Interesting - perhaps ideas of law and law enforcement will follow the same path as law in the old American West:
1. No enforcement
2. Vigilante law ("get a rope")
3. Independent local law enforcement (town sherrif and town judge)
4. Light federal oversight (marshalls and appellate courts)
5. "Modern" U.S. law.
The problem, of course, is what do you substitute "Modern" and "U.S." above with?
United States interests want another way to enforce copyrights abroad. This treaty is just another tool to exercise power outside of U.S. borders in order to keep the money flowing into the correct pockets. That stuff about Germans serving warrants on U.S. citizens talking to neo-Nazis is pure fantasy.
Just follow the money:
After the United States and other nations signed and ratified the WIPO treaty, Congress crafted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as implementing legislation. Congress did not seriously debate the most controversial aspects in part because of the perceived need to implement the treaty. One of those made it unlawful to tamper with anti-copying devices and software.
I don't think that devising a reader for antique magnetic or optical will be the problem - I'd imagine that a future hacker would welcome the challenge of figuring out how to read a 8" floppy disk.
The problem is that all physical media fail over time. Magnetic media degrades over just a few years. CDs experience "CD rot" (if anyone has any old video disks, you know what I mean), and even media designed for durability eventually breaks down.
I think humanity has to fact that fact that over the millennia, we inevitably lose our old historical records. At least archeologists will never be out of work.:)
MS seems to be the only big company that still regularly makes "we're gonna change the world" announcements. Hailstorm sounds fantastic as a concept. There are a ton of privacy issues associated with it, but the vision is a technophile's dream.
Not that it will be reality anytime soon, since Hailstorm is staffed by the same geniuses who brought you Passport. Remember that this is the team that took two years to bring you a simplistic cookie-based universal login (well, universal between a few MS services anyway), and never proofread their own Terms of Use. They're assisted by the executives who brought you the lame duck that is WebTV, and other assorted worthies. Anyway, don't hold your breath on this one.
To its credit, Microsoft is pointing to the future; the convergence of messaging technologies will happen. Why is MS the only company with the guts to say so with such conviction?
I don't mean any offense, but it's exactly these sorts of misconceptions about multicast that get people inappropriately excited over multicast technologies (IMHO).
Let's look at your categories:
Online games: You're really going to transmit the moves and state changes of all game objects to my machine? Clearly this doesn't work (unless you believe every player has the combined processing power of all of the game's server-class machines with giant network pipes). Data doesn't shrink in size just because it's multicast. The reason that large multiplayer games work is because of big honking servers that can figure out the minimum set of data that my game client needs.
Data to cache servers: why does multicast help here? Those cache servers are in geographically distinct regions, so you either believe that a multicast solution somehow spans all NOCs, or else you're back to the (appropriate) unicast solutions. This may be a solution if you needed to transmit the same data to multiple cache servers on the same network.
Sotck market tickers: not a bad idea actually, but not a high-speed application (as the original poster specified).
Sysadmin: yes, this is a good application of multicast, but as a previous poster said, it only works if you're switched network actually transmits multicast packets (again, the original poster gets to control this since he has a lab).
Linux kernel updates to ftp sites: see "data to cache servers" above.
I think that the misunderstanding here is one of locality -- if you have individual machines on disparate networks, multicasting buys you nothing over unicasting, except for the configuration headaches. Multicasting is cool when you have a lot of machines on the same network (or a few networks) all needing the same data.
What might be the best multicasting application to use to be able to fully utilize the power of the cluster?
When you think about it, the applications of network multicasting (of content anyway) are pretty straightforward, and pretty much come down to 1-to-many streamed audio/visual content. Most of your ideas (distance learning, conferencing, etc.) assume that you have content to stream. As for distributed file share, etc., those all seem to me to be more applicable to unicast technologies.
If you're interested in multicast technologies, there are some very interesting low bandwidth applications. Heartbeats for distributed system applications are a good example. See the Linux-HA (High Availability) project for an application of this: linux-ha.org.
What would be really cool is if someone were to write a driver layer for Linux capable of using the Win32 DirectX driver binaries.
What makes DirectX cool isn't the APIs per-se (though they're fine, just very low-level). It's the fact that all audio/video hardware manufacturers write and optimize their drivers for DirectX.
It wouldn't necessarily even be all that hard -- the external interfaces for DirectX are very well documented (they have to be), and the internals of the drivers are just 16 and (some) 32-bit Intel code.
I'm sure there would be some licensing issues in using DirectX drivers on a non MS platform, but there should be no such issues in writing the emultation layer.:)
Then it's bye-bye unsupported a/v hardware on Linux. Plus porting existing games to (or from!) Linux would be a breeze.
I will say outright that I don't know a lot about Monsanto nor its business practices, and I'm willing to be enlightened. I did read some of the anti-Monstato stuff on dmoz.org, and it all seemed to be of the vein "Monstano-modified food X might increase cancer risk", and "Monsanto uses misleading marketing".
Well big deal. All manner of "natural" foodstuffs increase cancer risk. And as for Monsanto employing "misleading marketing", please spare me. In this age we're constantly bombarded by influence-based marketing. Claims of any company, no matter how benign, are just claims. Monsanto is in the business of making food super cheap, period.
Do I think there should be no controls on such companies? Absolutely there should. But this vilification of Monsanto and other mega-corps bothers me. I'd ask Mr. Glowing Fish if he ever eats a Big Mac or sips a Diet Coke. Maybe he doesn't, but the point is that whether he does or not, it is his choice. He can just as easily buy organically grown meals and eat those. Oh, so Big Macs are unhealthy? Does anyone on the planet think that Big Macs or Diet Cokes are actually good for you? I think we're all pretty clear on that topic. Sometimes I do things that I know are not the best for my health, like drink alcohol or drive an automobile.
Why do people get so pissed off at companies like Monsanto? They make a product ubiquitous and cheap, but they do not deny you a choice. Oh, is it harder to buy organic food because it's not as prevalent? Believe it or not, that's not Monsanto's fault. The fact is, cheap mass produced food is very convenient for our lazy society, and it's not exactly impossible to find (or even grow) healthy foods.
Don't blame Monsanto if your diet is crap, blame yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting - perhaps ideas of law and law enforcement will follow the same path as law in the old American West:
1. No enforcement
2. Vigilante law ("get a rope")
3. Independent local law enforcement (town sherrif and town judge)
4. Light federal oversight (marshalls and appellate courts)
5. "Modern" U.S. law.
The problem, of course, is what do you substitute "Modern" and "U.S." above with?
Invisible Agent
Given the changes, I'm petitioning the board for my domain to register my college's domain: sex.edu
:)
And yes, I will be providing a four-year degree.
Invisible Agent
Allow me to decode:
United States interests want another way to enforce copyrights abroad. This treaty is just another tool to exercise power outside of U.S. borders in order to keep the money flowing into the correct pockets. That stuff about Germans serving warrants on U.S. citizens talking to neo-Nazis is pure fantasy.
Just follow the money:
After the United States and other nations signed and ratified the WIPO treaty, Congress crafted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as implementing legislation. Congress did not seriously debate the most controversial aspects in part because of the perceived need to implement the treaty. One of those made it unlawful to tamper with anti-copying devices and software.
Oh look, it's the DMCA.
Invisible Agent
I don't think that devising a reader for antique magnetic or optical will be the problem - I'd imagine that a future hacker would welcome the challenge of figuring out how to read a 8" floppy disk.
:)
The problem is that all physical media fail over time. Magnetic media degrades over just a few years. CDs experience "CD rot" (if anyone has any old video disks, you know what I mean), and even media designed for durability eventually breaks down.
I think humanity has to fact that fact that over the millennia, we inevitably lose our old historical records.
At least archeologists will never be out of work.
Invisible Agent
MS seems to be the only big company that still regularly makes "we're gonna change the world" announcements. Hailstorm sounds fantastic as a concept. There are a ton of privacy issues associated with it, but the vision is a technophile's dream.
Not that it will be reality anytime soon, since Hailstorm is staffed by the same geniuses who brought you Passport. Remember that this is the team that took two years to bring you a simplistic cookie-based universal login (well, universal between a few MS services anyway), and never proofread their own Terms of Use. They're assisted by the executives who brought you the lame duck that is WebTV, and other assorted worthies. Anyway, don't hold your breath on this one.
To its credit, Microsoft is pointing to the future; the convergence of messaging technologies will happen. Why is MS the only company with the guts to say so with such conviction?
Invisible Agent
Well, these FCC people have quite a naughty site themselves!
:)
Just type "fuck" into their site search engine (http://www.fcc.gov/search/wordsearch.html) and look at all the smut you get:
100% da981187.txt (summary)
100% da961858.txt (summary)
98% da002724.txt (summary)
98% da002724.txt (summary)
98% da010537.txt (summary)
98% da010537.txt (summary)
96% fcc98179.txt (summary)
94% da010111.txt (summary)
94% da010111.txt (summary)
94% da990511.txt (summary)
94% da982140.txt (summary)
92% fcc01090.txt (summary)
92% fcc01090.txt (summary)
88% da981566.txt (summary)
68% TV Ratings Proceeding E-Mail Comments(summary)
64% 5006314422.txt (summary)
30% 47cfr73.pdf (summary)
26% 20bip_5a.pdf (summary)
14% c-bip5b.pdf (summary)
And you should see some of this stuff! Try searching for "vibrator". What these guys lack is a sense of irony.
Invisible Agent
I don't mean any offense, but it's exactly these sorts of misconceptions about multicast that get people inappropriately excited over multicast technologies (IMHO).
Let's look at your categories:
Online games: You're really going to transmit the moves and state changes of all game objects to my machine? Clearly this doesn't work (unless you believe every player has the combined processing power of all of the game's server-class machines with giant network pipes). Data doesn't shrink in size just because it's multicast. The reason that large multiplayer games work is because of big honking servers that can figure out the minimum set of data that my game client needs.
Data to cache servers: why does multicast help here? Those cache servers are in geographically distinct regions, so you either believe that a multicast solution somehow spans all NOCs, or else you're back to the (appropriate) unicast solutions. This may be a solution if you needed to transmit the same data to multiple cache servers on the same network.
Sotck market tickers: not a bad idea actually, but not a high-speed application (as the original poster specified).
Sysadmin: yes, this is a good application of multicast, but as a previous poster said, it only works if you're switched network actually transmits multicast packets (again, the original poster gets to control this since he has a lab).
Linux kernel updates to ftp sites: see "data to cache servers" above.
I think that the misunderstanding here is one of locality -- if you have individual machines on disparate networks, multicasting buys you nothing over unicasting, except for the configuration headaches. Multicasting is cool when you have a lot of machines on the same network (or a few networks) all needing the same data.
Invisible Agent
What might be the best multicasting application to use to be able to fully utilize the power of the cluster?
When you think about it, the applications of network multicasting (of content anyway) are pretty straightforward, and pretty much come down to 1-to-many streamed audio/visual content. Most of your ideas (distance learning, conferencing, etc.) assume that you have content to stream. As for distributed file share, etc., those all seem to me to be more applicable to unicast technologies.
If you're interested in multicast technologies, there are some very interesting low bandwidth applications. Heartbeats for distributed system applications are a good example. See the Linux-HA (High Availability) project for an application of this: linux-ha.org.
Invisible Agent
I cracked a smile when I saw this "feature" article.
"No Slump For Sex Online" -- this is a revalation? You mean sex is still popular? Who'da thought!
I feel sorry for the researchers that are studying the effects of tartar on gum disease in chimpanzees or something boring like that.
Invisible Agent
What would be really cool is if someone were to write a driver layer for Linux capable of using the Win32 DirectX driver binaries.
:)
What makes DirectX cool isn't the APIs per-se (though they're fine, just very low-level). It's the fact that all audio/video hardware manufacturers write and optimize their drivers for DirectX.
It wouldn't necessarily even be all that hard -- the external interfaces for DirectX are very well documented (they have to be), and the internals of the drivers are just 16 and (some) 32-bit Intel code.
I'm sure there would be some licensing issues in using DirectX drivers on a non MS platform, but there should be no such issues in writing the emultation layer.
Then it's bye-bye unsupported a/v hardware on Linux. Plus porting existing games to (or from!) Linux would be a breeze.
Invisible Agent
I will say outright that I don't know a lot about Monsanto nor its business practices, and I'm willing to be enlightened. I did read some of the anti-Monstato stuff on dmoz.org, and it all seemed to be of the vein "Monstano-modified food X might increase cancer risk", and "Monsanto uses misleading marketing".
Well big deal. All manner of "natural" foodstuffs increase cancer risk. And as for Monsanto employing "misleading marketing", please spare me. In this age we're constantly bombarded by influence-based marketing. Claims of any company, no matter how benign, are just claims. Monsanto is in the business of making food super cheap, period.
Do I think there should be no controls on such companies? Absolutely there should. But this vilification of Monsanto and other mega-corps bothers me. I'd ask Mr. Glowing Fish if he ever eats a Big Mac or sips a Diet Coke. Maybe he doesn't, but the point is that whether he does or not, it is his choice. He can just as easily buy organically grown meals and eat those. Oh, so Big Macs are unhealthy? Does anyone on the planet think that Big Macs or Diet Cokes are actually good for you? I think we're all pretty clear on that topic. Sometimes I do things that I know are not the best for my health, like drink alcohol or drive an automobile.
Why do people get so pissed off at companies like Monsanto? They make a product ubiquitous and cheap, but they do not deny you a choice. Oh, is it harder to buy organic food because it's not as prevalent? Believe it or not, that's not Monsanto's fault. The fact is, cheap mass produced food is very convenient for our lazy society, and it's not exactly impossible to find (or even grow) healthy foods.
Don't blame Monsanto if your diet is crap, blame yourself.
Invisible Agent
Invisible Agent