OTOH, it *sounds* as if you need "An 800 MHz P-III and a DX6 level hardware accelerator (e.g. TNT)." -- Gabe Newell, Valve Software General Program Manager
The point is that when anybody can have a blog, there is no "everybody else" to worry about. Everyone can post whatever they want, and blogs act as a sort of collaborative filtering method to bring the good links to the top of Google searches (and other blogs), and therefore into the public awareness.
This is totally different from the old way of content filtering, where we pay companies (with money or with eyeballs on ads) to sort our content for us and present only the good stuff. There may be a bias against non-bloggers (I don't see why there should be, since blogs can link to other deserving sites as easily as to each other), but since anybody can be a blogger with minimal effort it shouldn't be a problem. The only real problem is that this system has the potential to take over certain functions now performed by newspapers, magazines, radio stations, music companies, and other "content filterers"; some people don't like that.
I think Google, being in the unique position of controlling what most people see on the web, sees anything that improves the web in general as improving their service. In particular, blogs are a great source of links to popular and useful sites for Google's PageRank algorithm to work with. That means more accurate and relevant Google results. As crazy as it sounds, this may just be a move by Google to try and make blogging more popular, because it has the side effect of improving their service. Also, blogging involves people in the web community, where they will inevitably come to rely on Google as we all do.
In addition, in other parts of the same document quoted in said article, Bruce alleges that SCO is guilty of the same offense, only worse, since they ripped off the entire code for the Berkely Packet Filter apparently without attributing it! Looks like a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Seems to me that such errors are almost unavoidable in large projects these days. Who can keep track of what needs to be attributed, licensed, or whatever?
A semi spends a lot more time on the road than your typical automobile, and causes a _lot_ more wear-and-tear on roads due to its increased weight. This "differential taxation" is merely an attempt to tax by actual usage of the resource, not an attempt to make semi drivers pay more money just because they're semi drivers. With Internet service it is possible to measure usage exactly (number of bytes transferred), and so we can tax by that instead of having different taxes on different users.
Yeah, regulation did such a great job of destroying the phone industry. That's why the phone service in the US is in such shambles right now, right?
Give me a break. Regulation did all right with the phone companies for a long time. The phone service here (in the US) is excellent and reasonably priced. It may not be extremely innovative, but that's not why we regulate things. We regulate things we want to be dependable and universal. That's why we should do for broadband what we did for phones. Broadband service has the same problems as telephone service and electric service: it is costly to go the last mile, and this discourages competition. So it needs to be regulated and taxed, just like phone and electric service. We can regulate and tax it to be universal, dependable, and reasonably cheap, just as we did for phones. Then we can have unregulated VoIP or whatever other services running on top of it, provided by unregulated companies in a free market.
Why can vonage sell unlimited phone service for $40/mo? They externalize all the costs of line maintenance. If your broadband service fails, you have no phone, and it's not Vonage's problem to rectify it.
Right. And whose fault is it that your broadband service failed? Your broadband service provider! Who should be taxed and regulated? Your broadband service provider!
Historically the physical infrastructure has been tied to phone service so completely that the laws for both have become joined. Now that the service can be separated from the infrastructure, the laws need to be revised. Broadband providers should be subject to regulation and taxes much like phone companies today, to guarantee adequate service to everyone. Internet telephony companies should not be subject to very much regulation, if any.
No no no! First there will be an option for real internet service. Then it will be a "value added" service that costs a little more. Then it will cost a lot more. Then the RIAA and MPAA and others will try to make it illegal, because only "pirates" and "hackers" want to do anything other than make http requests and send e-mail. The Internet should be open access to everyone, or else new Internet applications will never be able to develop, and the Internet will never be more than a collection of commercial web pages. As it is now it's really hard to develop a new Internet application with all the proxies, NAT boxes, and "block everything" firewalls out there. Don't make it harder. Unrestricted bidirectional connectivity between any two nodes is what the Internet is all about, not just web pages, email and chat.
Wow, iRate is awesome! Doesn't seem like the architecture is very scaleable, though. I wonder if this concept could be made P2P, while still having a reasonable guarantee that the music you get is Free? I think Bittorrent could be used as a model. The server could store all the available music, and send it out to people sometimes, but clients could download songs from each other when possible to reduce the bandwidth load on the server. That way you can download from other people, but if you use a server that guarantees it only has Free files, you won't have to worry about unknowingly committing copyright infringement.
Storage is more advanced, at least in concept, than all of these other options. That is why it is more interesting. The first interesting thing about Storage is that it uses natural language parsing instead of a predefined query language. This is essential to wide acceptance. The second interesting thing about Storage is that it goes out of its way to find and catalog useful metadata, whereas in most other systems you must input the metadata yourself (a tedious task that no one likes). An example given is using the name and length of a Divx file to search IMDB to get all the relevant information about a film. In this way, Storage solves what I see as the two main problems with database filesystems (it remains to be seen how well it works in practice, however). A third interesting thing about Storage is that it is backwards compatible with all GNOME applications through the VFS layer. A kioslave could allow it to work with KDE too.
I doubt it's a honeypot. I don't think many people would sign up for this and then continue sharing, and I don't think the RIAA would turn around and sue people who abided by their terms (it would be PR suicide). In fact, I don't think many people will sign up for this at all. Rather, this is just a PR stunt, so the RIAA can later say "We tried to be nice, we even gave you amnesty! What more do you want?" It'll look good in the news. They want to get public opinion back on their side.
Right. If you submit this, all the RIAA has is your word that you deleted the files. It even says in the article: "Those who renege on their promise will be subject to charges of willful copyright infringement". So basically, you give your identity to the RIAA and tell them you have committed infringement in the past, and you get what? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! You can't keep downloading music, you can't keep the music you already have, and you don't have immunity from being sued in the future. You only have a guarantee that if the RIAA already knew you were sharing, and were *just about* to file a lawsuit, they won't. The chances of that are slim to none.
msconfig is the answer to all your problems with stupid applications running at startup (like messenger, realplayer, etc). Start->Run, type in msconfig, hit enter. Go to the rightmost tab, "Startup", and uncheck all the boxes. Your computer will start up and run faster and more reliably, and you won't get retarded MSN messenger starting up (though you can still start it manually if you really have a burning desire to use it). You have to do this periodically since whenever you install a program nowadays it adds something to this list. Some programs are even adding Windows services, which aren't disabled by this screen. Luckily the next tab to the left is "Services", and it even has an option to hide all the default ones that come with Windows so you can selectively disable the ones installed by programs (And while you're at it, disable the deceptively named "Messenger" service from Microsoft to stop those stupid gray popup ads from appearing).
The constant use of msconfig is practically essential to running a decent windows system these days, so it's something everyone should know about. The combined use of msconfig and AdAware can keep a windows system reasonably clean of useless commercial junk, extending the time before you need to do a reinstall to remove all the crap.
I think that this is the perfect environment for an anti-worm. If the spread of such a worm was limited to the college's netblock, it could be easily controlled (luckily computer viruses don't spontaneously mutate) and it could be set to download all needed patches from a campus server, and destroy itself on command from the same server. Something like this could also be worthwhile on corporate networks. Why haven't antivirus companies caught on to this? They could sell customized anti-worms to small-to-medium size network owners. The problems of releasing an anti-worm on the Internet at large don't apply to smaller networks. You can get the permission of all the network admins before releasing the worm, and a central server can be used to control the infection, keeping track of which computers are patched and shutting down the worm when it has done its job.
Really? Why do they care if someone is trying to impersonate the Googlebot? Do people really use this hack to gain access to sites? I haven't tried it yet.
I think I'm going to configure my browser to always send a referrer string that is identical to the URL it is requesting, and to send a user-agent string of "Googlebot". After all, everyone wants Google to index their content, right? I'll bet you could get into more than one subscription site with this strategy.
One of the nice things Microsoft has done is that you don't have to recompile your Win32-based app to work in.NET
What are you talking about? If you want your app to be CLR code, of course it has to be recompiled. If you want it to be written in C#, then you have to completely change the source code. It is the same with QT. If you want to use the new capabilities of Qt 4, you have to recompile, and maybe change your code some.
If you don't want to change anything, you can continue using {Qt 3/Win32 API} and your applications will still work fine, with {Qt 4/.NET} applications running at the same time. This approach wastes memory, of course, since there's a lot of duplicated code when two systems are running at the same time, but the problem is the same for Windows as it is for Qt. You just don't notice it for Windows since there's no way to get rid of the legacy Win32 code. With Qt, and especially with most Linux Qt apps being open source, it is possible to port everything over to Qt 4 and dump Qt 3.
Remember the transition from Qt 2 to Qt 3? I don't think I have any Qt 2 applications on my system anymore. It wasn't a problem last time. OTOH, Microsoft's approach of always retaining backwards binary and source compatibility has resulted in Windows becoming a huge pile of convoluted code that is the epitome of the "More Than One Way To Do It" philosophy. Except that almost every way to do it is a hack around some older way to do it, which itself is often poorly documented and/or buggy.
I'm suggesting that on some level what vonage is offering is the same as what the telco is offering
I think the problem is that the phone companies are actually offering two things: the physical network infrastructure, and phone service. The regulations for both are intertwined since they have historically been equivalent, but now one can be offered without the other. Minnesota is trying to apply their combined regulations to a company that is only offering the phone service, and that is just dumb. So we agree that Minnesota's decision is dumb. What is really needed is for separate regulations to apply for phone service and network providers. Traditional phone companies should be subject to both, and Vonage should be subject only to the phone service ones. Also, we agree that existing phone service regulations are probably impractical in a world where phone service is provided over the Internet and they probably need changing (perhaps to the point of abolishing them entirely).
The phone company regulations have been written over the years to apply very specifically to companies that provide a switched copper wiring network densely covering a large geographical area, and now they want to apply them to companies that provide voice service over the Internet, and this is fair?!?
It is rediculous to assume that because the service VoIP companies provide to consumers is similar to the service phone companies provide to consumers, the same regulations will work to govern them. In fact, why should VoIP be subject to regulation at all? The only reason I can think of is: if it is not regulated, it has the potential to destroy the market for traditional switched land-line service. But the question we should be asking is, is that a bad thing? Shouldn't we be moving toward a model where phone companies transform into bandwidth providers and voice communication service is provided over the same connection as everything else?
The logical conclusion of this reasoning is that technology and its free distribution through the Internet will eventually equalize and link the economic status of every area of the world. That means no more "poor" countries, because if a country is poor, labor is cheap, and companies can outsource over the Internet there, raising wages and the standard of living until it is equal to wherever they're outsourcing from (or the opposite, lowering the "rich" country to match the "poor" one). The only limit to this process is the ease with which jobs can be outsourced: most tech/administrative jobs can be outsourced fairly easily, while most farm jobs can't;-)
This raises a lot of questions: How long will the process take? How far will it go? Will it result in a raised standard of living for the entire world, or will it drag prosperous countries down while not benefiting poorer countries much? Will it cause a single language to become dominant the world over to facilitate job migration? What other effects will it have?
They aren't making a huge deal about it but this is big, big news. A free and Free player for every type of video, on Windows, that doesn't suck? It just might be the end of WMP/Real/Quicktime if they don't get their collective acts together and produce some quality software. (Quicktime is actually a pretty good player, but it still sucks compared to MPlayer because it only plays quicktime files, and it has windows integration problems). They've even got open-source codecs for almost all of the things that used to require binary dll hacks of questionable legality (Sorenson). I think MPlayer is ready to take the Windows world by storm. All they need is a little improvement on the interface and an easy installer (browser plugin would be nice too). Real, in particular, should be shaking in their boots.
How about selling antivirus worms to businesses, and limiting their spread by subnet? A company could make an antivirus worm and sell it to companies, who would let it loose on their internal networks, immunizing every machine automatically and within a few hours! It's genius. You could sell a different one for each worm and make a bundle. Why hasn't someone thought of this before?
I can keep one computer hooked up to the stereo and run XMMS from any computer in the house.
But if you want to change the playing song from a different computer than xmms was originally started on, you're out of luck; you'll have to use something other than X. I don't understand how this feature could possibly have been overlooked by so many people for so long. To me it seems like one of the most basic features a network-transparent window system should have: the ability to move applications from one display to another. With this feature you could implement a VNC-like app that could selectively migrate or duplicate single applications or the whole desktop on multiple displays. Wouldn't that be cool? Hopefully the Xowhatever folks take a look at this.
Slashdot Mirror
OTOH, it *sounds* as if you need "An 800 MHz P-III and a DX6 level hardware accelerator (e.g. TNT)." -- Gabe Newell, Valve Software General Program Manager
This is totally different from the old way of content filtering, where we pay companies (with money or with eyeballs on ads) to sort our content for us and present only the good stuff. There may be a bias against non-bloggers (I don't see why there should be, since blogs can link to other deserving sites as easily as to each other), but since anybody can be a blogger with minimal effort it shouldn't be a problem. The only real problem is that this system has the potential to take over certain functions now performed by newspapers, magazines, radio stations, music companies, and other "content filterers"; some people don't like that.
Exactly! Thanks for putting that so succinctly.
I think Google, being in the unique position of controlling what most people see on the web, sees anything that improves the web in general as improving their service. In particular, blogs are a great source of links to popular and useful sites for Google's PageRank algorithm to work with. That means more accurate and relevant Google results. As crazy as it sounds, this may just be a move by Google to try and make blogging more popular, because it has the side effect of improving their service. Also, blogging involves people in the web community, where they will inevitably come to rely on Google as we all do.
In addition, in other parts of the same document quoted in said article, Bruce alleges that SCO is guilty of the same offense, only worse, since they ripped off the entire code for the Berkely Packet Filter apparently without attributing it! Looks like a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Seems to me that such errors are almost unavoidable in large projects these days. Who can keep track of what needs to be attributed, licensed, or whatever?
A semi spends a lot more time on the road than your typical automobile, and causes a _lot_ more wear-and-tear on roads due to its increased weight. This "differential taxation" is merely an attempt to tax by actual usage of the resource, not an attempt to make semi drivers pay more money just because they're semi drivers. With Internet service it is possible to measure usage exactly (number of bytes transferred), and so we can tax by that instead of having different taxes on different users.
Give me a break. Regulation did all right with the phone companies for a long time. The phone service here (in the US) is excellent and reasonably priced. It may not be extremely innovative, but that's not why we regulate things. We regulate things we want to be dependable and universal. That's why we should do for broadband what we did for phones. Broadband service has the same problems as telephone service and electric service: it is costly to go the last mile, and this discourages competition. So it needs to be regulated and taxed, just like phone and electric service. We can regulate and tax it to be universal, dependable, and reasonably cheap, just as we did for phones. Then we can have unregulated VoIP or whatever other services running on top of it, provided by unregulated companies in a free market.
Right. And whose fault is it that your broadband service failed? Your broadband service provider! Who should be taxed and regulated? Your broadband service provider!
Historically the physical infrastructure has been tied to phone service so completely that the laws for both have become joined. Now that the service can be separated from the infrastructure, the laws need to be revised. Broadband providers should be subject to regulation and taxes much like phone companies today, to guarantee adequate service to everyone. Internet telephony companies should not be subject to very much regulation, if any.
No no no! First there will be an option for real internet service. Then it will be a "value added" service that costs a little more. Then it will cost a lot more. Then the RIAA and MPAA and others will try to make it illegal, because only "pirates" and "hackers" want to do anything other than make http requests and send e-mail. The Internet should be open access to everyone, or else new Internet applications will never be able to develop, and the Internet will never be more than a collection of commercial web pages. As it is now it's really hard to develop a new Internet application with all the proxies, NAT boxes, and "block everything" firewalls out there. Don't make it harder. Unrestricted bidirectional connectivity between any two nodes is what the Internet is all about, not just web pages, email and chat.
Wow, iRate is awesome! Doesn't seem like the architecture is very scaleable, though. I wonder if this concept could be made P2P, while still having a reasonable guarantee that the music you get is Free? I think Bittorrent could be used as a model. The server could store all the available music, and send it out to people sometimes, but clients could download songs from each other when possible to reduce the bandwidth load on the server. That way you can download from other people, but if you use a server that guarantees it only has Free files, you won't have to worry about unknowingly committing copyright infringement.
I doubt it's a honeypot. I don't think many people would sign up for this and then continue sharing, and I don't think the RIAA would turn around and sue people who abided by their terms (it would be PR suicide). In fact, I don't think many people will sign up for this at all. Rather, this is just a PR stunt, so the RIAA can later say "We tried to be nice, we even gave you amnesty! What more do you want?" It'll look good in the news. They want to get public opinion back on their side.
Right. If you submit this, all the RIAA has is your word that you deleted the files. It even says in the article: "Those who renege on their promise will be subject to charges of willful copyright infringement". So basically, you give your identity to the RIAA and tell them you have committed infringement in the past, and you get what? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! You can't keep downloading music, you can't keep the music you already have, and you don't have immunity from being sued in the future. You only have a guarantee that if the RIAA already knew you were sharing, and were *just about* to file a lawsuit, they won't. The chances of that are slim to none.
Yes, and they want you to stop it.
msconfig is the answer to all your problems with stupid applications running at startup (like messenger, realplayer, etc). Start->Run, type in msconfig, hit enter. Go to the rightmost tab, "Startup", and uncheck all the boxes. Your computer will start up and run faster and more reliably, and you won't get retarded MSN messenger starting up (though you can still start it manually if you really have a burning desire to use it). You have to do this periodically since whenever you install a program nowadays it adds something to this list. Some programs are even adding Windows services, which aren't disabled by this screen. Luckily the next tab to the left is "Services", and it even has an option to hide all the default ones that come with Windows so you can selectively disable the ones installed by programs (And while you're at it, disable the deceptively named "Messenger" service from Microsoft to stop those stupid gray popup ads from appearing).
The constant use of msconfig is practically essential to running a decent windows system these days, so it's something everyone should know about. The combined use of msconfig and AdAware can keep a windows system reasonably clean of useless commercial junk, extending the time before you need to do a reinstall to remove all the crap.
I think that this is the perfect environment for an anti-worm. If the spread of such a worm was limited to the college's netblock, it could be easily controlled (luckily computer viruses don't spontaneously mutate) and it could be set to download all needed patches from a campus server, and destroy itself on command from the same server. Something like this could also be worthwhile on corporate networks. Why haven't antivirus companies caught on to this? They could sell customized anti-worms to small-to-medium size network owners. The problems of releasing an anti-worm on the Internet at large don't apply to smaller networks. You can get the permission of all the network admins before releasing the worm, and a central server can be used to control the infection, keeping track of which computers are patched and shutting down the worm when it has done its job.
Really? Why do they care if someone is trying to impersonate the Googlebot? Do people really use this hack to gain access to sites? I haven't tried it yet.
I think I'm going to configure my browser to always send a referrer string that is identical to the URL it is requesting, and to send a user-agent string of "Googlebot". After all, everyone wants Google to index their content, right? I'll bet you could get into more than one subscription site with this strategy.
What are you talking about? If you want your app to be CLR code, of course it has to be recompiled. If you want it to be written in C#, then you have to completely change the source code. It is the same with QT. If you want to use the new capabilities of Qt 4, you have to recompile, and maybe change your code some.
If you don't want to change anything, you can continue using {Qt 3/Win32 API} and your applications will still work fine, with {Qt 4/.NET} applications running at the same time. This approach wastes memory, of course, since there's a lot of duplicated code when two systems are running at the same time, but the problem is the same for Windows as it is for Qt. You just don't notice it for Windows since there's no way to get rid of the legacy Win32 code. With Qt, and especially with most Linux Qt apps being open source, it is possible to port everything over to Qt 4 and dump Qt 3.
Remember the transition from Qt 2 to Qt 3? I don't think I have any Qt 2 applications on my system anymore. It wasn't a problem last time. OTOH, Microsoft's approach of always retaining backwards binary and source compatibility has resulted in Windows becoming a huge pile of convoluted code that is the epitome of the "More Than One Way To Do It" philosophy. Except that almost every way to do it is a hack around some older way to do it, which itself is often poorly documented and/or buggy.
I think the problem is that the phone companies are actually offering two things: the physical network infrastructure, and phone service. The regulations for both are intertwined since they have historically been equivalent, but now one can be offered without the other. Minnesota is trying to apply their combined regulations to a company that is only offering the phone service, and that is just dumb. So we agree that Minnesota's decision is dumb. What is really needed is for separate regulations to apply for phone service and network providers. Traditional phone companies should be subject to both, and Vonage should be subject only to the phone service ones. Also, we agree that existing phone service regulations are probably impractical in a world where phone service is provided over the Internet and they probably need changing (perhaps to the point of abolishing them entirely).
It is rediculous to assume that because the service VoIP companies provide to consumers is similar to the service phone companies provide to consumers, the same regulations will work to govern them. In fact, why should VoIP be subject to regulation at all? The only reason I can think of is: if it is not regulated, it has the potential to destroy the market for traditional switched land-line service. But the question we should be asking is, is that a bad thing? Shouldn't we be moving toward a model where phone companies transform into bandwidth providers and voice communication service is provided over the same connection as everything else?
This raises a lot of questions: How long will the process take? How far will it go? Will it result in a raised standard of living for the entire world, or will it drag prosperous countries down while not benefiting poorer countries much? Will it cause a single language to become dominant the world over to facilitate job migration? What other effects will it have?
They aren't making a huge deal about it but this is big, big news. A free and Free player for every type of video, on Windows, that doesn't suck? It just might be the end of WMP/Real/Quicktime if they don't get their collective acts together and produce some quality software. (Quicktime is actually a pretty good player, but it still sucks compared to MPlayer because it only plays quicktime files, and it has windows integration problems). They've even got open-source codecs for almost all of the things that used to require binary dll hacks of questionable legality (Sorenson). I think MPlayer is ready to take the Windows world by storm. All they need is a little improvement on the interface and an easy installer (browser plugin would be nice too). Real, in particular, should be shaking in their boots.
How about selling antivirus worms to businesses, and limiting their spread by subnet? A company could make an antivirus worm and sell it to companies, who would let it loose on their internal networks, immunizing every machine automatically and within a few hours! It's genius. You could sell a different one for each worm and make a bundle. Why hasn't someone thought of this before?
But if you want to change the playing song from a different computer than xmms was originally started on, you're out of luck; you'll have to use something other than X. I don't understand how this feature could possibly have been overlooked by so many people for so long. To me it seems like one of the most basic features a network-transparent window system should have: the ability to move applications from one display to another. With this feature you could implement a VNC-like app that could selectively migrate or duplicate single applications or the whole desktop on multiple displays. Wouldn't that be cool? Hopefully the Xowhatever folks take a look at this.