First of all, AIM, and I would imagine other instant messengers already support the transfer of video or audio clips, not to mention images or damn near anything else you'd want to send. Its called FILE TRANSFER people. It happens all the time. Its rather naive to say that they only support text. Someone isn't doing their research.
Worried about overwhealming the backbone with mp3s?? How exactly is this going to happen? Napster at the height of its craze caused some college campus network admins to wring their hands a bit, but the internet backbone didn't seem to have any serious problems as a result.
The article sounds like the technologies they're discussing are things that will hit in the future, when they've already been pretty prominant for the last few years.
Want to integrate voice chat? Don't netmeeting and other similar programs provide this capability already? Yet for some reason, the backbone is still intact.
The way the authors of that article sound, they seem to imply that everyone has broadband service and the backbone is this one single connection that will "run out" if we don't cut back on all this multimedia trading!!!!
If the transfer rates increase, then the upstream providers will increase to compensate. The backbone won't crash as a result of this. They will expand as needed. And if the kids start trading mp3's in such enormous volume that it would grind the backbone to a halt, the individual
ISP's who rely on overbooking their bandwidth to keep costs low will have no choice but to raise the rates to their more bandwidth heavy customers.. thereby solving the problem.
If you're going to be doing something illegal, you need to pay attention what you are doing with your evidence. Don't leave the drugs on the living room coffee table. Don't deposit your proceeds into your bank account. Don't drive a Ferrari if you're unemployed. Don't inform your cohorts that their phones are tapped by calling them.
And when you're mailing out your weekly email newsletter to your loyal junkies, try to avoid mentioning anything incriminating, because SOMEONE might be less than vigilant in erasing those messages on a timely and thourough basis.
Just remember a quote from Miranda. "Anything you say can be used against you". Its only a matter of someone's ability to retrieve what you said that can put you in a compriming position in the future. If you obey the law and act ethically, you shouldn't have problems, but people can misread what you wrote years before and while on a witchhunt will twist what you said to mean something else. If that information simply isn't available, becuase you never provided the means to MAKE it available, liability is significantly reduced.
If you're going to email something to someone, consider how that email could be used to hurt you in the future. While I'm sure that every software company in the world has dreams of avarice of overthrowing the competition. And the internal harmless banter of corporate takeovers probably takes place. If one of those companies turns out to be the next Microsoft, and those internal emails are still available, years after the fact, they could be used as evidence, even if at the time it had nothing to do with company policy.
So.... be careful what you say. Someone might be listening.
Nasa once again launched a spacecraft at Mars. However, due to inaccurate calculations, the spacecraft missed its target and instead settled in a stable orbit, unable to crash into the planet and achieve its intital objective. A preliminary investigation blames a slight miscalculation due to the improper use of significant digits.
Mission planners are uncertain how to proceed now that the mission has been officially declared a failure. "We now have a $250 million piece of equipment uselessly orbiting the planet." A small group of scientists has declared the mission "not a total loss" as this might present a rare opportunity to study the planet before the orbiter crashes into the planet naturally at some later date.
"Disaster" was one of my favorite episodes. Any event where EVERYTHING breaks down, massive confustion, and the simple issues of rank vs. experience, brings out more development in the characters and shows how people really hold up in a crisis.
Dianna taking command of the ship because she was the senior officer present, although she had no idea what to do.
Worf having to deliver a baby because he was the only one present with the necessary basic medical training.
Data having to sacrifice himself (potentially) in order to achieve their goal.
And Picard being stuck in a turboshaft, wounded with three crying children. Ultimately his worst nightmare come true.
-Restil
Re:I was such a TNG addict back in the day
on
Star Trek TNG DVDs
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I think the problem, primarily with the next generation, is it's just too..... campy. There's no internal conflict. Concepts of a 14 year old boy at the helm seem to go over perfectly with the rest of the crew, many who have spent years and years in training for just such a privalage. People that spend 7 years doing the exact same job and never getting promoted.
At least DS9 had elements to it which made it more realistic (as realistic as sci-fi can get anyways) and had more interesting story arcs around several common themes. It allowed them to have more character development, and people actually went somewhere.
We see Nog start the series as a juvinile delinquent and over the years become a respected officer in startfleet. The most growth that any characters show in TNG is Data, and thats for little more than very poorly done comic relief.
The battles are more intense. Civilians actually get scared when things start blowing up around them. Children of captains somehow don't always aspire to join Starfleet. And sometimes, your most powerful allies are dishonest assassins who used to work for the other side, and if not for exile would gladly join up with them again.
The only reason spam is so prevalant is because there are still enough suckers out there who respond to it and buy into the schemes. We need to do one of two things. Either successfully educate the suckers so the spam becomes uneconomical, or compile a real list of suckers and find a way to convince the spammers to ONLY spam them, and not the rest of the world.
Neither of these things will happen, unfortunately.
I've said this before, but its a good point. Even though its been pointed out to me that some of the file sharing software supports this, people don't primiarly share locally. They abuse the upstream connection for all of their sharing, when chances are good on a large university campus, there will be numerous others sharing similiar things, and the local bandwidth is cheap and plentiful.
The clients used for this purpose need to prioritize on local networks. Even if there is a limit on the number and speed of the connections, give immediate unrestricted access to anyone thats on the local net. This will encourage people to look first from within and only search the rest of the internet if it can't be found locally. If other large universities did the same thing, then the incoming requests would also be significantly minimized.
Remember, if the upstream connection is used or a local one is used, the local bandwidth is spent anyways. Might as well quit wasting one of them.
Windows 3.0 on a 386 ran rather decently. 4 megs of ram? I could only have dreamed of having 4 megs of ram on my 386. I DID upgrade to 3 megs at one point. Back then I did it with an add-on isa card.
Windows 3.0 even ran decently on a 286. And you didn't really need much more than 640K of ram, and it didn't complain much about it or spend too much time thrashing.
However, thats not to say it was useful. In fact, I don't quite remember WHAT I did with win 3.0 except maybe something like paintbrush and the scanner software. Everything else back then still used Dos, and so did I. Windows was something that got loaded into a desqview window, along with all the other dos programs.:)
Of the amount of energy created by matter/animatter annialation, consider the amount of energy that goes into creating the antimatter in the first place. The size of the accellerators and all the energy it takes to operate, just to produce a single particle of antimatter.
What you get out of this, is the energy potential equivalent of accellerating a single particle to near the speed of light. Thats a LOT of energy and it can be stored within two particles. Its no wonder that we need a very small amount of it to accomplish great things.
However, its extremely costly and time consuming to create, and without drastically improving the effiency of the creation process, this is not going to change anytime in the near future.
Also, don't forget about the potential arms race here. Antimatter doesn't occur naturally in nature like nuclear elements (such as uranium) do (at least not in a form that can be collected easily). Right now nobody has the capability of creating enough antimatter to do any significant damage. But if we are able to create enough to be useful, a few grams of antimatter could be used to make a weapon that is significantly more powerful than a nuclear weapon. And although tactical nukes come in briefcases, imagine a bomb of equal power that fits inside a watch.
Another issue to consider is that antimatter needs to be stored. If a chemical fuel tank leaks, no big deal. If a nuclear fuel tank leaks, you might get radiation poisoning, but the effect will be limited. If a gram of antimatter gets loose. WATCH OUT.
Still, if we plan to travel great distances, its a necessary step.
and trash their equipment rather than recycle it back to those who use it have a wealth of hardware available that could be used for this bridging purpose.
Even equipment that is 3-4 years old is still useful for a linux workstations and web browsers. Older equipment like this which could be donated, could give these people a chance to figure out how to use computers and the internet without a huge investment of money. It would also have the added benefit of starting them out with Linux and other open source software and they would have a better chance of being loyal to our cause.:)
Cable was such a waste anyways. I don't need it for the local channels, and I certainly never watched TV that much anyways. The two or three programs I DO watch I can download from somewhere easily enough. Is it perfectly legitimate, no, but somehow I don't feel too guilty about it.
If only they dropped some of the restrictions in the process. Uncap the upstream and provide static ip addresses with no silly restrictions on server usage.
If these things were to take place, it'd be a bargian compared to what I'm paying for similar unrestricted service. But although they'll definitely lose some customers, I don't see them letting up on anything. Wouldn't make much sense from their point of view.
The fact of the matter is, they're just trying to survive. They suffer from the same problem every other dot com was suffering from. Trying to offer more than they're realisticly able to, and they're losing money in the process. This is all they can do to avoid bleeding cash.
Virtually random data, or data that is generated by a complex, yet predictable formula, could potentially be subjected to a rather complex curve fitting excersize to reveal the original formula, or at least enough of the formula to reproduce the data.
In fact, for any finite group of numbers, you can produce a function that will generate those numbers. However, unless an obvious pattern is recognized and exploited, the function will likely be larger than the data it is trying to reproduce. Its the recognition of significantly long patterns that would achieve the 100:1 lossless ratio.
Although I've never tried to, I don't think its beyond the realm of probability to be able to recreate a formula for a generated list of data, if that data was created by a formula in the first place. However, this presents a couple of problems.
First of all, if the data IS easily stored in a formula, why would large quantities of this data exist in data form when it could be just as easily stored in formula form and have the application generate it realtime as needed. Basically, even if this program does work this way, it would only be useful where data was poorly concieved in the first place.
Secondly, how much virtually random data is there anyways? Where high speed, high volume compression is the most useful would be for video transmission, and yet we still achieve greater rates than this for acceptable rates of lossy compression, and in any event, recorded video and audio has a natural element to it which would break it out of the "virtual" qualifier.
Of course, there's no saying that they use an approach even closely resembling this. But something to think about anyways.
I thought that the idea of putting a boy band cameo into a star wars movie was a BAD idea. Then I thought it over. In 10 years, its a good bet that most people will only vaguely remember who they were and even fewer people will actually recognize them.
Secondly, although it might have been somewhat tacky, placing members of a boy band as clones had a certain ironic twist to it that made the whole idea work out well.
And third... the opportunity to see a boy band get blown to bits overrules my desire to not see an uncorruptable starwars movie. Its already been contaminated anyways. It's got JarJar.
I don't know of any either, at least not for the common protocols... someone could modify a gnutella client to only return hits if the search is from the local network. Not sure if that's what you're using or not..
I mean... there are sites that advertise nothing BUT X10. Those crappy little cameras must be selling like hotcakes, or they're getting that adspace dirt cheap. Is it just good marketing? I know the product sucks, so they can't be relying on the business of repeat customers. X10 makes some nice products, but that camera isn't one of them. Yet its the only thing they advertise.
Maybe I should get into the business of selling garbage by advertising it via annoying ads. It certainly seems to be working well for X10. Hmmmm.
Is that bandwidth cap for ALL network activity or just traffic that leaves the internal network? You could feasibly trade only within the network, contribute adaquately to the cause, yet not violate your bandwidth restrictions. In fact, if most college students did this, there wouldn't be a need for the cap. The internal network would be just as saturated either way, but internal networks are cheaper.
$5 for the appliance modules and $40 for the setup kit. Since this is completely off topic, bug me on the page or email me at pmathis@dfw.net if you want to know anything else. Thanks.:)
How do we punish the freeloaders of open source?
Do we even want to? I don't contribute much, but any programming I do on my own time is automatically gpl'ed. I don't even think to make it proprietary... just because I might want to sell it someday. I won't hoarde it. Its an attitude I've developed due to the good nature of others. SOMEDAY I might contribute something more substantial than the code snippets I do now, but without the right mentality, that day may never come to be.
This is also a slightly different analogy. In a shared investment game, freeloaders reduce the total profit for everyone. However, if I write a program and gpl it, if there's 1 user or 1 million users using it without returning anything, it makes no difference to me. I should have such a problem.
Think about it. If you have one large server that everyone tries to download from without others participating, several problems emerge. First of all, you saturate the bandwidth on that connection. Secondly, with limited resources, it takes much longer for everyone to obtain what they're wanting. And when the server is located by authorities and shut down, a major resource is lost.
Now, have everyone serve. Anyone looking for something can always find it, because its everywhere. They can always get it, because no one server is oversaturated, as the load is spread out. If one or even several servers get shut down, the effect is minimal. Everyone benefits when everyone cooperates and nobody is hit too harshly.
Now we have another form of potential punishment in this case, not from those that participate, but from law enforcement. Law enforcement, unlike the traders, is more likely to go after those who DO participate, and the freeloaders will get off scott free.
Doubleclick is failing because ads on the internet are failing in general. Why? Because there is more advertising than there is cash flow to justify it. Too many companies and individuals are sporting banner ads to make a few bucks, while depleting the ad resources that would better go to the websites that could really use it. Of course, its all a matter of supply and demand.
To be effective, you need a LOT of ecommerce sites. And you need a LOT of people conducting business through those sites. However, while 50% of Americans might be using the internet, you can bet that 50% of all retail purchases are not conducted through it. You have an excessive amount of consumers not actually spending money to support online businesses, but still "consuming" the free products that are being funded somewhat indirectly by those same businesses. Imagine if all the customers of a grocery store came in to take only the free samples and left.
Also, the average online consumer is less affected by online ads than their equivilant counterpart in meatspace is. The brainwashed masses who watch primetime TV every night are more influenced by the 33% of their TV watching experience, which is comprised of commercials. It also helps that generally speaking, most commercials are actually advertising products that people will use, instead of porn sites and pyramid schemes. Yes, I realize not all banner ads are about these things, but most of the spam we get is, and this spam reflects in the minds of the consumers in much the same way. Once they realize they're being suckered, all online advertising is seen in the same light.
What ends up happening, is we have a much smaller percentage of online consumers who are easily influenced by ads of any sort, yet those consumers are still consuming the free material supported by those very ads.
Targeting ads at consumers who are not influenced by ads won't have any greater effect. They're still just as likely to ignore them. The added overhead involved in accumulating this information is mostly wasted. Also, remember that the purpose of most advertising is not to inform a user of a product's existance, but to psycologically imprint that product's name so the next time the consumer is shopping and see's the product, they're more likely to grab it. This is why we still see coke commercials, even though everyone knows what coke is. It becomes an issue of name recognition.
Online, name recognition is less of a concern. If you're buying products online, you probably already know what you're looking for. The best an advertiser can hope for is to place a similar product next to one the consumer is looking for, hoping to catch his/her eye. Ultimately, every website will either have to fund their own content, which is fine until it becomes too popular to justify, charge subscriptions, which goes against the grain of what everyone is used to for content based websites, or sell products to generate revenue.
If more sites do this, then ads will have greater value. They will also advertise actual products instead of other content sites, which would create more cashflow. However, this could take some time.
That all depends on what type of networking they're rolling out. There is a big difference between the top of the line in networking architecture and what the average joe consumer uses. If they run a fibre drop to each home, then the capacity for upgrading will be in place for years to come. The only physical upgrades will need to take place at the central offices and routers and not individual runs to each home.
At least, I HOPE that's what they do. Installing connections that are only capable of 1.54mbps might suffice for a few years, but consumers will probably outgrow that in a short period of time. However, there is nothing stopping a company from planning far enough in the future to make it last for a while.
And then there are companies such as netpliance who thought that the average consumer still used only dialup and planned to continue that trend for the next 5+ years. And they're gone.
If a 100 metre asteroid were to crash into earth, and hit a country with nuclear capability, it would appear at first to be a high yield nuclear attack. Minutes/hours later, it would easily be confirmed for what it really is, but during those crucial seconds where the country in question thinks they're under nuclear attack, might panic and respond by launching their own attack, especially if they're currently having hostilities with another country at the time.
Now, once they launch an attack, what will the rest of the nations of the world do? By the time everyone figures out exactly what happened, half a dozen nations might be actively involved in a nuclear war. Of course, this seems a bit paranoid, but this is the world we live in.
Its very possible that a 100 meter asteroid could sneak up on us and hit with little or no warning. At least if we have a few days warning, we can evacuate ground zero and all affected nations will know what is REALLY happening and won't panic and create more problems in the process.
Should we invest trillions of $$$ in defensive measures against this type of threat? Not now. We aren't even sure exactly what the threat would be. A rocky asteroid would present a different threat, and therefore a different solution compared to one comprised primarily of metal. We would require a different approach to deflecting them. And if we only discover them a month before impact, there is nothing we could do anyways, unless its a VERY small asteroid, and even then, the most we could probably do is adjust the location of ground zero, and not miss the earth entirely. Any solution will require the cumulative effects of time to work properly.
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First of all, AIM, and I would imagine other instant messengers already support the transfer of video or audio clips, not to mention images or damn near anything else you'd want to send. Its called FILE TRANSFER people. It happens all the time. Its rather naive to say that they only support text. Someone isn't doing their research.
Worried about overwhealming the backbone with mp3s?? How exactly is this going to happen? Napster at the height of its craze caused some college campus network admins to wring their hands a bit, but the internet backbone didn't seem to have any serious problems as a result.
The article sounds like the technologies they're discussing are things that will hit in the future, when they've already been pretty prominant for the last few years.
Want to integrate voice chat? Don't netmeeting and other similar programs provide this capability already? Yet for some reason, the backbone is still intact.
The way the authors of that article sound, they seem to imply that everyone has broadband service and the backbone is this one single connection that will "run out" if we don't cut back on all this multimedia trading!!!!
If the transfer rates increase, then the upstream providers will increase to compensate. The backbone won't crash as a result of this. They will expand as needed. And if the kids start trading mp3's in such enormous volume that it would grind the backbone to a halt, the individual
ISP's who rely on overbooking their bandwidth to keep costs low will have no choice but to raise the rates to their more bandwidth heavy customers.. thereby solving the problem.
Don't worry people. Its not the end of the world.
-Restil
If you're going to be doing something illegal, you need to pay attention what you are doing with your evidence. Don't leave the drugs on the living room coffee table. Don't deposit your proceeds into your bank account. Don't drive a Ferrari if you're unemployed. Don't inform your cohorts that their phones are tapped by calling them.
And when you're mailing out your weekly email newsletter to your loyal junkies, try to avoid mentioning anything incriminating, because SOMEONE might be less than vigilant in erasing those messages on a timely and thourough basis.
Just remember a quote from Miranda. "Anything you say can be used against you". Its only a matter of someone's ability to retrieve what you said that can put you in a compriming position in the future. If you obey the law and act ethically, you shouldn't have problems, but people can misread what you wrote years before and while on a witchhunt will twist what you said to mean something else. If that information simply isn't available, becuase you never provided the means to MAKE it available, liability is significantly reduced.
If you're going to email something to someone, consider how that email could be used to hurt you in the future. While I'm sure that every software company in the world has dreams of avarice of overthrowing the competition. And the internal harmless banter of corporate takeovers probably takes place. If one of those companies turns out to be the next Microsoft, and those internal emails are still available, years after the fact, they could be used as evidence, even if at the time it had nothing to do with company policy.
So.... be careful what you say. Someone might be listening.
-Restil
Nasa once again launched a spacecraft at Mars. However, due to inaccurate calculations, the spacecraft missed its target and instead settled in a stable orbit, unable to crash into the planet and achieve its intital objective. A preliminary investigation blames a slight miscalculation due to the improper use of significant digits.
Mission planners are uncertain how to proceed now that the mission has been officially declared a failure. "We now have a $250 million piece of equipment uselessly orbiting the planet." A small group of scientists has declared the mission "not a total loss" as this might present a rare opportunity to study the planet before the orbiter crashes into the planet naturally at some later date.
-Restil
"Disaster" was one of my favorite episodes. Any event where EVERYTHING breaks down, massive confustion, and the simple issues of rank vs. experience, brings out more development in the characters and shows how people really hold up in a crisis.
Dianna taking command of the ship because she was the senior officer present, although she had no idea what to do.
Worf having to deliver a baby because he was the only one present with the necessary basic medical training.
Data having to sacrifice himself (potentially) in order to achieve their goal.
And Picard being stuck in a turboshaft, wounded with three crying children. Ultimately his worst nightmare come true.
-Restil
I think the problem, primarily with the next generation, is it's just too..... campy. There's no internal conflict. Concepts of a 14 year old boy at the helm seem to go over perfectly with the rest of the crew, many who have spent years and years in training for just such a privalage. People that spend 7 years doing the exact same job and never getting promoted.
At least DS9 had elements to it which made it more realistic (as realistic as sci-fi can get anyways) and had more interesting story arcs around several common themes. It allowed them to have more character development, and people actually went somewhere.
We see Nog start the series as a juvinile delinquent and over the years become a respected officer in startfleet. The most growth that any characters show in TNG is Data, and thats for little more than very poorly done comic relief.
The battles are more intense. Civilians actually get scared when things start blowing up around them. Children of captains somehow don't always aspire to join Starfleet. And sometimes, your most powerful allies are dishonest assassins who used to work for the other side, and if not for exile would gladly join up with them again.
MUCH more realistic in my opinion.
-Restil
True. the screen refreshing really didn't get good until the eisa and vlb cards became available.
:)
Still... when windows was just another application and not your operating system, you didn't notice it as much.
-Restil
The only reason spam is so prevalant is because there are still enough suckers out there who respond to it and buy into the schemes. We need to do one of two things. Either successfully educate the suckers so the spam becomes uneconomical, or compile a real list of suckers and find a way to convince the spammers to ONLY spam them, and not the rest of the world.
Neither of these things will happen, unfortunately.
-Restil
I've said this before, but its a good point. Even though its been pointed out to me that some of the file sharing software supports this, people don't primiarly share locally. They abuse the upstream connection for all of their sharing, when chances are good on a large university campus, there will be numerous others sharing similiar things, and the local bandwidth is cheap and plentiful.
The clients used for this purpose need to prioritize on local networks. Even if there is a limit on the number and speed of the connections, give immediate unrestricted access to anyone thats on the local net. This will encourage people to look first from within and only search the rest of the internet if it can't be found locally. If other large universities did the same thing, then the incoming requests would also be significantly minimized.
Remember, if the upstream connection is used or a local one is used, the local bandwidth is spent anyways. Might as well quit wasting one of them.
-Restil
Windows 3.0 on a 386 ran rather decently. 4 megs of ram? I could only have dreamed of having 4 megs of ram on my 386. I DID upgrade to 3 megs at one point. Back then I did it with an add-on isa card.
:)
Windows 3.0 even ran decently on a 286. And you didn't really need much more than 640K of ram, and it didn't complain much about it or spend too much time thrashing.
However, thats not to say it was useful. In fact, I don't quite remember WHAT I did with win 3.0 except maybe something like paintbrush and the scanner software. Everything else back then still used Dos, and so did I. Windows was something that got loaded into a desqview window, along with all the other dos programs.
-Restil
Of the amount of energy created by matter/animatter annialation, consider the amount of energy that goes into creating the antimatter in the first place. The size of the accellerators and all the energy it takes to operate, just to produce a single particle of antimatter.
What you get out of this, is the energy potential equivalent of accellerating a single particle to near the speed of light. Thats a LOT of energy and it can be stored within two particles. Its no wonder that we need a very small amount of it to accomplish great things.
However, its extremely costly and time consuming to create, and without drastically improving the effiency of the creation process, this is not going to change anytime in the near future.
Also, don't forget about the potential arms race here. Antimatter doesn't occur naturally in nature like nuclear elements (such as uranium) do (at least not in a form that can be collected easily). Right now nobody has the capability of creating enough antimatter to do any significant damage. But if we are able to create enough to be useful, a few grams of antimatter could be used to make a weapon that is significantly more powerful than a nuclear weapon. And although tactical nukes come in briefcases, imagine a bomb of equal power that fits inside a watch.
Another issue to consider is that antimatter needs to be stored. If a chemical fuel tank leaks, no big deal. If a nuclear fuel tank leaks, you might get radiation poisoning, but the effect will be limited. If a gram of antimatter gets loose. WATCH OUT.
Still, if we plan to travel great distances, its a necessary step.
-Restil
and trash their equipment rather than recycle it back to those who use it have a wealth of hardware available that could be used for this bridging purpose.
:)
Even equipment that is 3-4 years old is still useful for a linux workstations and web browsers. Older equipment like this which could be donated, could give these people a chance to figure out how to use computers and the internet without a huge investment of money. It would also have the added benefit of starting them out with Linux and other open source software and they would have a better chance of being loyal to our cause.
-Restil
Cable was such a waste anyways. I don't need it for the local channels, and I certainly never watched TV that much anyways. The two or three programs I DO watch I can download from somewhere easily enough. Is it perfectly legitimate, no, but somehow I don't feel too guilty about it.
-Restil
If only they dropped some of the restrictions in the process. Uncap the upstream and provide static ip addresses with no silly restrictions on server usage.
If these things were to take place, it'd be a bargian compared to what I'm paying for similar unrestricted service. But although they'll definitely lose some customers, I don't see them letting up on anything. Wouldn't make much sense from their point of view.
The fact of the matter is, they're just trying to survive. They suffer from the same problem every other dot com was suffering from. Trying to offer more than they're realisticly able to, and they're losing money in the process. This is all they can do to avoid bleeding cash.
-Restil
Virtually random data, or data that is generated by a complex, yet predictable formula, could potentially be subjected to a rather complex curve fitting excersize to reveal the original formula, or at least enough of the formula to reproduce the data.
In fact, for any finite group of numbers, you can produce a function that will generate those numbers. However, unless an obvious pattern is recognized and exploited, the function will likely be larger than the data it is trying to reproduce. Its the recognition of significantly long patterns that would achieve the 100:1 lossless ratio.
Although I've never tried to, I don't think its beyond the realm of probability to be able to recreate a formula for a generated list of data, if that data was created by a formula in the first place. However, this presents a couple of problems.
First of all, if the data IS easily stored in a formula, why would large quantities of this data exist in data form when it could be just as easily stored in formula form and have the application generate it realtime as needed. Basically, even if this program does work this way, it would only be useful where data was poorly concieved in the first place.
Secondly, how much virtually random data is there anyways? Where high speed, high volume compression is the most useful would be for video transmission, and yet we still achieve greater rates than this for acceptable rates of lossy compression, and in any event, recorded video and audio has a natural element to it which would break it out of the "virtual" qualifier.
Of course, there's no saying that they use an approach even closely resembling this. But something to think about anyways.
-Restil
I thought that the idea of putting a boy band cameo into a star wars movie was a BAD idea. Then I thought it over. In 10 years, its a good bet that most people will only vaguely remember who they were and even fewer people will actually recognize them.
Secondly, although it might have been somewhat tacky, placing members of a boy band as clones had a certain ironic twist to it that made the whole idea work out well.
And third... the opportunity to see a boy band get blown to bits overrules my desire to not see an uncorruptable starwars movie. Its already been contaminated anyways. It's got JarJar.
-Restil
SHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! Quit giving bored, unemployed geeks ideas!
-Restil
I don't know of any either, at least not for the common protocols... someone could modify a gnutella client to only return hits if the search is from the local network. Not sure if that's what you're using or not..
:)
Listen up people. PET PROJECT!!!!!
-Restil
I mean... there are sites that advertise nothing BUT X10. Those crappy little cameras must be selling like hotcakes, or they're getting that adspace dirt cheap. Is it just good marketing? I know the product sucks, so they can't be relying on the business of repeat customers. X10 makes some nice products, but that camera isn't one of them. Yet its the only thing they advertise.
Maybe I should get into the business of selling garbage by advertising it via annoying ads. It certainly seems to be working well for X10. Hmmmm.
-Restil
Is that bandwidth cap for ALL network activity or just traffic that leaves the internal network? You could feasibly trade only within the network, contribute adaquately to the cause, yet not violate your bandwidth restrictions. In fact, if most college students did this, there wouldn't be a need for the cap. The internal network would be just as saturated either way, but internal networks are cheaper.
-Restil
$5 for the appliance modules and $40 for the setup kit. Since this is completely off topic, bug me on the page or email me at pmathis@dfw.net if you want to know anything else. Thanks. :)
-Restil
How do we punish the freeloaders of open source?
Do we even want to? I don't contribute much, but any programming I do on my own time is automatically gpl'ed. I don't even think to make it proprietary... just because I might want to sell it someday. I won't hoarde it. Its an attitude I've developed due to the good nature of others. SOMEDAY I might contribute something more substantial than the code snippets I do now, but without the right mentality, that day may never come to be.
This is also a slightly different analogy. In a shared investment game, freeloaders reduce the total profit for everyone. However, if I write a program and gpl it, if there's 1 user or 1 million users using it without returning anything, it makes no difference to me. I should have such a problem.
-Restil
I know its funny, but this actually applies.
Think about it. If you have one large server that everyone tries to download from without others participating, several problems emerge. First of all, you saturate the bandwidth on that connection. Secondly, with limited resources, it takes much longer for everyone to obtain what they're wanting. And when the server is located by authorities and shut down, a major resource is lost.
Now, have everyone serve. Anyone looking for something can always find it, because its everywhere. They can always get it, because no one server is oversaturated, as the load is spread out. If one or even several servers get shut down, the effect is minimal. Everyone benefits when everyone cooperates and nobody is hit too harshly.
Now we have another form of potential punishment in this case, not from those that participate, but from law enforcement. Law enforcement, unlike the traders, is more likely to go after those who DO participate, and the freeloaders will get off scott free.
-Restil
Doubleclick is failing because ads on the internet are failing in general. Why? Because there is more advertising than there is cash flow to justify it. Too many companies and individuals are sporting banner ads to make a few bucks, while depleting the ad resources that would better go to the websites that could really use it. Of course, its all a matter of supply and demand.
To be effective, you need a LOT of ecommerce sites. And you need a LOT of people conducting business through those sites. However, while 50% of Americans might be using the internet, you can bet that 50% of all retail purchases are not conducted through it. You have an excessive amount of consumers not actually spending money to support online businesses, but still "consuming" the free products that are being funded somewhat indirectly by those same businesses. Imagine if all the customers of a grocery store came in to take only the free samples and left.
Also, the average online consumer is less affected by online ads than their equivilant counterpart in meatspace is. The brainwashed masses who watch primetime TV every night are more influenced by the 33% of their TV watching experience, which is comprised of commercials. It also helps that generally speaking, most commercials are actually advertising products that people will use, instead of porn sites and pyramid schemes. Yes, I realize not all banner ads are about these things, but most of the spam we get is, and this spam reflects in the minds of the consumers in much the same way. Once they realize they're being suckered, all online advertising is seen in the same light.
What ends up happening, is we have a much smaller percentage of online consumers who are easily influenced by ads of any sort, yet those consumers are still consuming the free material supported by those very ads.
Targeting ads at consumers who are not influenced by ads won't have any greater effect. They're still just as likely to ignore them. The added overhead involved in accumulating this information is mostly wasted. Also, remember that the purpose of most advertising is not to inform a user of a product's existance, but to psycologically imprint that product's name so the next time the consumer is shopping and see's the product, they're more likely to grab it. This is why we still see coke commercials, even though everyone knows what coke is. It becomes an issue of name recognition.
Online, name recognition is less of a concern. If you're buying products online, you probably already know what you're looking for. The best an advertiser can hope for is to place a similar product next to one the consumer is looking for, hoping to catch his/her eye. Ultimately, every website will either have to fund their own content, which is fine until it becomes too popular to justify, charge subscriptions, which goes against the grain of what everyone is used to for content based websites, or sell products to generate revenue.
If more sites do this, then ads will have greater value. They will also advertise actual products instead of other content sites, which would create more cashflow. However, this could take some time.
-Restil
That all depends on what type of networking they're rolling out. There is a big difference between the top of the line in networking architecture and what the average joe consumer uses. If they run a fibre drop to each home, then the capacity for upgrading will be in place for years to come. The only physical upgrades will need to take place at the central offices and routers and not individual runs to each home.
At least, I HOPE that's what they do. Installing connections that are only capable of 1.54mbps might suffice for a few years, but consumers will probably outgrow that in a short period of time. However, there is nothing stopping a company from planning far enough in the future to make it last for a while.
And then there are companies such as netpliance who thought that the average consumer still used only dialup and planned to continue that trend for the next 5+ years. And they're gone.
-Restil
If a 100 metre asteroid were to crash into earth, and hit a country with nuclear capability, it would appear at first to be a high yield nuclear attack. Minutes/hours later, it would easily be confirmed for what it really is, but during those crucial seconds where the country in question thinks they're under nuclear attack, might panic and respond by launching their own attack, especially if they're currently having hostilities with another country at the time.
Now, once they launch an attack, what will the rest of the nations of the world do? By the time everyone figures out exactly what happened, half a dozen nations might be actively involved in a nuclear war. Of course, this seems a bit paranoid, but this is the world we live in.
Its very possible that a 100 meter asteroid could sneak up on us and hit with little or no warning. At least if we have a few days warning, we can evacuate ground zero and all affected nations will know what is REALLY happening and won't panic and create more problems in the process.
Should we invest trillions of $$$ in defensive measures against this type of threat? Not now. We aren't even sure exactly what the threat would be. A rocky asteroid would present a different threat, and therefore a different solution compared to one comprised primarily of metal. We would require a different approach to deflecting them. And if we only discover them a month before impact, there is nothing we could do anyways, unless its a VERY small asteroid, and even then, the most we could probably do is adjust the location of ground zero, and not miss the earth entirely. Any solution will require the cumulative effects of time to work properly.
-Restil