I would love to see an AMD/Transmeta 64-bit chip, but I have to admit I'm concerned about legacy 32-bit apps. Intel's Itanium 64-bit cpu does very poorly with 32-bit apps, and even on a 64-bit system, I can't imagine not ever having to run a 32-bit app like, say, MS proxy server. Of course, if you were running linux you could always port to 64-bit, but if an office is trying to standardize their network on ONE application suite and OS,this could cause problems...
That said, AMD and Transmeta routinely kick Intel butt, and I'm confident their 64-bit chip (if that's what they are in fact working on) will blow Itanium out of the water. One thing I'm wondering: will the new chip incorporate the power-saving features of current Transmeta chips. If so, the Californians will love it.
For slashdotters and more highly skilled users, this would indeed be an ideal solution. However, you have to remember that most Internet users are at a more-or-less permanent novice skill level. They do not understand the Internet, they do not want to understand the Internet, and they will not understand the Internet.
This renders those users vulnerable to something I call the "AOL Effect" - the preference above all other factors for user-friendliness. Even a small increase in user-friendliness (such as an easy-to-remember domain name) makes a novice user percieve a site as more professional and efficient.
In other words, the novice user will not be happy with entering hard-to-understand numbers (or even bookmarking them) when they could use sites with "friendly" domain names.
Also remember, all those big companies like AOL, Microsoft, etc, are aware of how people percieve an easy-to-remember domain name, and spend a lot of time in court defending not just their domains, but similar domain names. A domain name fot these companies is a huge investment in not just advertising-related cash, but court-time as well. They will not give up their domain names without a fight.
Just to play devil's advocate, why not kill the domain policy list? It was useful for Verisign to prove to the government they could be trusted as the keepers of the.com registry, but now they have it. Why would they do anything out of the goodness of their hearts? The list took up resource - not many, admittedly, but some. Cut enough small expenses and you save a lot of cash. Verisign is a business, not a saint.
I say this just to present a possible viewpoint, not because I believe it. I think that Versign could have at least helped with backing up the arhives to other servers.
It seems that unlike, say, burning pirated copies of games, there's no real advantage to TVrips. I mean, in exchange for hours of work in finding the rip you want, and another hour or so downloading the darned thing, you get to watch your TV show before it would normally come one.
I just can't see how this is useful. It takes so much trouble to get a rip, you reach a point of diminishing returns in your efforts.
Incidentally, what if the Aricebo telescope was used for TVrips and sent them out over seti@home? That might actually make the program useful...:-)
You're right. I should have said that the RIAA simply applied that principle to Napster and the internet. The problem with "dodging the bullet" is that it's darned hard to tell which material was legal. How do you prove the contents of "coolstuff.zip" are my resume and not a metallica soundtrack?
I think the reason RIAA isn't suing AT&T is one of scale. In all likelyhood, your friend isn't going to record your conversation and distribute tapos to thousands of friends. But thousands of people can download an MP3 quickly and easily.
You're right, of course, but I think the RIAA is arguing that Aimster is used so much for criminal purposes that it should not be considered a legal service. There is precedent for this - there could be legal acts that could be committed with an M-16 (perhaps home decoration), but the device is so dangerous no attempt to made to outline legal uses for it for civilians. The same, the RIAA could say, is true of Aimster. It has such a high rish of abuse that it cannot be allowed to exist.
Remember, that's not my opinion, just a possible argumant the RIAA could use.
The RIAA wants to prevent copying copywritten works on Aimster by shutting down that service. I agree copying copywritten works is illegal, and and not a right, but is it appropriate to shut down a service with legitimate uses because some people abuse it? Remember, sharing copywritten files is expressly forbidden in the Aimster EULA. It is not designed to be a "warez" service See my earilier post "I hate to say it, but..." (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/05/24/2229 219&cid=36).
Incidentally, while your points are good, using the terms "brat", "idiots", "really slow", and using all caps are all extrememly rude, and in fact moddable under the mod criteria. Don't do it, please.
With luck, FDISK would also be banned. After all, it is designed to create FAT32 partitions. And if those were outlawed...
Actually, this isn't as crazy as it sounds. For a while, Microsoft and IBM were working on a new hard drive format that would only allow files to be copied a certain number of times. If this happened, the marketing might of Microsoft and IBM would doubtless kill FAT32 very quickly. Of course, we'd be left with a true monster...
I respectfully disagree. The "survival characteristic" that the RIAA "breeds" for is not greater decentralization, but legal and political inoffensiveness. If a network truly had no central servers, the RIAA will simply lobby (and probably succeed) to get the use of a client for this network a feleony. The only way the RIAA will leave a network alone is if it simply cannot in any way distribute material the RIAA does not want distributed. The RIAAs lawyers are not brilliant, but the judges aren't either, and the RIAA has whole volumes of intellectual property law on its side.
I suspect that at the end of this, there will be no true file-sharing networks, but just IRC and FTP servers. Personally, I prefer that system anyway - Gnutella, Aimster etc. have always been too laggy for my taste.
Flunky: It's the internet, sir. People are realizing that they can use it to obtain music for free, and they don't need us to rip off artists for them anymore.
RIAA Exec: Oh crud, I always knew this day would come. Well, this calls for high-quality delaying tactics.
Flunky: Excellent, sir. I can set up an ad-laden, overpublicized Napster clone in a few hours. I'll just steal Gnutella code.
Exec: No! That would be unethical. Let's just convince the American justice system that file-sharing over the internet of any kind is bad.
Flunky: Excellent, sir! And perhaps we could even claim that Napster is ripping off the artists, and we're trying to protect them!
Exec: (laughs) Good one! They'll never see that coming!
I don't think the EULA argument would work very well - if memory serves, Napster tried the same thing. However, I don't think this means the end of the EULA - Microsoft arguably has as much or more power than the RIAA, and they'd fight to the death to protect those incomprehensible blocks of legalese. Of course, in some parts of Europe the EULA is already dead...
From a legal point of view, the RIAA has a point. No, this is not flamebait, but the Napster case did set a legal precedent for saying that any service that can be used to transfer copyrighted materials can be challenged and.or shut down. After all, Aimster is capable of fulfilling the same functions as Napster, to an extent, which makes the precedent very "on point".
The only hope for Aimster, as I see it, is to argue that there is a difference in emphasis between the two services. Napster was intended for sharing hard-to-find media files on the internet, and distributing them easily. The naturally leads to ease in distributing copywritten materials.
What Aimster could argue is that the emphasis of Aimster is not on large-scale copywritten file sharing as with Napster, but on providing users a way to share files between each other on a smaller scale, as with email or ICQ. Aimster can be used to distribute copywritten works, but it lacks the file-searching ability of Napster, among other things, that made it an ideal medium for distributing copywritten works. It's also less easy for a person to give everyone on the service a given file - each potential recipient has to be approved by the person distributing the file.
In other words, Aimster is more akin to an instant messaging client that a large-scale file-sharing network, and that is the only hope it has for survival. Unless, of course, the judge in this case is smarter than the one for napster.
Thank you for disagreeing with me. Upon further consideration, I believe you're right. Censorship of any sort would be impractical. But I can dream, can't I?:-)
What if accuracy were tied to ping? Specifically, what if the higher the average ping in a game was, the more forgiving the game would be of shot accuracy? In other words, in a low ping game you'd have to actually hit someone's body to hit them, but in a high ping game you could just hit in the "ping zone" around a player's body which grows with ping. That way, people wouldn't make a shot that was accurate when they fired, but missed because of lag.
Wheeled robots almost always win against walkers in battlebots, and there is a good reason for this. Wheeled robots are just plain more maneuverable that walkers, and much faster. Since so much of battlebots victory is based on taking your opponent to the hazards and/or just getting in something resembling a hit, wheels have a real advantage. They're just faster.
Seti@home sends out occasional packets to clients to which it knows what the response will be. Why not do something like that with wireless keyboards/mice?
Instead of just a receiver processing signals from the mouse or keyboard, have a transmitter in addition. Send random floating-points to the mouse or keyboard after each attempt at input or a random percentage of the time, which would then return another floating-point obtained from an algorithm in ROM that would be unique for each machine, and never transmitted. A malicious individual would be unable to control a user's computer because he.she would not have the algorithm.
Here's the way it would look:
1. Mouse/keyboard sends command to computer.
2. Computer sends random numbers.
3. Random numbers are received by mouse, and are fed into an algorithm on mouse ROM.
4. Mouse returns result(s).
5. If response in incorrect, wireless peripheral is locked out, and user switchs either to wired device or different frequency.
This is exactly why Anonymous Cowards should not be allowed to post. If this - person - had an account, he could lose enough karma to ensure his next six lives would be miserble. I've seen this same message attacked to several other news items today - couldn't the perl script automatically reject posts like this by scanning for certain words?
Webster's defines "peerless" as "unequaled; having no peer or equal". I can think of several probable peers for this device in terms of price per megabyte: second hard drive, cd-rws, dvd writeables, etc. Of course, this is based on the assumption that Peerless is in the $100-$200 range, with cartridges in the $50 range. I base those assumptions on what I've seen of other cartridge-based gigabyte+ systems, so they could be way off.
I mentioned a second hard drive because, in my opinion, it's the best backup option available. IDE drives aren't proprietary, are relatively cheap (around $100 for a 15 gig machine at circuit city), and are stable. As for portability - is it that hard to just open your case and yank out the slave drive? Admittedly, I wouldn't want to do this every few hours, but how often do you have to Sneakernet multi-gigabyte files? Don't say that in corporate environments with huge databases, this might be needed - the corporations with huge databases have high-speed networks to shuttle the things around with.
CD-RWs cost only a buck each at compgeeks.com - even with their lower capacity, I bet I could store 10 gigs for less that what Iomega will want for their cartridge. In addition, CDs are shiny, and I personally like shiny things.
The article mentioned connecting Peerless to consumer devices, so it seems likely a computer will not be needed. Why whould you want peerless on a computer anyway, when a second hard drive is cheaper and just as easy to install?
In the beginning there were hard drives, and they were good. But verily, they were inside the computer, and the user was on the outside, and never the twain did meet. And the floppies were too small, and the tape drives did take long and corrupt the sacred data.
And God created the Zip drive and the SparQ, and -lo! - they were both overpriced, and did gougeth the hapless consumer, as God commanded in Microsoft 10:12 "Thou Shalt exploiteth the ignorance of the user, for his soul grows as his pocketbook shrinketh".
And the consumers did buy the Zip, but not the SparQ, though it was thre mightier drive. And Iomega grew fat on their success, and did make more and bigger drives.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of overpriced external drives, I shall buy none, for the best form of backup is simply a second hard drive.
Slashdot Mirror
I would love to see an AMD/Transmeta 64-bit chip, but I have to admit I'm concerned about legacy 32-bit apps. Intel's Itanium 64-bit cpu does very poorly with 32-bit apps, and even on a 64-bit system, I can't imagine not ever having to run a 32-bit app like, say, MS proxy server. Of course, if you were running linux you could always port to 64-bit, but if an office is trying to standardize their network on ONE application suite and OS,this could cause problems... That said, AMD and Transmeta routinely kick Intel butt, and I'm confident their 64-bit chip (if that's what they are in fact working on) will blow Itanium out of the water. One thing I'm wondering: will the new chip incorporate the power-saving features of current Transmeta chips. If so, the Californians will love it.
For slashdotters and more highly skilled users, this would indeed be an ideal solution. However, you have to remember that most Internet users are at a more-or-less permanent novice skill level. They do not understand the Internet, they do not want to understand the Internet, and they will not understand the Internet.
This renders those users vulnerable to something I call the "AOL Effect" - the preference above all other factors for user-friendliness. Even a small increase in user-friendliness (such as an easy-to-remember domain name) makes a novice user percieve a site as more professional and efficient.
In other words, the novice user will not be happy with entering hard-to-understand numbers (or even bookmarking them) when they could use sites with "friendly" domain names.
Also remember, all those big companies like AOL, Microsoft, etc, are aware of how people percieve an easy-to-remember domain name, and spend a lot of time in court defending not just their domains, but similar domain names. A domain name fot these companies is a huge investment in not just advertising-related cash, but court-time as well. They will not give up their domain names without a fight.
Just to play devil's advocate, why not kill the domain policy list? It was useful for Verisign to prove to the government they could be trusted as the keepers of the .com registry, but now they have it. Why would they do anything out of the goodness of their hearts? The list took up resource - not many, admittedly, but some. Cut enough small expenses and you save a lot of cash. Verisign is a business, not a saint.
I say this just to present a possible viewpoint, not because I believe it. I think that Versign could have at least helped with backing up the arhives to other servers.
It seems that unlike, say, burning pirated copies of games, there's no real advantage to TVrips. I mean, in exchange for hours of work in finding the rip you want, and another hour or so downloading the darned thing, you get to watch your TV show before it would normally come one.
:-)
I just can't see how this is useful. It takes so much trouble to get a rip, you reach a point of diminishing returns in your efforts.
Incidentally, what if the Aricebo telescope was used for TVrips and sent them out over seti@home? That might actually make the program useful...
Aimster is a seperate program that piggybacks on the Aim network, but does not incorporate the AIM software.
But who would stick to it?
You're right. I should have said that the RIAA simply applied that principle to Napster and the internet. The problem with "dodging the bullet" is that it's darned hard to tell which material was legal. How do you prove the contents of "coolstuff.zip" are my resume and not a metallica soundtrack?
I think the reason RIAA isn't suing AT&T is one of scale. In all likelyhood, your friend isn't going to record your conversation and distribute tapos to thousands of friends. But thousands of people can download an MP3 quickly and easily.
By the way, Dune is the best series ever written.
You're right, of course, but I think the RIAA is arguing that Aimster is used so much for criminal purposes that it should not be considered a legal service. There is precedent for this - there could be legal acts that could be committed with an M-16 (perhaps home decoration), but the device is so dangerous no attempt to made to outline legal uses for it for civilians. The same, the RIAA could say, is true of Aimster. It has such a high rish of abuse that it cannot be allowed to exist.
Remember, that's not my opinion, just a possible argumant the RIAA could use.
The RIAA wants to prevent copying copywritten works on Aimster by shutting down that service. I agree copying copywritten works is illegal, and and not a right, but is it appropriate to shut down a service with legitimate uses because some people abuse it? Remember, sharing copywritten files is expressly forbidden in the Aimster EULA. It is not designed to be a "warez" service See my earilier post "I hate to say it, but..." (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/05/24/2229 219&cid=36).
Incidentally, while your points are good, using the terms "brat", "idiots", "really slow", and using all caps are all extrememly rude, and in fact moddable under the mod criteria. Don't do it, please.
With luck, FDISK would also be banned. After all, it is designed to create FAT32 partitions. And if those were outlawed...
Actually, this isn't as crazy as it sounds. For a while, Microsoft and IBM were working on a new hard drive format that would only allow files to be copied a certain number of times. If this happened, the marketing might of Microsoft and IBM would doubtless kill FAT32 very quickly. Of course, we'd be left with a true monster...
I respectfully disagree. The "survival characteristic" that the RIAA "breeds" for is not greater decentralization, but legal and political inoffensiveness. If a network truly had no central servers, the RIAA will simply lobby (and probably succeed) to get the use of a client for this network a feleony. The only way the RIAA will leave a network alone is if it simply cannot in any way distribute material the RIAA does not want distributed. The RIAAs lawyers are not brilliant, but the judges aren't either, and the RIAA has whole volumes of intellectual property law on its side.
I suspect that at the end of this, there will be no true file-sharing networks, but just IRC and FTP servers. Personally, I prefer that system anyway - Gnutella, Aimster etc. have always been too laggy for my taste.
Flunky: Sir, we have a problem...
RIAA Exec: Yes?
Flunky: It's the internet, sir. People are realizing that they can use it to obtain music for free, and they don't need us to rip off artists for them anymore.
RIAA Exec: Oh crud, I always knew this day would come. Well, this calls for high-quality delaying tactics.
Flunky: Excellent, sir. I can set up an ad-laden, overpublicized Napster clone in a few hours. I'll just steal Gnutella code.
Exec: No! That would be unethical. Let's just convince the American justice system that file-sharing over the internet of any kind is bad.
Flunky: Excellent, sir! And perhaps we could even claim that Napster is ripping off the artists, and we're trying to protect them!
Exec: (laughs) Good one! They'll never see that coming!
I don't think the EULA argument would work very well - if memory serves, Napster tried the same thing. However, I don't think this means the end of the EULA - Microsoft arguably has as much or more power than the RIAA, and they'd fight to the death to protect those incomprehensible blocks of legalese. Of course, in some parts of Europe the EULA is already dead...
From a legal point of view, the RIAA has a point. No, this is not flamebait, but the Napster case did set a legal precedent for saying that any service that can be used to transfer copyrighted materials can be challenged and.or shut down. After all, Aimster is capable of fulfilling the same functions as Napster, to an extent, which makes the precedent very "on point".
The only hope for Aimster, as I see it, is to argue that there is a difference in emphasis between the two services. Napster was intended for sharing hard-to-find media files on the internet, and distributing them easily. The naturally leads to ease in distributing copywritten materials.
What Aimster could argue is that the emphasis of Aimster is not on large-scale copywritten file sharing as with Napster, but on providing users a way to share files between each other on a smaller scale, as with email or ICQ. Aimster can be used to distribute copywritten works, but it lacks the file-searching ability of Napster, among other things, that made it an ideal medium for distributing copywritten works. It's also less easy for a person to give everyone on the service a given file - each potential recipient has to be approved by the person distributing the file.
In other words, Aimster is more akin to an instant messaging client that a large-scale file-sharing network, and that is the only hope it has for survival. Unless, of course, the judge in this case is smarter than the one for napster.
Thank you for disagreeing with me. Upon further consideration, I believe you're right. Censorship of any sort would be impractical. But I can dream, can't I? :-)
What if accuracy were tied to ping? Specifically, what if the higher the average ping in a game was, the more forgiving the game would be of shot accuracy? In other words, in a low ping game you'd have to actually hit someone's body to hit them, but in a high ping game you could just hit in the "ping zone" around a player's body which grows with ping. That way, people wouldn't make a shot that was accurate when they fired, but missed because of lag.
Wheeled robots almost always win against walkers in battlebots, and there is a good reason for this. Wheeled robots are just plain more maneuverable that walkers, and much faster. Since so much of battlebots victory is based on taking your opponent to the hazards and/or just getting in something resembling a hit, wheels have a real advantage. They're just faster.
Seti@home sends out occasional packets to clients to which it knows what the response will be. Why not do something like that with wireless keyboards/mice?
Instead of just a receiver processing signals from the mouse or keyboard, have a transmitter in addition. Send random floating-points to the mouse or keyboard after each attempt at input or a random percentage of the time, which would then return another floating-point obtained from an algorithm in ROM that would be unique for each machine, and never transmitted. A malicious individual would be unable to control a user's computer because he.she would not have the algorithm.
Here's the way it would look:
1. Mouse/keyboard sends command to computer.
2. Computer sends random numbers.
3. Random numbers are received by mouse, and are fed into an algorithm on mouse ROM.
4. Mouse returns result(s).
5. If response in incorrect, wireless peripheral is locked out, and user switchs either to wired device or different frequency.
This is exactly why Anonymous Cowards should not be allowed to post. If this - person - had an account, he could lose enough karma to ensure his next six lives would be miserble. I've seen this same message attacked to several other news items today - couldn't the perl script automatically reject posts like this by scanning for certain words?
Webster's defines "peerless" as "unequaled; having no peer or equal". I can think of several probable peers for this device in terms of price per megabyte: second hard drive, cd-rws, dvd writeables, etc. Of course, this is based on the assumption that Peerless is in the $100-$200 range, with cartridges in the $50 range. I base those assumptions on what I've seen of other cartridge-based gigabyte+ systems, so they could be way off.
I mentioned a second hard drive because, in my opinion, it's the best backup option available. IDE drives aren't proprietary, are relatively cheap (around $100 for a 15 gig machine at circuit city), and are stable. As for portability - is it that hard to just open your case and yank out the slave drive? Admittedly, I wouldn't want to do this every few hours, but how often do you have to Sneakernet multi-gigabyte files? Don't say that in corporate environments with huge databases, this might be needed - the corporations with huge databases have high-speed networks to shuttle the things around with.
CD-RWs cost only a buck each at compgeeks.com - even with their lower capacity, I bet I could store 10 gigs for less that what Iomega will want for their cartridge. In addition, CDs are shiny, and I personally like shiny things.
The article mentioned connecting Peerless to consumer devices, so it seems likely a computer will not be needed. Why whould you want peerless on a computer anyway, when a second hard drive is cheaper and just as easy to install?
In the beginning there were hard drives, and they were good. But verily, they were inside the computer, and the user was on the outside, and never the twain did meet. And the floppies were too small, and the tape drives did take long and corrupt the sacred data.
And God created the Zip drive and the SparQ, and -lo! - they were both overpriced, and did gougeth the hapless consumer, as God commanded in Microsoft 10:12 "Thou Shalt exploiteth the ignorance of the user, for his soul grows as his pocketbook shrinketh".
And the consumers did buy the Zip, but not the SparQ, though it was thre mightier drive. And Iomega grew fat on their success, and did make more and bigger drives.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of overpriced external drives, I shall buy none, for the best form of backup is simply a second hard drive.