I think the whole idea of wave is AWESOME. My one question is... how is Google going to make money off of it???
I doubt if Google will make much money off of the wave protocol or message format... Much like SMTP, it'll just kind of be out there for other people to implement.
I'm sure they'll offer a free (ad supported) Wave service however, much like they've got Gmail now... And they'll probably offer a paid subscription to business users, like with Google Apps right now...
Of course, they're spearheading the whole thing... So they could probably get an actual wave server (hardware/software/whatever) to market long before anyone else can. They could sell that, but it doesn't really sound like Google's way of doing things...
a neat idea, for collaborative brainstorming or throwaway conversations perhaps, but i hope that nobody is planning on using this for any communication that is mission critical, in it's current form anyway.
Aside from some folks at Google and a few folks who got beta invites, nobody is using it in its current form. It is beta (alpha?) software in its truest form.
just like "clouds", "waves" do not reside on your computer, but rather *out there* somewhere, that you can *probably* get access to if: -the service is up and functioning properly -you have the required hardware and software -there are no connection issues between you and the server
The requirements appear to be bandwidth and a web browser. Nothing more. And with Google Gears, you might not even need bandwidth.
if your internet goes down, suddenly you've lost access to even internal communication at your office, as well as all archives and logs of past communication. Without local storage, you cannot do efficient search and retrieval of your own information.
I'm not certain that anyone will be getting rid of local storage... It is entirely possible that you'll have some kind of offline cache of waves - much like what is done with IMAP. And I'm not certain why you think on-line searching would be any slower than searching a local store... I know Google can process a hell of a lot more data than my desktop can.
there are serious privacy issues as well, no doubt google will be surfin the "waves" looking for terms to market to you, but perhaps it is more shady than that even. google has agreed to censorship in foreign markets over the years, does it really make sense to let them hold onto your data in this way?
then again.. it's cool technology, and now that it's being open sourced, it means feasibly you can run your own "waveserver" and mitigate the issues above somewhat.
The whole point of this project is to develop a completely open communication system - much like what was done with email and SMTP. The message formats and protocols are documented, so you don't have to run any particular piece of software. Exchange, Sendmail, Qmail, whatever... They'll all send and receive email with everyone else.
The idea is that this new "wave" thing will be as open and interoperable as SMTP... So you might very well use Google's hosted wave service... Or you might get a wave account through Yahoo... Or your company might install its own wave server... Or maybe your ISP would provide one...
Speaking of Bungie, what about a reboot on Oni, most amazing first person fighting system evar! It could be even better on the Wii!
I thoroughly enjoyed Oni. I don't know that it really lived up to the hype, but it was a good game. And the fighting system was pretty innovative. They certainly left it wide-open for a sequel of some sort...
As I used to tell snarky Halo fanbois, "I liked Halo better when it was called Marathon". It always seemed to go over their heads tho.
There were definitely similarities. Maybe more than I ever saw, since I only played the first Halo game. I could easily imagine both Halo and Marathon taking place in the same universe.
A couple things I liked in Marathon, but missed in Halo:
Marathon had a real sense of the unknown. You didn't know who the enemy was. You didn't know why they were attacking. You didn't know what they were capable of. The first level where you encounter a hunter was creepy as hell. You kept reading about them in the terminals... Kept seeing mentions of their howl... And then you finally get jumped by one.
Halo, on the other hand, seemed very routine. Even when you the player encountered something new, the attitude of all the NPCs around you was "oh, here's another badguy, same as last time." You got the distinct impression that Master Chief and his cohorts have been fighting this war for a very long time, and there's nothing new about any of it. Even the Flood, which was a surprise to the humans, was well-documented by the Covenant.
Marathon also had terrific diversity in enemies. You had the Pfhor - who came in a half-dozen different varieties. Different weapons, different armor, different threats. You had the S'pht, which were just plain creepy. Then you had all the assorted slave races... The little bug-guys, the big ol' hulks, the flying things that lobbed missiles at you...
Halo, on the other hand, seemed to keep throwing the same kind of enemies at me. Some of the little grunt guys, some of the bigger elite guys, and occasionally someone in a tank or something. There was never the feeling of "oh, he's different, I wonder what he does?" Only "oh, they gave him a different weapon this time."
Finally, Marathon had a weird kind of metephysical thing going on. You'd periodically get Durandal rambling on about the end of the universe, or the embodiment of chaos, or Childe Roland... It was never clear if he was just raving, or if he'd tapped into something deeper. Kind of reminded me of Moorcock's eternal champion.
Halo had some incredibly-long backstory with the flood and the halos and some progenitor species and whatnot... But it didn't seem to get terribly mythic.
And I grew up on Wing Commander. From pixelated sprites to 3-D models. Nothing like nursing your ship through that last waypoint with one working mass driver hoping you don't meet any more nasties. Space sims seem to have dropped of the edge of the planet in recent years (EVE Online excepted). It would be nice to see one again so I can blow the dust off of my joystick.
I used to love the Wing Commander games... Played those for hours. Descent Freespace was good too. And some of the X-Wing games...
Yeah, space flight sims seem to have dropped off the face of the Earth. Hmm... Maybe that's just flight sims in general, I haven't seen many of them lately.
I've still got a nice joystick I bought a few years ago, used it extensively for games like Independence War and MechWarrior... It's now just gathering dust on a bookshelf.
I'd love to see Bungie turn out some new Marathon games.
I thoroughly enjoyed those games... Great storyline, interesting characters, innovative (for the time) gameplay... I think they could do some fun stuff with modern hardware.
Here's a great idea. Produce games that people really want to play, and sell them at a price people want to pay.
If your game advertises 5ish hours of gameplay, with a $50+ pricetag, I'm not going to pay for it.
If the gameplay is just another rehash of the same kind of crap I played last year, and the year before, and the year before that - I'm not going to pay for it.
If it is only available on one or two pieces of hardware that I don't own, I'm not going to pay for it.
Frankly, I'm not impressed with the titles that Ubisoft is turning out lately. I haven't played anything they've released in years. If they want my money they're going to have to do more than develop better DRM.
They would have become more successful if they didn't try to do their own software stack. The countries they were selling them to never wanted third-world solutions; they wanted normal computers that could run normal software. A lot of these efforts fail because people think that third-world countries want to be beta testers.
They didn't really create their own software stack though...
The underlying OS was basically Red Hat. A couple tweaks here and there, but nothing substantial. There was a new GUI on top, to accommodate the hardware better... But again it wasn't anything bizarre.
Take a look at the netbooks running Linux out there - things like the MSI Wind. They're basically running a vaguely-custom Linux install with a GUI on top that's optimized for the screen size and input available on the netbook. The XO wasn't doing anything terribly unusual.
I'm not sure where exactly you get the idea that Linux-onna-netbook is a "third-world solution"... I've got a netbook, I run Linux on it, it works great. It works better with Linux and a tweaked GUI than it did with the default Windows install on it.
In reality, nobody wants to spend millions of dollars on an unproven, half-baked product with no track record, and that's exactly what the OLPC was.
Fair enough. But the same kind of criticisms could be pointed at the iPhone, or MSI/Dell/HP's first batch of netbooks, or any other new technology. Until it has been around for a while a product won't be proven, won't have a track record, and nobody will know how well-baked it is.
They had a lot of ideas, but no ability to execute, no deployment strategy, no quality control, no product support strategy, and no experience developing hardware.
All true. All largely unrelated to Sugar and/or rolling their own software stack.
Negroponte just didn't know what the hell he was trying to accomplish with this device.
Negroponte couldn't seem to make up his mind on the device. First it was supposed to be small, cheap, and completely open-source/user-modifiable. Part of the point was to make the entire platform a learning experience.
Then the hardware specs started changing to make room for Windows... Why exactly? Who knows... Microsoft wanted a piece of the pie, and Negroponte accommodated them.
But then the device wasn't nearly so cheap, and the entire platform wasn't an open learning experience. The cost lost them a few customers... And the lack of openness lost them a few more...
And the marketing? Horrible.
There are plenty of netbooks out there now... Stuff from MSI and Dell and HP... Some ship with Windows, some ship with Linux... They're selling just fine. There's no reason the XO couldn't have been a successful product.
Basically, it's reasonable to expect some common sense from those old enough to know what they're doing, but it is not reasonable to expect people to make decisions based on information they probably don't know or understand
The only thing you need to know is that you're posting information on the Internet.
If I ask a site to delete my personal data when they no longer have any reason to hold it, I might reasonably expect them to delete it
Sure, that's a reasonable expectation. But it isn't necessarily reality. If I give you a picture of me doing something lewd to a llama and ask you to destroy it I might reasonably expect you to do so... But that doesn't mean that you actually destroyed anything. And it doesn't mean that you have to destroy it either. Unless we signed some kind of legally binding contract that said you would destroy it... In which case I'd want to get a lawyer and make sure the contract was really just as binding as I thought it was. And ultimately the best way to make sure you didn't keep that picture hanging around would be not to give it to you in the first place.
But this is the Internet. Millions of inter-connected computers. Tons of indexes and archives and everything else. Even if FaceBook does delete your information, what's to say that it isn't cached by Google or the WayBack Machine? What's to say that someone out there didn't already save it to their HDD?
If I flag my personal data as private and restrict access to only a select group of friends, I might reasonably expect that data to be kept private and accessible only to those friends
Again, a reasonable expectation. And again, not necessarily relevant.
So it's limited to those people... Let's say FaceBook doesn't give out the information to other people, doesn't retain it after you deleted your account, etc. But one of your friends shares your information where they shouldn't have - re-posts it to a different website or something.
Or maybe you check your FaceBook account at work, or at an airport and someone logs your credentials.
Again, the best way to avoid something incriminating getting out is to never put it out there to start with.
The way Facebook doesn't really delete data and the way they allow app developers open-ended access to it are the two big reasons I personally don't use their service, and I would be interested to know how many of my Facebook-using friends would agree if they knew the full implications of signing up for one game of Scrabulous or whatever it's called these days.
That's certainly your choice.
And it may very well be that your friends don't know just how vulnerable they are on FaceBook.
But, myself, I just don't post anything terribly incriminating there. There's no information on FaceBook that isn't already posted dozens of other places on the Internet.
I'm not saying that FaceBook is a good site, or that they've got a great privacy policy or anything like that. I'm saying that a key ingredient in the whole mix is common sense, which many people don't have.
What you say would be true for people who make their facebook profile public, but what about those with private profiles that are visible only to their friends, and are basically being leaked to third parties?
Your FaceBook profile is only private if your friends don't share anything with people you don't want them to. It doesn't much matter what FaceBook's privacy policy is... Or what kind of mechanics they've got in place to protect you... If you post something on FaceBook you have to assume that it'll wind up somewhere you don't want it to.
How would you feel if your cell phone company were selling transcripts of your phone calls to advertisers and potential employers without your consent (ie. considering your use of their system as you granting your implicit consent)?
I wouldn't be terribly surprised, to be honest.
I'd be even less surprised if they were doing that with my text messages. Or using the photos I take on that camera for promotional purposes.
But I wouldn't be terribly horrified. I do use the phone for business, so there might be some confidentiality concerns with some of our clients... But I don't generally say anything terribly private on the phone. Important stuff is best handled face-to-face.
But, then again, I'm operating on the assumption that anything I say on a cell phone can be overheard anyway. It isn't like I duck into a cone of silence every time it rings. If I'm chatting on the phone with my wife anyone within earshot can hear at least half of the conversation. And if I ever get into trouble my call records can be subpoenaed. And if I leave my phone unattended somewhere someone could go through my address book or call log. So I'm not assuming that I've got some built-in level of privacy.
Your examples are ones that have easily recognizable consequences for just about anyone. My point is more about the ones that take considerably more thought. For example, you give a big thumbs up to some fringe political party that, in the not so distant future, is outlawed with the supporters being flagged. Hell, atheism could become illegal someday if some fanatics got their way.
Extreme examples, for sure, but I believe the point is clear
So, kind of like the folks who liked the Nazis and then looked embarrassed after WWII?
One thing to keep in mind is that once people are on FB, private information about them can be posted by other people and linked to them via tagging and linking. Because of most default settings in FB, people can't easily control who sees what their friends and families post about them.
But you don't need to be on FaceBook for other people to post information about you. I can spread all sorts of nasty information about folks who don't have an on-line presence at all. I can upload photos, tag them with whatever I want to, and distribute them all over the place.
That's my point.
Whether or not FaceBook has a good privacy policy isn't going to protect anyone. If you do something stupid and/or incriminating, and there's evidence, you're just going to have to hope that nobody decides to share that information. And you sure as hell better not share it, regardless of the privacy policy of the site you put it on.
Also, the recent article on privacy salience on Bruce Schneier's blog explains why some people put private information on such sites: FB and similar sites have an agressive marketing strategy that emphasizes the benefits of posting such information, while burying privacy concerns deep in hard-to-find pages.
And we're back to common sense.
You shouldn't need to have privacy concerns pointed out to you.
If I post detailed information about every aspect of my life on a public website I'm sure I'll get all sorts of benefits... Marketers will be able to send me offers for jumbo-XL condoms and inflatable sheep and all sorts of other things that would interest me.
But that information is also available to my parents and employers and whoever else. So folks might use that information in deciding whether to hire me or not... Or whether they want to go out on a date with me... Or they could use it to take out a line of credit in my name...
This isn't some anonymous bathroom wall where you can safely scribble down something dirty and never have it traced back to you. This is a giant billboard that the whole world can see - complete with signature and personally-identifying information.
You're right, but I don't think Joe Sixpack necessarily understands the concepts of data mining, profiling, etc and how they might relate to social networking sites. Nor do I think he, or the average teenager, understands the permanence of data or the associated implications.
And frankly, what may make sense to post on a gigantic billboard in your front yard may not make sense, or even be legal, tomorrow. Times change. Governments change. Social mores change. I think expecting your average internet user to consider these things is asking a little much.
No it isn't.
People have been making decisions (sometimes stupid ones) and living with the consequences for centuries. Ok, maybe it's easier to squash a verbally-distributed nasty rumor than a digitally-distributed incriminating photo, but that doesn't mean that common sense no longer applies.
Look back at some printed statements over the years... Things that were appropriate at the time and showed up very proudly in newspapers all over the united states, and now look very embarrassing.
Political careers have been ended because of a youthful indiscretion or an incriminating photograph.
Tons of people have tattoos that they wish they hadn't gotten.
Plenty of people have taken pictures they shouldn't have, and had it used against them.
Ever hear of Nixon? Recorded some tapes he probably wished he hadn't.
How about Sotomayor? Bet she wishes she hadn't said some things right about now.
This isn't about understanding data mining or profiling, this is about simple common sense - which is apparently in short supply these days. If I proudly proclaim that I like big butts on FaceBook you don't need to mine any data - you know that I like big butts. You don't have to profile anything, I've stated it in plain text. Oh, now my mother read it and I'm embarrassed? I guess I shouldn't have written it where she could see it, now should I?
Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, blogs, text messaging, cell phones... They're all just ways of distributing a message. The problem isn't that distribution has become insanely quick, easy, and efficient. The problem is that nobody is thinking about the message anymore.
Folks will call up a friend and have a running conversation about the random people walking by them and what they're wearing - why? Just because you can tell your friend that somebody wearing a Penny Arcade t-shirt doesn't mean you have to.
People actually report on their bowel movements! Why?!
So, let's say FaceBook has perfect privacy. You can share your information with whoever you want, and nobody else can get at that stuff. App authors can't get at it, FaceBook deletes it as soon as you quit. Perfect privacy.
You pass out in a field. Somebody takes a picture. You post that picture on FaceBook - only your friends can see it. Great!
Now one of your friends downloads it and emails it to his buddy, that you don't know, and that buddy re-uploads it to FaceBook.
Or maybe the guy who took the picture in the first place uploads it to Flickr.
The point I'm trying to make is that you don't share what you don't want to be out in the wild.
Used to be that you could do something stupid and maybe get away with it. If you passed out in some field maybe your friend would see it, but that would be it. Maybe a picture would be passed around. Worst-case scenario the whole school or maybe town would be talking about you.
These days it's insanely simple to share any random bit of information with anyone in the world. Not just easy for you to share information with your friend, but easy for them to share it with folks you'd rather they didn't. Instead of the worst-case scenario encompassing a town or school, it now encompasses the planet.
who puts something on Facebook that they _want_ to keep _private_?
People who don't know any better, who are (incidentally) the same people the privacy laws were written to protect.
People who don't know any better?
I put a gigantic billboard in my front yard - 20' tall. Plaster all kinds of personal information on it. Maybe some racy photos. And then, when everyone in the world knows the intimate details of my life I can cry foul because some privacy law was supposed to protect me, because I didn't know any better?
What ever happened to common sense?
I'm not talking about understanding the intricacies of HTTP or how various web apps share information... I'm talking about basic, common sense.
Why would you put private information on a social networking site? The whole point in a social networking site is to share information.
I'm sure that folks are being more careful spending their dollars these days. If the economy goes to hell and you've got less money to spend you won't be throwing it away on crap. But the problem isn't really that the economy has gone to hell, it's that there's just a glut of crap to buy.
It seems to me that very few video games are actually worth their price these days. You pay >$50 for a game with good games have been released this year?
Plus you've got the vendor lock-in... Gotta buy your console for $300ish... Then you're looking for games that run on that console... And then something good will come out that's exclusive to some other console... So you're looking at a real price of $350 to play that exclusive game (unless you already bought every console there is)...
I don't think the problem is that people don't have enough money to buy video games. I think the problem is that people are finding better ways to entertain themselves. Maybe they're replaying old games... Maybe they're milking an MMOG subscription... Maybe they're renting movies... Maybe they're reading books... Maybe they're just hanging out... Whatever.
I like computers... I make my living fixing them... I thoroughly enjoy video games... But I really hate what digital media has done to the concepts of property and ownership.
Used to be that I'd buy a book, or a record, or a board game, or a deck of cards - and nobody would question for a moment that I owned those things. They were my property. I could do with them whatever I wanted. After I finished reading the book I could donate it to the local library, or hand it off to a friend, or sell it to a used bookstore. If the original author of that book showed up at my garage sale and complained that I was selling his book he would have been laughed at.
These days, however, we don't actually own anything. We've just been given a temporary license to use the thing. And when I'm done playing my video game, or done reading my ebook, or done listening to my MP3, I'm not really able to do much with it. Sure, I can sell a video game to someone else... But the DRM involved is making it hard just to re-install the game on your own computer, much less transfer ownership to someone else.
The worst part isn't that this is happening... Of course a company is going to do everything they can to make money - that's what businesses do. So I don't blame EA or Microsoft or whoever for trying to prevent the selling of used video games. The worst part is that it is being allowed to happen. Nobody is laughing at these guys. Their arguments aren't being rebuffed. They aren't being thrown out of court. These folks are claiming that the $60 I paid for a video game didn't actually buy me a video game, and everyone just kind of shrugs and nods and goes along with it.
TwitPic is run by one guy (maybe two now, there was a blog post on the site a while ago looking for another coder) with a couple servers. Even if he gave enough of a damn to try to filter out torrent-containing images (which I doubt is the case), I'm sure he has much better stuff to spend his time on.
I guess my question isn't really about whether some individual might, out of the kindness of their heart, decide to filter the encoded torrent/PNG files off of a site... But more about people being forced/coerced into doing it.
Look at the Pirate Bay trial. The Pirate Bay only hosts the torrents, none of the incriminating files. There is absolutely nothing copyrighted on the Pirate Bay. But they were still taken to court over it. They were found guilty, maybe, depending on appeals/whatever... But simply being taken to court might be enough to shut down a website that couldn't afford the legal fees.
These PNGs are just encoded torrents - really little different than hosting the torrent itself. Yes, they can be hosted at different places because they're harmless pictures instead of torrents... But the data contained is the same. And if you can take a web site operator to court because of the non-copyrighted data contained in a torrent, you can do the same for the non-copyrighted data contained in a PNG that decodes into a torrent.
So, again, I just don't see the advantage of storing them as PNGs as opposed to torrents. Sure, for the moment it is great because you can host them all over the place. All these free image hosting sites just became free torrent hosting sites. But if this actually catches on you'll see any site with any amount of traffic either implementing some kind of filtering or being taken to court.
Some torrent sites already filter out HBO shows and American origin IP addresses. If TPB goes 100% legit then this becomes an easy way to distribute.torrents if you already have a twitter account and access to twitpic, just without the ability to browse by number of seeders/leechers. EZTV and a few others already post all their torrents to twitter for when the site goes down (their site is down currently).
Fair enough. But if this becomes the preferred way to distribute torrents, what's to stop twitter/twitpic from filtering these images out?
I don't see how this is actually addressing the issue of the torrents being filtered... It's just moving that problem.
Filename extensions are a form of metadata, and I don't think it sets a good precedent to lie in the metadata for a file. It's bad enough that we have Windows hiding filename extensions from the user, and encouraging people to just double-click on a file to launch the associated app. This just seems like asking for more problems, as people try to double-click on mjthriller.png and it launches - and crashes - IE.
I know, I know... This is Slashdot, nobody reads the article. But could you at least read the summary?
They aren't re-naming a file. They aren't just dropping the.torrent extension and replacing it with.png The resulting file isn't going to run any malicious code or do anything bizzarre.
They're encoding the bits of the.torrent file in a.png image. It actually creates an image. Looks like some kind of abstract/modern art kind of thing... Blocks of bright colors. You could open it with any graphics program... Set it as your wallpaper... Send it off to WalMart to be printed on photo paper...
Hosting a bunch of images doesn't do any good unless you have a text (or at least searchable) description of what you're downloading. Without context, warehoused information is useless. And these PNG files are just different representations of the same quasi-legal information (that is, they're still colored bits.
That was my initial reaction as well.
Instead of a.torrent file you've got a PNG, but I'm not sure how much that helps anyone.
I don't think the complaint was ever that the information contained in the.torrent file was somehow infringing copyright or breaking laws... I believe the argument has been made that there's nothing actually copyrighted/illegal in the.torrent file itself, and judging from the results of recent court cases that argument doesn't seem to be working terribly well. The PNG still contains the same information as the torrent... Still enables you to download the same files... Would, therefor, still be vulnerable to the same lawsuits and takedown notices - wouldn't it?
It isn't a text file, so it might be harder to locate the incriminating evidence with a simple text search... But you'll need to indicate what's contained in the file somewhere, or nobody is going to know what they're downloading. You'll still need a searchable index, or a header on the forum post, or at least a line or two of text saying what the picture gets you.
Nearly six in 10 companies have no current plans to deploy Windows 7 by the end of next year, according to a new survey. Of 1,100 IT administrators who responded to the survey, 59.3 percent said they didn't have a plan to deploy Windows 7.
Is anyone surprised?
IT Administrators are typically fairly conservative and cautious. Most folks will wait until SP1 is released. At the very least they'll wait until a few months after release so they can get real-world usage reports.
This is all heady stuff and good for lots of press, but in the end none of this is likely to make a real difference for either company or, indeed, for consumers. It's just noise â" a form of mutually assured destruction intended to keep each company in check.
Mutually assured destruction? I believe the term you're looking for is "competition." It's that thing where multiple companies produce similar products and try to out-do each-other in an attempt to make people buy their products.
The battle between Microsoft and Google entered a new phase last week with the announcement of Google's Chrome Operating System â" a direct attack on Microsoft Windows.
How, exactly, is a glorified thin-client an attack on Microsoft Windows?
Sure, a lot of stuff runs on the web these days... And I've argued that the trend will only continue... But this is like claiming that Wyse terminals are a direct attack on Dell's desktops.
What? Were you really fooled into thinking that one administration was going to be heads and tails above another? If you were let me be the first to say I'm sorry.
Why is it that in a nation where we swing between two parties in power every decade or so that people really think that one has that much on the ball and the other is full of gimps and morons? The fact is that they're roughly the same entity and every couple voting cycles people get sick of hearing what one has to say and goes to the other to hear the same thing they were hearing from them the last time they got voted out of office. The difference is that most voters have an easier time remembering Terry Bradshaw's pass completion percentage from the 1975 season than the hollow promises made to them by politicians in the same time frame.
QFT.
We will not see a truely progressive politician make it to the presidency until we get a viable third party. And even then it's a long shot.
I don't think this will help much. The problem isn't that we've only got two parties to choose from, the problem is that we don't remember what was promised and don't hold people accountable.
If we would actually vote out the representatives who don't accomplish what we want them to... If we'd actually pressure our representatives to vote accordingly... Then maybe we'd see some real changes.
We honestly do get the government we deserve. And with how apathetic most of the United States is, it's no wonder we've had the same crap in office for decades.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the whole idea of wave is AWESOME. My one question is ... how is Google going to make money off of it???
I doubt if Google will make much money off of the wave protocol or message format... Much like SMTP, it'll just kind of be out there for other people to implement.
I'm sure they'll offer a free (ad supported) Wave service however, much like they've got Gmail now... And they'll probably offer a paid subscription to business users, like with Google Apps right now...
Of course, they're spearheading the whole thing... So they could probably get an actual wave server (hardware/software/whatever) to market long before anyone else can. They could sell that, but it doesn't really sound like Google's way of doing things...
a neat idea, for collaborative brainstorming or throwaway conversations perhaps, but i hope that nobody is planning on using this for any communication that is mission critical, in it's current form anyway.
Aside from some folks at Google and a few folks who got beta invites, nobody is using it in its current form. It is beta (alpha?) software in its truest form.
just like "clouds", "waves" do not reside on your computer, but rather *out there* somewhere, that you can *probably* get access to if:
-the service is up and functioning properly
-you have the required hardware and software
-there are no connection issues between you and the server
The requirements appear to be bandwidth and a web browser. Nothing more. And with Google Gears, you might not even need bandwidth.
if your internet goes down, suddenly you've lost access to even internal communication at your office, as well as all archives and logs of past communication. Without local storage, you cannot do efficient search and retrieval of your own information.
I'm not certain that anyone will be getting rid of local storage... It is entirely possible that you'll have some kind of offline cache of waves - much like what is done with IMAP. And I'm not certain why you think on-line searching would be any slower than searching a local store... I know Google can process a hell of a lot more data than my desktop can.
there are serious privacy issues as well, no doubt google will be surfin the "waves" looking for terms to market to you, but perhaps it is more shady than that even. google has agreed to censorship in foreign markets over the years, does it really make sense to let them hold onto your data in this way?
then again.. it's cool technology, and now that it's being open sourced, it means feasibly you can run your own "waveserver" and mitigate the issues above somewhat.
The whole point of this project is to develop a completely open communication system - much like what was done with email and SMTP. The message formats and protocols are documented, so you don't have to run any particular piece of software. Exchange, Sendmail, Qmail, whatever... They'll all send and receive email with everyone else.
The idea is that this new "wave" thing will be as open and interoperable as SMTP... So you might very well use Google's hosted wave service... Or you might get a wave account through Yahoo... Or your company might install its own wave server... Or maybe your ISP would provide one...
Speaking of Bungie, what about a reboot on Oni, most amazing first person fighting system evar! It could be even better on the Wii!
I thoroughly enjoyed Oni. I don't know that it really lived up to the hype, but it was a good game. And the fighting system was pretty innovative. They certainly left it wide-open for a sequel of some sort...
As I used to tell snarky Halo fanbois, "I liked Halo better when it was called Marathon". It always seemed to go over their heads tho.
There were definitely similarities. Maybe more than I ever saw, since I only played the first Halo game. I could easily imagine both Halo and Marathon taking place in the same universe.
A couple things I liked in Marathon, but missed in Halo:
Marathon had a real sense of the unknown. You didn't know who the enemy was. You didn't know why they were attacking. You didn't know what they were capable of. The first level where you encounter a hunter was creepy as hell. You kept reading about them in the terminals... Kept seeing mentions of their howl... And then you finally get jumped by one.
Halo, on the other hand, seemed very routine. Even when you the player encountered something new, the attitude of all the NPCs around you was "oh, here's another badguy, same as last time." You got the distinct impression that Master Chief and his cohorts have been fighting this war for a very long time, and there's nothing new about any of it. Even the Flood, which was a surprise to the humans, was well-documented by the Covenant.
Marathon also had terrific diversity in enemies. You had the Pfhor - who came in a half-dozen different varieties. Different weapons, different armor, different threats. You had the S'pht, which were just plain creepy. Then you had all the assorted slave races... The little bug-guys, the big ol' hulks, the flying things that lobbed missiles at you...
Halo, on the other hand, seemed to keep throwing the same kind of enemies at me. Some of the little grunt guys, some of the bigger elite guys, and occasionally someone in a tank or something. There was never the feeling of "oh, he's different, I wonder what he does?" Only "oh, they gave him a different weapon this time."
Finally, Marathon had a weird kind of metephysical thing going on. You'd periodically get Durandal rambling on about the end of the universe, or the embodiment of chaos, or Childe Roland... It was never clear if he was just raving, or if he'd tapped into something deeper. Kind of reminded me of Moorcock's eternal champion.
Halo had some incredibly-long backstory with the flood and the halos and some progenitor species and whatnot... But it didn't seem to get terribly mythic.
And I grew up on Wing Commander. From pixelated sprites to 3-D models. Nothing like nursing your ship through that last waypoint with one working mass driver hoping you don't meet any more nasties. Space sims seem to have dropped of the edge of the planet in recent years (EVE Online excepted). It would be nice to see one again so I can blow the dust off of my joystick.
I used to love the Wing Commander games... Played those for hours. Descent Freespace was good too. And some of the X-Wing games...
Yeah, space flight sims seem to have dropped off the face of the Earth. Hmm... Maybe that's just flight sims in general, I haven't seen many of them lately.
I've still got a nice joystick I bought a few years ago, used it extensively for games like Independence War and MechWarrior... It's now just gathering dust on a bookshelf.
I'd love to see Bungie turn out some new Marathon games.
I thoroughly enjoyed those games... Great storyline, interesting characters, innovative (for the time) gameplay... I think they could do some fun stuff with modern hardware.
Here's a great idea. Produce games that people really want to play, and sell them at a price people want to pay.
If your game advertises 5ish hours of gameplay, with a $50+ pricetag, I'm not going to pay for it.
If the gameplay is just another rehash of the same kind of crap I played last year, and the year before, and the year before that - I'm not going to pay for it.
If it is only available on one or two pieces of hardware that I don't own, I'm not going to pay for it.
Frankly, I'm not impressed with the titles that Ubisoft is turning out lately. I haven't played anything they've released in years. If they want my money they're going to have to do more than develop better DRM.
They would have become more successful if they didn't try to do their own software stack. The countries they were selling them to never wanted third-world solutions; they wanted normal computers that could run normal software. A lot of these efforts fail because people think that third-world countries want to be beta testers.
They didn't really create their own software stack though...
The underlying OS was basically Red Hat. A couple tweaks here and there, but nothing substantial. There was a new GUI on top, to accommodate the hardware better... But again it wasn't anything bizarre.
Take a look at the netbooks running Linux out there - things like the MSI Wind. They're basically running a vaguely-custom Linux install with a GUI on top that's optimized for the screen size and input available on the netbook. The XO wasn't doing anything terribly unusual.
I'm not sure where exactly you get the idea that Linux-onna-netbook is a "third-world solution"... I've got a netbook, I run Linux on it, it works great. It works better with Linux and a tweaked GUI than it did with the default Windows install on it.
In reality, nobody wants to spend millions of dollars on an unproven, half-baked product with no track record, and that's exactly what the OLPC was.
Fair enough. But the same kind of criticisms could be pointed at the iPhone, or MSI/Dell/HP's first batch of netbooks, or any other new technology. Until it has been around for a while a product won't be proven, won't have a track record, and nobody will know how well-baked it is.
They had a lot of ideas, but no ability to execute, no deployment strategy, no quality control, no product support strategy, and no experience developing hardware.
All true. All largely unrelated to Sugar and/or rolling their own software stack.
Negroponte just didn't know what the hell he was trying to accomplish with this device.
I don't think sugar was the main problem.
Negroponte couldn't seem to make up his mind on the device. First it was supposed to be small, cheap, and completely open-source/user-modifiable. Part of the point was to make the entire platform a learning experience.
Then the hardware specs started changing to make room for Windows... Why exactly? Who knows... Microsoft wanted a piece of the pie, and Negroponte accommodated them.
But then the device wasn't nearly so cheap, and the entire platform wasn't an open learning experience. The cost lost them a few customers... And the lack of openness lost them a few more...
And the marketing? Horrible.
There are plenty of netbooks out there now... Stuff from MSI and Dell and HP... Some ship with Windows, some ship with Linux... They're selling just fine. There's no reason the XO couldn't have been a successful product.
Basically, it's reasonable to expect some common sense from those old enough to know what they're doing, but it is not reasonable to expect people to make decisions based on information they probably don't know or understand
The only thing you need to know is that you're posting information on the Internet.
If I ask a site to delete my personal data when they no longer have any reason to hold it, I might reasonably expect them to delete it
Sure, that's a reasonable expectation. But it isn't necessarily reality. If I give you a picture of me doing something lewd to a llama and ask you to destroy it I might reasonably expect you to do so... But that doesn't mean that you actually destroyed anything. And it doesn't mean that you have to destroy it either. Unless we signed some kind of legally binding contract that said you would destroy it... In which case I'd want to get a lawyer and make sure the contract was really just as binding as I thought it was. And ultimately the best way to make sure you didn't keep that picture hanging around would be not to give it to you in the first place.
But this is the Internet. Millions of inter-connected computers. Tons of indexes and archives and everything else. Even if FaceBook does delete your information, what's to say that it isn't cached by Google or the WayBack Machine? What's to say that someone out there didn't already save it to their HDD?
If I flag my personal data as private and restrict access to only a select group of friends, I might reasonably expect that data to be kept private and accessible only to those friends
Again, a reasonable expectation. And again, not necessarily relevant.
So it's limited to those people... Let's say FaceBook doesn't give out the information to other people, doesn't retain it after you deleted your account, etc. But one of your friends shares your information where they shouldn't have - re-posts it to a different website or something.
Or maybe you check your FaceBook account at work, or at an airport and someone logs your credentials.
Again, the best way to avoid something incriminating getting out is to never put it out there to start with.
The way Facebook doesn't really delete data and the way they allow app developers open-ended access to it are the two big reasons I personally don't use their service, and I would be interested to know how many of my Facebook-using friends would agree if they knew the full implications of signing up for one game of Scrabulous or whatever it's called these days.
That's certainly your choice.
And it may very well be that your friends don't know just how vulnerable they are on FaceBook.
But, myself, I just don't post anything terribly incriminating there. There's no information on FaceBook that isn't already posted dozens of other places on the Internet.
I'm not saying that FaceBook is a good site, or that they've got a great privacy policy or anything like that. I'm saying that a key ingredient in the whole mix is common sense, which many people don't have.
What you say would be true for people who make their facebook profile public, but what about those with private profiles that are visible only to their friends, and are basically being leaked to third parties?
Your FaceBook profile is only private if your friends don't share anything with people you don't want them to. It doesn't much matter what FaceBook's privacy policy is... Or what kind of mechanics they've got in place to protect you... If you post something on FaceBook you have to assume that it'll wind up somewhere you don't want it to.
How would you feel if your cell phone company were selling transcripts of your phone calls to advertisers and potential employers without your consent (ie. considering your use of their system as you granting your implicit consent)?
I wouldn't be terribly surprised, to be honest.
I'd be even less surprised if they were doing that with my text messages. Or using the photos I take on that camera for promotional purposes.
But I wouldn't be terribly horrified. I do use the phone for business, so there might be some confidentiality concerns with some of our clients... But I don't generally say anything terribly private on the phone. Important stuff is best handled face-to-face.
But, then again, I'm operating on the assumption that anything I say on a cell phone can be overheard anyway. It isn't like I duck into a cone of silence every time it rings. If I'm chatting on the phone with my wife anyone within earshot can hear at least half of the conversation. And if I ever get into trouble my call records can be subpoenaed. And if I leave my phone unattended somewhere someone could go through my address book or call log. So I'm not assuming that I've got some built-in level of privacy.
Yup, however...
Your examples are ones that have easily recognizable consequences for just about anyone. My point is more about the ones that take considerably more thought. For example, you give a big thumbs up to some fringe political party that, in the not so distant future, is outlawed with the supporters being flagged. Hell, atheism could become illegal someday if some fanatics got their way.
Extreme examples, for sure, but I believe the point is clear
So, kind of like the folks who liked the Nazis and then looked embarrassed after WWII?
One thing to keep in mind is that once people are on FB, private information about them can be posted by other people and linked to them via tagging and linking. Because of most default settings in FB, people can't easily control who sees what their friends and families post about them.
But you don't need to be on FaceBook for other people to post information about you. I can spread all sorts of nasty information about folks who don't have an on-line presence at all. I can upload photos, tag them with whatever I want to, and distribute them all over the place.
That's my point.
Whether or not FaceBook has a good privacy policy isn't going to protect anyone. If you do something stupid and/or incriminating, and there's evidence, you're just going to have to hope that nobody decides to share that information. And you sure as hell better not share it, regardless of the privacy policy of the site you put it on.
Also, the recent article on privacy salience on Bruce Schneier's blog explains why some people put private information on such sites: FB and similar sites have an agressive marketing strategy that emphasizes the benefits of posting such information, while burying privacy concerns deep in hard-to-find pages.
And we're back to common sense.
You shouldn't need to have privacy concerns pointed out to you.
If I post detailed information about every aspect of my life on a public website I'm sure I'll get all sorts of benefits... Marketers will be able to send me offers for jumbo-XL condoms and inflatable sheep and all sorts of other things that would interest me.
But that information is also available to my parents and employers and whoever else. So folks might use that information in deciding whether to hire me or not... Or whether they want to go out on a date with me... Or they could use it to take out a line of credit in my name...
This isn't some anonymous bathroom wall where you can safely scribble down something dirty and never have it traced back to you. This is a giant billboard that the whole world can see - complete with signature and personally-identifying information.
You're right, but I don't think Joe Sixpack necessarily understands the concepts of data mining, profiling, etc and how they might relate to social networking sites. Nor do I think he, or the average teenager, understands the permanence of data or the associated implications.
And frankly, what may make sense to post on a gigantic billboard in your front yard may not make sense, or even be legal, tomorrow. Times change. Governments change. Social mores change. I think expecting your average internet user to consider these things is asking a little much.
No it isn't.
People have been making decisions (sometimes stupid ones) and living with the consequences for centuries. Ok, maybe it's easier to squash a verbally-distributed nasty rumor than a digitally-distributed incriminating photo, but that doesn't mean that common sense no longer applies.
Look back at some printed statements over the years... Things that were appropriate at the time and showed up very proudly in newspapers all over the united states, and now look very embarrassing.
Political careers have been ended because of a youthful indiscretion or an incriminating photograph.
Tons of people have tattoos that they wish they hadn't gotten.
Plenty of people have taken pictures they shouldn't have, and had it used against them.
Ever hear of Nixon? Recorded some tapes he probably wished he hadn't.
How about Sotomayor? Bet she wishes she hadn't said some things right about now.
This isn't about understanding data mining or profiling, this is about simple common sense - which is apparently in short supply these days. If I proudly proclaim that I like big butts on FaceBook you don't need to mine any data - you know that I like big butts. You don't have to profile anything, I've stated it in plain text. Oh, now my mother read it and I'm embarrassed? I guess I shouldn't have written it where she could see it, now should I?
Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, blogs, text messaging, cell phones... They're all just ways of distributing a message. The problem isn't that distribution has become insanely quick, easy, and efficient. The problem is that nobody is thinking about the message anymore.
Folks will call up a friend and have a running conversation about the random people walking by them and what they're wearing - why? Just because you can tell your friend that somebody wearing a Penny Arcade t-shirt doesn't mean you have to.
People actually report on their bowel movements! Why?!
So, let's say FaceBook has perfect privacy. You can share your information with whoever you want, and nobody else can get at that stuff. App authors can't get at it, FaceBook deletes it as soon as you quit. Perfect privacy.
You pass out in a field. Somebody takes a picture. You post that picture on FaceBook - only your friends can see it. Great!
Now one of your friends downloads it and emails it to his buddy, that you don't know, and that buddy re-uploads it to FaceBook.
Or maybe the guy who took the picture in the first place uploads it to Flickr.
The point I'm trying to make is that you don't share what you don't want to be out in the wild.
Used to be that you could do something stupid and maybe get away with it. If you passed out in some field maybe your friend would see it, but that would be it. Maybe a picture would be passed around. Worst-case scenario the whole school or maybe town would be talking about you.
These days it's insanely simple to share any random bit of information with anyone in the world. Not just easy for you to share information with your friend, but easy for them to share it with folks you'd rather they didn't. Instead of the worst-case scenario encompassing a town or school, it now encompasses the planet.
who puts something on Facebook that they _want_ to keep _private_?
People who don't know any better, who are (incidentally) the same people the privacy laws were written to protect.
People who don't know any better?
I put a gigantic billboard in my front yard - 20' tall. Plaster all kinds of personal information on it. Maybe some racy photos. And then, when everyone in the world knows the intimate details of my life I can cry foul because some privacy law was supposed to protect me, because I didn't know any better?
What ever happened to common sense?
I'm not talking about understanding the intricacies of HTTP or how various web apps share information... I'm talking about basic, common sense.
Why would you put private information on a social networking site? The whole point in a social networking site is to share information.
I'm sure that folks are being more careful spending their dollars these days. If the economy goes to hell and you've got less money to spend you won't be throwing it away on crap. But the problem isn't really that the economy has gone to hell, it's that there's just a glut of crap to buy.
It seems to me that very few video games are actually worth their price these days. You pay >$50 for a game with good games have been released this year?
Plus you've got the vendor lock-in... Gotta buy your console for $300ish... Then you're looking for games that run on that console... And then something good will come out that's exclusive to some other console... So you're looking at a real price of $350 to play that exclusive game (unless you already bought every console there is)...
I don't think the problem is that people don't have enough money to buy video games. I think the problem is that people are finding better ways to entertain themselves. Maybe they're replaying old games... Maybe they're milking an MMOG subscription... Maybe they're renting movies... Maybe they're reading books... Maybe they're just hanging out... Whatever.
I like computers... I make my living fixing them... I thoroughly enjoy video games... But I really hate what digital media has done to the concepts of property and ownership.
Used to be that I'd buy a book, or a record, or a board game, or a deck of cards - and nobody would question for a moment that I owned those things. They were my property. I could do with them whatever I wanted. After I finished reading the book I could donate it to the local library, or hand it off to a friend, or sell it to a used bookstore. If the original author of that book showed up at my garage sale and complained that I was selling his book he would have been laughed at.
These days, however, we don't actually own anything. We've just been given a temporary license to use the thing. And when I'm done playing my video game, or done reading my ebook, or done listening to my MP3, I'm not really able to do much with it. Sure, I can sell a video game to someone else... But the DRM involved is making it hard just to re-install the game on your own computer, much less transfer ownership to someone else.
The worst part isn't that this is happening... Of course a company is going to do everything they can to make money - that's what businesses do. So I don't blame EA or Microsoft or whoever for trying to prevent the selling of used video games. The worst part is that it is being allowed to happen. Nobody is laughing at these guys. Their arguments aren't being rebuffed. They aren't being thrown out of court. These folks are claiming that the $60 I paid for a video game didn't actually buy me a video game, and everyone just kind of shrugs and nods and goes along with it.
TwitPic is run by one guy (maybe two now, there was a blog post on the site a while ago looking for another coder) with a couple servers. Even if he gave enough of a damn to try to filter out torrent-containing images (which I doubt is the case), I'm sure he has much better stuff to spend his time on.
I guess my question isn't really about whether some individual might, out of the kindness of their heart, decide to filter the encoded torrent/PNG files off of a site... But more about people being forced/coerced into doing it.
Look at the Pirate Bay trial. The Pirate Bay only hosts the torrents, none of the incriminating files. There is absolutely nothing copyrighted on the Pirate Bay. But they were still taken to court over it. They were found guilty, maybe, depending on appeals/whatever... But simply being taken to court might be enough to shut down a website that couldn't afford the legal fees.
These PNGs are just encoded torrents - really little different than hosting the torrent itself. Yes, they can be hosted at different places because they're harmless pictures instead of torrents... But the data contained is the same. And if you can take a web site operator to court because of the non-copyrighted data contained in a torrent, you can do the same for the non-copyrighted data contained in a PNG that decodes into a torrent.
So, again, I just don't see the advantage of storing them as PNGs as opposed to torrents. Sure, for the moment it is great because you can host them all over the place. All these free image hosting sites just became free torrent hosting sites. But if this actually catches on you'll see any site with any amount of traffic either implementing some kind of filtering or being taken to court.
Some torrent sites already filter out HBO shows and American origin IP addresses. If TPB goes 100% legit then this becomes an easy way to distribute .torrents if you already have a twitter account and access to twitpic, just without the ability to browse by number of seeders/leechers. EZTV and a few others already post all their torrents to twitter for when the site goes down (their site is down currently).
Fair enough. But if this becomes the preferred way to distribute torrents, what's to stop twitter/twitpic from filtering these images out?
I don't see how this is actually addressing the issue of the torrents being filtered... It's just moving that problem.
Filename extensions are a form of metadata, and I don't think it sets a good precedent to lie in the metadata for a file. It's bad enough that we have Windows hiding filename extensions from the user, and encouraging people to just double-click on a file to launch the associated app. This just seems like asking for more problems, as people try to double-click on mjthriller.png and it launches - and crashes - IE.
I know, I know... This is Slashdot, nobody reads the article. But could you at least read the summary?
They aren't re-naming a file. They aren't just dropping the .torrent extension and replacing it with .png The resulting file isn't going to run any malicious code or do anything bizzarre.
They're encoding the bits of the .torrent file in a .png image. It actually creates an image. Looks like some kind of abstract/modern art kind of thing... Blocks of bright colors. You could open it with any graphics program... Set it as your wallpaper... Send it off to WalMart to be printed on photo paper...
Hosting a bunch of images doesn't do any good unless you have a text (or at least searchable) description of what you're downloading. Without context, warehoused information is useless. And these PNG files are just different representations of the same quasi-legal information (that is, they're still colored bits.
That was my initial reaction as well.
Instead of a .torrent file you've got a PNG, but I'm not sure how much that helps anyone.
I don't think the complaint was ever that the information contained in the .torrent file was somehow infringing copyright or breaking laws... I believe the argument has been made that there's nothing actually copyrighted/illegal in the .torrent file itself, and judging from the results of recent court cases that argument doesn't seem to be working terribly well. The PNG still contains the same information as the torrent... Still enables you to download the same files... Would, therefor, still be vulnerable to the same lawsuits and takedown notices - wouldn't it?
It isn't a text file, so it might be harder to locate the incriminating evidence with a simple text search... But you'll need to indicate what's contained in the file somewhere, or nobody is going to know what they're downloading. You'll still need a searchable index, or a header on the forum post, or at least a line or two of text saying what the picture gets you.
So... How is this actually better than a .torrent?
Is anyone surprised?
IT Administrators are typically fairly conservative and cautious. Most folks will wait until SP1 is released. At the very least they'll wait until a few months after release so they can get real-world usage reports.
Mutually assured destruction? I believe the term you're looking for is "competition." It's that thing where multiple companies produce similar products and try to out-do each-other in an attempt to make people buy their products.
How, exactly, is a glorified thin-client an attack on Microsoft Windows?
Sure, a lot of stuff runs on the web these days... And I've argued that the trend will only continue... But this is like claiming that Wyse terminals are a direct attack on Dell's desktops.
QFT.
We will not see a truely progressive politician make it to the presidency until we get a viable third party. And even then it's a long shot.
I don't think this will help much. The problem isn't that we've only got two parties to choose from, the problem is that we don't remember what was promised and don't hold people accountable.
If we would actually vote out the representatives who don't accomplish what we want them to... If we'd actually pressure our representatives to vote accordingly... Then maybe we'd see some real changes.
We honestly do get the government we deserve. And with how apathetic most of the United States is, it's no wonder we've had the same crap in office for decades.