not necessarily what's good for their customers-- and as MS is a monopoly, there's not much that the customers can do about it. It worries me when a monopoly teams up with a Cartel and starts building features like DRM into a monopoly-product. The consequences can be dire for smaller competitors in the music and software business, not to mention the end-user.
civil disobedience requires the willingness to be arrested and jailed, very publicly, in order to make your point.
Again, this is where we disagree. Many people believe this is true, but it's not. Actions of civil disobedience can be undertaken peacefully, by people with a sincere desire not to be punished. When the people of East Berlin marched on the Wall, they were engaged in one of the greatest acts of civil disobedience of this century. Some of those marching may have been looking forward to a confrontation with machine guns, but the majority probably would've hit the bricks if they really thought they were going to die. But that didn't happen, because a million people standing in solidarity makes for a powerful form of civil disobedience. So powerful that, perversely, it also reduces the chance that there will be consequences for the individuals involved. The problem with your definition is that it measures the "quality" of civil disobedience by the potential consequences to the perpetrators, not by the results that they obtain.
A lot of those who would currently claim the mantle of civil disobedience seem to want to skip the consequence part.
In their heart, every sane person wants to skip the consequences part, no matter how just the cause. The exceptions are generally a few lunatics or would-be martyrs. Where is it written that we need rely on narcissists and the insane to keep our society balanced? In any case, when you knowingly engage in an act of civil disobedience, you've made your bed. You know at the outset that there will be consequences, and even if down the road you decide that you don't want to go to jail (quite a reasonable decision, mind you), you can't really do much about it.
Furthermore, fighting the charges is a large component of civil disobedience. If you're being accused of violating an unjust law, then you want to make everybody and their brother know it, and hopefully go down fighting-- or better, yet, come out on top. Some people view this as avoiding responsibility... But honestly, if the law is illegal or immoral, why should you feel personally obligated to roll over and do time? There are plenty of other people who'll handle the prosecution, without your help.
Back on track, I'm not calling these Warez kids heroes, or comparing their actions in this particular case to the toppling of the Berlin Wall. Hell no. And I'm certainly not implying that their actions weren't primarily undertaken for personal gratification. But I'm willing to accept that there's a certain element of nose-thumbing implicit in any operation that so publicly tramples copyright law, and that maybe their actions will have a certain, tiny impact on the nation's overzealous attitude toward copyright protection despite the fact that they were mostly just looking to play games free. Maybe twenty more kids will be so annoyed at the gov'ts actions that they'll start a Warez group of their own. Maybe the gov't will become even nastier in its legislative/enforcement efforts, to the point where the rest of society rebels against laws like the DMCA.
Who knows, at some point, twenty or fifty years from now, we may look back and be shocked that Federal agents would draw their weapons against some kids who were just sharing files.
The first thing that popped in my mind was "what about the majority of linux companies". Although it's not properly warez, it's still a situation where most people d/l the software for free.
The Linux companies also got most of their software for free.
So in a way, "piracy" (using the term jokingly) is responsible for those companies' existence in the first place.
What you say is basically the same as what so many traffic (parking, speed, etc) offenders say: "Don't you have some bad guys to arrest?"
If there's a riot in progress in my city, and I'm stopped by some cop who has nothing better to do than bust me for going 8 miles over the speed limit, I am going to be pissed. And with a certain amount of justification.
We're being told that the FBI needs enormous resources to fight the war on Terrorism. We're told that they need extreme new police powers. I'm not saying that we should put all other law enforcement matters on the back burner, but if what we're being told is correct, we should damn well put the less important ones there. Nobody was even arrested in this scheme. The government poured an enormous number of agent-hours into capturing a handful of Warez-crammed boxes... That will no doubt be replicated within a week.
That's what civil disobedience is all about, taking absurd responsibility for an unjust law.
Very few people want to be arrested or jailed. In an ideal case of civil disobedience, the government finds your activity to be so widespread and unstoppable that they realize enforcing an unjust law isn't worth it, given the incredible measures required by enforcement (years in jail for copying some files with no intention of making a profit?) And maybe an unjust law is repealed.
Now, oftentimes things don't go that way. People get arrested, locked up, etc. Some people think this part of the process is the be-all-end-all-- that people should want to go to jail, and in the absence of that desire, there's no message to be taken away from the situation. And that's a shame.
The folks in Boston who threw tea into the harbor wore disguises and did their work under the cover of night. They probably had families, and didn't feel that rotting in jail or the stocks was a great way to demonstrate their disaffection.
And what do you know? Respectable people nowadays say such favorable things about those idiots, despite their desire not to face the consequences.
Bad guys releasing info on the exploit has _nothing_ to do with obscurity. If bad guys know about a bug and don't tell anyone in open source software, the bug is still there.
An airplane designer might not notice some very unlikely disaster waiting to happen, simply by browsing the blueprints. He/she does have a good chance of noticing a messy or dangerous design, such as electric wires running through the fuel tanks, however.
Security may not be the first thing you think about when designing a web browser, but it's right up there. IE should have been built from ground up around a handful of simple security precautions. The fact that this bug exists points to a bunch of bolted together security code. Had the source been open, somebody could have at least noticed this, and maybe taken some steps to correct it. Not that there isn't a lot of messy Open Source code, but in something as widely used as IE you really want to do it right.
Other p2p protocols might be wrapped in classes for JXTA. The value added would then be some Grand Unified P2P Theory Application (GUPTA)!?
I imagine this'll be the way of things some day. Generally, you wouldn't write your own GUI library to draw windows and menu bars nowadays, so probably in a few years the same'll be true of p2p applications.
Though I doubt it'll be JXTA. Too kludgy, and written in Java. My guess is that the first library to garner popular use and support will be the one to take off, even if it's not as flexible as JXTA. And that'll probably be a more practically-oriented C/C++ implementation. JXTA reeks of "research project".
But I couldn't help but be aware at some level that the mod might attract the attention of a game maker and land me a job.
The question is, would you still have made the Quake mod if you'd known absolutely that it wouldn't land you a job-- or if you already had a great job waiting for you?
And to go further, having contemplated that question, do you think the majority of Open Source coders would answer as you did? If the answer to both questions is yes, or the answer to both questions is no, then I think Open Source would do just fine without financial incentives to back it up.
For a great example of people contributing their time with just about 0 expectation of reward, check out collaborative projects like Wikipedia (or even Slashdot, for that matter!) People spend hundreds of hours posting to these things with little to no realistic expectation that they'll get a resume boost out of it. We coders are lucky in that we can haul out the old "it'll gain me work experience" excuse to justify our own concerns about the time we spend.
The underlying question I have remains: given the smorgasboard of existing protocols, how does this new effort simplify effort, or add capability? Or is it just counter-battery fire in response to C#?
I think C# is the wrong comparison. The equivalent of JXTA is something like the gIFT/OpenFT. Both of these are libraries (written in C, incidentally) that help you write p2p apps by implementing a lot of the features an average p2p app needs.
If you were trying to write a p2p app, would you really want to go to all of the trouble of defining a communication protocol for inter-node messages, building a system that can route messages between nodes, etc. when all of this has already been done by other p2p applications? Or wouldn't it be easier just to start with a library containing an implementation of a communication protocol and a whole bunch of useful routines for peer discovery and communication? That's what JXTA and gIFT/OpenFT try to be. Neither is quite there yet, and I don't think there are any other Open Source projects that are further along (there are a handful of Open Source p2p apps out there.)
With one of these libraries, building a p2p app could be as easy as a) call some library routines to discover other peers on the network, b) start an engine thread that handles incoming messages and updates the list of nodes we're connected to, in case some drop out, c) upon receiving a request message, call a routine to send a reply message, or open a "pipe" to that node so we can send data. With a library that took care of all the tricky p2p stuff, you could write a variety of complex p2p apps very easily.
JXTA is trying to do a neat thing. Essentially, it helps abstract away all of the complicated stuff. Every node on your p2p network gets a unique ID number. If you want to communicate with that node, you can create a "pipe" class to that ID number. The library will then figure out the details of how to actually get your data to the node in question (it may involve routing through other p2p nodes, or transparently encrypting the data). If you know the IP address of one other node on the network, the JXTA library contains routines that help you find others. Your application can sit "above" the JXTA library and not trouble itself dealing with the complexities involved in a p2p network. Now, none of this seems to be implemented enough to be practical. But the concept is a great one.
Futhermore, I would submit that for p2p application development, protocol compatibility isn't a very big deal (at this juncture, at least.) If I want to write a p2p app for sharing files, and another app for chat, it's perfectly ok if they use different protocols, and build separate networks. I could use OpenFT/gIFT for my chat app, and JXTA for my file-sharing app. Unless I wanted the two applications to be compatible, there'd be no reason to settle on pick one just to use a standard. Maybe at some point in the near future, it'll be useful for all p2p apps to speak a standardized protocol so that clients with different needs can all combine their resources, but not now.
Working on free projects can help create a reputation and a portfolio that can help you make money, and developers in countries who are forgoing less money by concentrating on free projects therefore are more likely to do so.
It strikes me that the development of a portfolio and increased income is often the justification people use for doing something that they just like to do anyway.
There probably are people who view Open Source coding as a road to prosperity, but probably only a small subset of those people derive so little personal satisfaction from the process that resume-building is their primary motivation.
The future needs something like JXTA, although having messed with the code, I get the feeling that JXTA isn't quite it. Yet.
What is it, specifically, besides (insert file-sharing utility here) with enhanced security?
That's a very poor way of characterizing it. What JXTA is (or attempts to be) is a platform upon which you can easily develop and deploy a p2p app-- without all that messy reinventing the wheel that would otherwise be required. File sharing apps are certainly one application you could develop, but you can also build distributed computing/streaming/chat utilities. And anything else you can imagine.
So the concept is great. Unfortunately, JXTA doesn't seem to be quite there yet. JXTA currently only provides a working implementation of the lower-level components required to put together a p2p app. Peer discovery isn't very sophisticated at this point, though the basic tools with which you might build a more sophisticated system are there. And performance isn't great.
This is only my opinion, but the problem I see is that JXTA seems to be more of a research project than an attempt to build a practical p2p platform. Maybe in time JXTA will be refined into a more practical tool, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was displaced by a better performing, less flexible platform (based off of Kazaa/Morpheus, maybe.)
I think a lot of internet junkies are still wary because they're decent business-people too, and this being the case, the reason people distrust online banks and payment services are their apparent lack of physical stuff.
Or maybe it's because internet service companies have tendency to go tits up without much warning. Regardless of how much physical "stuff" they've got lying around.
Linking to them, giving them free press and promo.
Two problems:
1. Visitors have to get past that damn Flash intro first.
2. Sixty seconds of that damned theme song should end any desire to do business with this company.
Forget the boonies... My last discussion with a friend who is an engineer for a wireless company implied that the maximum useful distance between cells was about 1/2 mile. Meaning you're not going to see them anywhere outside of the cities for a long, long time.
But the complaints about the video display miss the point entirely: once the video data is flowing, you can output to a number of interfaces; imagine piping that video stream to a sunglass-display, for example.
Not on 470,000 bps shared, you're not gonna be doing a lot of that. Unless your local telco can stay in business with less than ten users per cell... or you like RealPlayer quality, circa 1996. Then you might as well just watch it on your phone.
I think high-speed data is a great thing, and should be an immediate goal. That does not mean that the wireless companies should invest billions (trillions) in the first halfway-there tech they can get their hand on. The financial hit the Telcos take on 3G could well slow down advances in high-speed data delivery for years.
The killer app isn't here yet. I had an iPaq with a PC-card jacket and a Ricochet card a while back, and it was nifty... But it wasn't all that. It weighed too much, battery life and screen size weren't useful for an Internet-linked device, and IO was a hassle. That's probably the best networked handheld I've seen (short of a small laptop.) And you can forget about cell phones. Even high-speed WAP is still WAP.
It's sort of a chicken and egg problem. Do you wait til there are enough people with a need for high-speed wireless net? Or do you provide the net, and hope that the products and services come? I'm all about the "if you build it, people will find an application" approach, but it can bankrupt companies; my Ricochet doesn't work anymore because of it. The Telcos can't afford to offer a service that nobody needs, even if they can delude themselves into thinking they'll make it all back on WAP and SMS.
However, how would you telecommuters like to be able to work from ANYWHERE in the world without sacrificing your high-speed, always-on connection to the internet?
It was called Ricochet, and I liked it just fine. Sure, it didn't work anywhere in the world (far from it), but neither will 3G whenever it creaks its ass around. From what I understand, 3G isn't likely to exist outside of the major cities for a long time to come.
And despite appearances, Ricochet was supposed to be a cheap solution compared to all-out 3G. I'm not holding my breath for 3G, given that the already-struggling telcos see it as a risky venture with no guaranteed market. Even if they bite the bullet, we're going to wind up with an expensive standardized system built out of what will immediately become yesterday's technology. Or the day-before-yesterday's technology if we start with TDMA.
470Kb shared with 100 other people in my cell... How much is this going to cost?
We'll see some kind of practical 3G or beyond. but I'm willing to bet it'll resemble the 802.11 city networks more closely than it does today's cellular system.
Besides, doesn't triangulation (by definition) require receiving a radio signal from two different locations?
It requires receiving a radio signal at two different locations. Presumably this could be done, if the ship Hackman commands is linked to some other receiver, such as a radar or signals plane. Not to defend a movie that probably has more holes than The 6th Day.
Re:Begging Questions and Urban Planning
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This is IT?
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· Score: 1
Hope the criminal has some faster mode of transportation for the getaway.
Presumably he'll have no problem outrunning the victim's out-of-shape "IT"-riding ass...
Actually no, he was right. Version 1.0 was the analog cellular spec that the US adopted long before Europe really got interested. The US missed the boat on GSM because we jumped first at analog cellular.
Yes, and that was more than ten years ago. My point is that the worm has completely turned.
I find it strange that index.museum doesn't even link to the museum sites. It just spits them out as text (sans hyperlink), forcing you to copy and paste them into the browser. Not a very big deal, but I'm wondering if this is a deliberate choice they made given the anti-hyperlinking decision in the 2600 case.
This of course means that the USA tends to implement version 1.0 all across the country, and when you've covered an area that big with version 1.0, version 2.0 is gonna be a long time coming;)
Actually, it seems that the situation is reversed in this case. GSM uses a less-advanced technology (TDMA) than many US networks (CDMA). Europe/Asia/Africa have opted to standardize this older system, while some US carriers have gone ahead and adopted more advanced but incompatible systems. As we've got no expectations of compatibility (even when switching from one company to another), it's easier to skip to newer tech.
I don't entirely agree with the US companies' decision here, but I do think it may have some unexpected benefits. For one, we may be able to move in with a much more advanced 3G without being tied down by a whole lot of backwards-compatibility concerns. For another, it may turn out that the focus on standardized networks becomes less and less important as technology becomes more adaptable. The price and flexibility of wireless tech have been plunging and exploding, respectively. It may turn out that compatibility is more effectively acheived by cheap Taiwanese chipsets than by standardized networks.
Personally, having caught a glimpse of the projected cost of 3G (for not-terribly impressive data rates, and only in the cities), I'm skeptical of the whole project. I think the next generation of data/phone tech will take its cues from 802.11 tech, and GSM will become a relic. This is obviously a few years off, though. In the mean time, we Americans just have to rent phones when we get off the plane (not a terrible deal when you consider international roaming charges, I'm told.)
As to "America gets stuck on 1.0", there's plenty of precedent for the opposite; the Minitel in France (outmoded by the web) and analog HDTV in Japan. Sometimes our stubborness is actually an asset.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget all the toxic nasties that come with computers. If I'm not mistaken, most Computer power supplies contain (or at least, used to contain) PCBs and other friendly chemicals, a small amount of which would waft into the air whenever they warmed up.
I used to work for a major long-distance provider. They were kind enough to reimburse most of my long-distance & local charges, which made choosing my phone company a breeze. From time to time (ie, once a week), I would get a telemarketing call from another long-distance company, eager to sell me on their newest hairbrained scheme (what, pay for my long-distance calls, are you nuts??)
It was one of the singular joys of my telemarketing experience to stop that guy, not 5 seconds into his spiel: "I don't want to waste your time, I work for [X], and get my long-distance free. If you've got a more competitive plan, I'd love to hear about it."
I suppose if you've been put off or hung up on fifty times in a row, that's at least a new one. There'd generally be a slight pause, then oftentimes a genuine laugh from the guy/gal on the other end. I could hang up the phone without that pesky anger/guilt I get when I have to blow off a marketer (who's generally some poor schmuck who's only being obnoxious to pay his bills.) The calls were so poorly targetted that getting rid of them was painless.
Er, so my point... I hate getting poorly targetted phone calls, but it's so damn easy to get rid of the things you have no interest in. I don't have a fireplace, so it's easy to deal with that chimney-sweeper. On the other hand, if a marketer knows that I bought a new BMW last year (I wish), and that I regularly have the oil changed by his competitor, he's got incentive to be a whole lot more persistent. Now, if the number of marketing calls I get per week goes down as a result of this technology, that's great. But somehow I doubt that'll be the result.
I think you misunderstood the comment. He meant that you only receive information on those links that people follow. A hundred pages could link to your site, but if nobody ever follows those links, you'll never know they exist.
The subject of his message may have been confusing. But if you read the rest of you'll see that he didn't imply that HTTP-REFERER gives you additional information about the person who followed the link, it only provides the URL of the page they came from.
To generalize, the primary goal of an action of civil disobedience is to draw society's attention to an injustice. I don't think either of us would argue on that point. There are various ways to get attention. Certainly, getting yourself jailed or shot is one. But there are others.
The bottom line is, does the rest of society see what's happened to you as an injustice, and have you accomplished your goal? Somebody who's arrested for killing doctors to make a point doesn't get a lot of respect from me and a lot of other Americans. On the other hand, some guy who finds himself incarcerated for violating some silly, unjust law (and who never intended to make a statement, or go to jail) can make a very big difference.
So again, I suppose we're talking about the ends and the means. I submit that the ends are what defines a successful disobedience, while the means may vary. The point here is, if I think that somebody's being punished unfairly, I will sympathize with them regardless of whether they have the cojones to be stoic about their plight. And if their whining is what ultimately gets more people to pay attention to what's going on, then that's as effective a technique as any other.
In point of fact, Microsoft did go to the RIAA and say that. They made a concerted effort to sell their Windows Media DRM solution, as did IBM and a bunch of other people. DRM solutions were the next big thing at the time, and nobody knew that the music industry was gonna drop the ball on it so completely. Microsoft just had enough money and patience to continue the selling, long after the competition began to flag.
It's not a terribly big point to make, though, as Microsoft really is just responding to content-providers' demands by producing integrated DRM systems. The problem is, what's in the content-providers' interest is not necessarily what's good for their customers-- and as MS is a monopoly, there's not much that the customers can do about it. It worries me when a monopoly teams up with a Cartel and starts building features like DRM into a monopoly-product. The consequences can be dire for smaller competitors in the music and software business, not to mention the end-user.
Again, this is where we disagree. Many people believe this is true, but it's not. Actions of civil disobedience can be undertaken peacefully, by people with a sincere desire not to be punished. When the people of East Berlin marched on the Wall, they were engaged in one of the greatest acts of civil disobedience of this century. Some of those marching may have been looking forward to a confrontation with machine guns, but the majority probably would've hit the bricks if they really thought they were going to die. But that didn't happen, because a million people standing in solidarity makes for a powerful form of civil disobedience. So powerful that, perversely, it also reduces the chance that there will be consequences for the individuals involved. The problem with your definition is that it measures the "quality" of civil disobedience by the potential consequences to the perpetrators, not by the results that they obtain.
A lot of those who would currently claim the mantle of civil disobedience seem to want to skip the consequence part.
In their heart, every sane person wants to skip the consequences part, no matter how just the cause. The exceptions are generally a few lunatics or would-be martyrs. Where is it written that we need rely on narcissists and the insane to keep our society balanced? In any case, when you knowingly engage in an act of civil disobedience, you've made your bed. You know at the outset that there will be consequences, and even if down the road you decide that you don't want to go to jail (quite a reasonable decision, mind you), you can't really do much about it.
Furthermore, fighting the charges is a large component of civil disobedience. If you're being accused of violating an unjust law, then you want to make everybody and their brother know it, and hopefully go down fighting-- or better, yet, come out on top. Some people view this as avoiding responsibility... But honestly, if the law is illegal or immoral, why should you feel personally obligated to roll over and do time? There are plenty of other people who'll handle the prosecution, without your help.
Back on track, I'm not calling these Warez kids heroes, or comparing their actions in this particular case to the toppling of the Berlin Wall. Hell no. And I'm certainly not implying that their actions weren't primarily undertaken for personal gratification. But I'm willing to accept that there's a certain element of nose-thumbing implicit in any operation that so publicly tramples copyright law, and that maybe their actions will have a certain, tiny impact on the nation's overzealous attitude toward copyright protection despite the fact that they were mostly just looking to play games free. Maybe twenty more kids will be so annoyed at the gov'ts actions that they'll start a Warez group of their own. Maybe the gov't will become even nastier in its legislative/enforcement efforts, to the point where the rest of society rebels against laws like the DMCA.
Who knows, at some point, twenty or fifty years from now, we may look back and be shocked that Federal agents would draw their weapons against some kids who were just sharing files.
The Linux companies also got most of their software for free.
So in a way, "piracy" (using the term jokingly) is responsible for those companies' existence in the first place.
If there's a riot in progress in my city, and I'm stopped by some cop who has nothing better to do than bust me for going 8 miles over the speed limit, I am going to be pissed. And with a certain amount of justification.
We're being told that the FBI needs enormous resources to fight the war on Terrorism. We're told that they need extreme new police powers. I'm not saying that we should put all other law enforcement matters on the back burner, but if what we're being told is correct, we should damn well put the less important ones there. Nobody was even arrested in this scheme. The government poured an enormous number of agent-hours into capturing a handful of Warez-crammed boxes... That will no doubt be replicated within a week.
Very few people want to be arrested or jailed. In an ideal case of civil disobedience, the government finds your activity to be so widespread and unstoppable that they realize enforcing an unjust law isn't worth it, given the incredible measures required by enforcement (years in jail for copying some files with no intention of making a profit?) And maybe an unjust law is repealed.
Now, oftentimes things don't go that way. People get arrested, locked up, etc. Some people think this part of the process is the be-all-end-all-- that people should want to go to jail, and in the absence of that desire, there's no message to be taken away from the situation. And that's a shame.
The folks in Boston who threw tea into the harbor wore disguises and did their work under the cover of night. They probably had families, and didn't feel that rotting in jail or the stocks was a great way to demonstrate their disaffection.
And what do you know? Respectable people nowadays say such favorable things about those idiots, despite their desire not to face the consequences.
An airplane designer might not notice some very unlikely disaster waiting to happen, simply by browsing the blueprints. He/she does have a good chance of noticing a messy or dangerous design, such as electric wires running through the fuel tanks, however.
Security may not be the first thing you think about when designing a web browser, but it's right up there. IE should have been built from ground up around a handful of simple security precautions. The fact that this bug exists points to a bunch of bolted together security code. Had the source been open, somebody could have at least noticed this, and maybe taken some steps to correct it. Not that there isn't a lot of messy Open Source code, but in something as widely used as IE you really want to do it right.
I imagine this'll be the way of things some day. Generally, you wouldn't write your own GUI library to draw windows and menu bars nowadays, so probably in a few years the same'll be true of p2p applications.
Though I doubt it'll be JXTA. Too kludgy, and written in Java. My guess is that the first library to garner popular use and support will be the one to take off, even if it's not as flexible as JXTA. And that'll probably be a more practically-oriented C/C++ implementation. JXTA reeks of "research project".
The question is, would you still have made the Quake mod if you'd known absolutely that it wouldn't land you a job-- or if you already had a great job waiting for you?
And to go further, having contemplated that question, do you think the majority of Open Source coders would answer as you did? If the answer to both questions is yes, or the answer to both questions is no, then I think Open Source would do just fine without financial incentives to back it up.
For a great example of people contributing their time with just about 0 expectation of reward, check out collaborative projects like Wikipedia (or even Slashdot, for that matter!) People spend hundreds of hours posting to these things with little to no realistic expectation that they'll get a resume boost out of it. We coders are lucky in that we can haul out the old "it'll gain me work experience" excuse to justify our own concerns about the time we spend.
I think C# is the wrong comparison. The equivalent of JXTA is something like the gIFT/OpenFT. Both of these are libraries (written in C, incidentally) that help you write p2p apps by implementing a lot of the features an average p2p app needs.
If you were trying to write a p2p app, would you really want to go to all of the trouble of defining a communication protocol for inter-node messages, building a system that can route messages between nodes, etc. when all of this has already been done by other p2p applications? Or wouldn't it be easier just to start with a library containing an implementation of a communication protocol and a whole bunch of useful routines for peer discovery and communication? That's what JXTA and gIFT/OpenFT try to be. Neither is quite there yet, and I don't think there are any other Open Source projects that are further along (there are a handful of Open Source p2p apps out there.)
With one of these libraries, building a p2p app could be as easy as a) call some library routines to discover other peers on the network, b) start an engine thread that handles incoming messages and updates the list of nodes we're connected to, in case some drop out, c) upon receiving a request message, call a routine to send a reply message, or open a "pipe" to that node so we can send data. With a library that took care of all the tricky p2p stuff, you could write a variety of complex p2p apps very easily.
JXTA is trying to do a neat thing. Essentially, it helps abstract away all of the complicated stuff. Every node on your p2p network gets a unique ID number. If you want to communicate with that node, you can create a "pipe" class to that ID number. The library will then figure out the details of how to actually get your data to the node in question (it may involve routing through other p2p nodes, or transparently encrypting the data). If you know the IP address of one other node on the network, the JXTA library contains routines that help you find others. Your application can sit "above" the JXTA library and not trouble itself dealing with the complexities involved in a p2p network. Now, none of this seems to be implemented enough to be practical. But the concept is a great one.
Futhermore, I would submit that for p2p application development, protocol compatibility isn't a very big deal (at this juncture, at least.) If I want to write a p2p app for sharing files, and another app for chat, it's perfectly ok if they use different protocols, and build separate networks. I could use OpenFT/gIFT for my chat app, and JXTA for my file-sharing app. Unless I wanted the two applications to be compatible, there'd be no reason to settle on pick one just to use a standard. Maybe at some point in the near future, it'll be useful for all p2p apps to speak a standardized protocol so that clients with different needs can all combine their resources, but not now.
It strikes me that the development of a portfolio and increased income is often the justification people use for doing something that they just like to do anyway.
There probably are people who view Open Source coding as a road to prosperity, but probably only a small subset of those people derive so little personal satisfaction from the process that resume-building is their primary motivation.
What is it, specifically, besides (insert file-sharing utility here) with enhanced security?
That's a very poor way of characterizing it. What JXTA is (or attempts to be) is a platform upon which you can easily develop and deploy a p2p app-- without all that messy reinventing the wheel that would otherwise be required. File sharing apps are certainly one application you could develop, but you can also build distributed computing/streaming/chat utilities. And anything else you can imagine.
So the concept is great. Unfortunately, JXTA doesn't seem to be quite there yet. JXTA currently only provides a working implementation of the lower-level components required to put together a p2p app. Peer discovery isn't very sophisticated at this point, though the basic tools with which you might build a more sophisticated system are there. And performance isn't great.
This is only my opinion, but the problem I see is that JXTA seems to be more of a research project than an attempt to build a practical p2p platform. Maybe in time JXTA will be refined into a more practical tool, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was displaced by a better performing, less flexible platform (based off of Kazaa/Morpheus, maybe.)
Or maybe it's because internet service companies have tendency to go tits up without much warning. Regardless of how much physical "stuff" they've got lying around.
Two problems:
1. Visitors have to get past that damn Flash intro first.
2. Sixty seconds of that damned theme song should end any desire to do business with this company.
Forget the boonies... My last discussion with a friend who is an engineer for a wireless company implied that the maximum useful distance between cells was about 1/2 mile. Meaning you're not going to see them anywhere outside of the cities for a long, long time.
Not on 470,000 bps shared, you're not gonna be doing a lot of that. Unless your local telco can stay in business with less than ten users per cell... or you like RealPlayer quality, circa 1996. Then you might as well just watch it on your phone.
I think high-speed data is a great thing, and should be an immediate goal. That does not mean that the wireless companies should invest billions (trillions) in the first halfway-there tech they can get their hand on. The financial hit the Telcos take on 3G could well slow down advances in high-speed data delivery for years.
The killer app isn't here yet. I had an iPaq with a PC-card jacket and a Ricochet card a while back, and it was nifty... But it wasn't all that. It weighed too much, battery life and screen size weren't useful for an Internet-linked device, and IO was a hassle. That's probably the best networked handheld I've seen (short of a small laptop.) And you can forget about cell phones. Even high-speed WAP is still WAP.
It's sort of a chicken and egg problem. Do you wait til there are enough people with a need for high-speed wireless net? Or do you provide the net, and hope that the products and services come? I'm all about the "if you build it, people will find an application" approach, but it can bankrupt companies; my Ricochet doesn't work anymore because of it. The Telcos can't afford to offer a service that nobody needs, even if they can delude themselves into thinking they'll make it all back on WAP and SMS.
It was called Ricochet, and I liked it just fine. Sure, it didn't work anywhere in the world (far from it), but neither will 3G whenever it creaks its ass around. From what I understand, 3G isn't likely to exist outside of the major cities for a long time to come.
And despite appearances, Ricochet was supposed to be a cheap solution compared to all-out 3G. I'm not holding my breath for 3G, given that the already-struggling telcos see it as a risky venture with no guaranteed market. Even if they bite the bullet, we're going to wind up with an expensive standardized system built out of what will immediately become yesterday's technology. Or the day-before-yesterday's technology if we start with TDMA.
470Kb shared with 100 other people in my cell... How much is this going to cost?
We'll see some kind of practical 3G or beyond. but I'm willing to bet it'll resemble the 802.11 city networks more closely than it does today's cellular system.
It requires receiving a radio signal at two different locations. Presumably this could be done, if the ship Hackman commands is linked to some other receiver, such as a radar or signals plane. Not to defend a movie that probably has more holes than The 6th Day.
Presumably he'll have no problem outrunning the victim's out-of-shape "IT"-riding ass...
Yes, and that was more than ten years ago. My point is that the worm has completely turned.
If so... phooey.
Actually, it seems that the situation is reversed in this case. GSM uses a less-advanced technology (TDMA) than many US networks (CDMA). Europe/Asia/Africa have opted to standardize this older system, while some US carriers have gone ahead and adopted more advanced but incompatible systems. As we've got no expectations of compatibility (even when switching from one company to another), it's easier to skip to newer tech.
I don't entirely agree with the US companies' decision here, but I do think it may have some unexpected benefits. For one, we may be able to move in with a much more advanced 3G without being tied down by a whole lot of backwards-compatibility concerns. For another, it may turn out that the focus on standardized networks becomes less and less important as technology becomes more adaptable. The price and flexibility of wireless tech have been plunging and exploding, respectively. It may turn out that compatibility is more effectively acheived by cheap Taiwanese chipsets than by standardized networks.
Personally, having caught a glimpse of the projected cost of 3G (for not-terribly impressive data rates, and only in the cities), I'm skeptical of the whole project. I think the next generation of data/phone tech will take its cues from 802.11 tech, and GSM will become a relic. This is obviously a few years off, though. In the mean time, we Americans just have to rent phones when we get off the plane (not a terrible deal when you consider international roaming charges, I'm told.)
As to "America gets stuck on 1.0", there's plenty of precedent for the opposite; the Minitel in France (outmoded by the web) and analog HDTV in Japan. Sometimes our stubborness is actually an asset.