The client needs to run fast, but most of the problems it's solving scale well. The server needs to do things like collision detection that tend to grow O(nlogn)on large datasets (and you only get that if you're really clever.) Clustering your server gives rise to the possibility of hosting many more players with more diverse projectile possibilities.
The client is a relatively 'dumb' rendering terminal in many FPS games. Unless you're talking about trying to make the cluster do the things the graphics card does, but I suspect that the latencies involved would inherently rule anything like that out.
I agree with the first responder on this one, you're kind of forcing this problem into a OO solution. A better example might be a polynomial object that contains methods to calculate roots and derivatives.
Someone gets that done, so that problem's been solved, and later you realize that you need to multiply and divide polynomials too. That's the kind of situation where OO is really nice, because you can just extend your (or someone elses) previous polynomial class.
This still isn't a large enough problem to fully show how OO is nice, but I think the revised example illustrates better the utility of OO for dealing with a situation where your needs from a piece of code are changing frequently.
My girlfriend gave me a translation of that for my birthday last year, and I can attest that it's definitely an excellent work.
The author kind of plays with witchcraft and totalitarian oppression in some really fun ways. I'm sure I'm missing a good deal in the tranlsation, but enough of the beauty of that work is story dependent that you can still enjoy it even in translation. (I exhausted my Russian vocabulary on the first line of this post.:)
However, I wouldn't call it science fiction. Heinlein hated that term because the genre often has very little to do with science. He preferred speculative fiction, which is much more broad, and even consistent with how most book stores stock their shelves these days (clumping together sci-fi and fantasy.) I'd call The Master and Margarita speculative fiction, even though it is neither fantasy nor sci-fi.
The DMCA only deals with accessing copyrighted works. I don't know if passwords are copyrightable. It seems to me that if I could copyright my password, I could sue all of you for typing "root." err I mean... "god" err... doh.
They're already slightly profitable, actually. According to Lackey at his talk at DefCON yesterday, that is. He said that they get a big chunk of their business from companies that had already gone overseas for their hosting, but had crappy service in underdeveloped countries. He also claimed that their hosting prices aren't all that steep compared to others in Europe.
The problem with little states getting on the "liberal laws" hosting business, is that little states with liberal laws can, and do, change those laws when it ceases to be in their interest.
Actually, I heard Lackey give a talk at DefCon yesterday, and it sounds like he burns most of his free time on the internet. They've got an assload of bandwidth out there.:)
He also said that if someone gives him $5 million, he'd start laying the fiber tomorrow, but since they recently achieved profitability, they'd rather not go into debt just now. It sounds like fiber is a few years off for HavenCO to me.
LOL.
Just the other day I finally got around to wiping the copy of slakware-current I had on my hard drive left over from the install on my laptop. It's just a little winbook (;->) 100 or so Mhz with no CD-drive, so I did a minimal network floppy install and then ftp'd in and downloaded the whole shebang. Then I installed over the minimal install from my hard disk. I left the files on disk until I needed the space for something else though.
"they don't just make a copy, they make a perfect copy. And then they are able to take that perfect copy and put it on the Internet and distribute it worldwide. This is something that Congress can protect against. "
Yup... Congress sure can protect against that copy being put on the internet. I think someone should write some laws against that.:)
Hmm... I think you're taking a position that strays dangerously close to elitism. Allow me to explain:
Are all people smart enough to succede in a competitive four year university environment? No. Do these people not deserve to succede? I'm not so sure. Inteligence and usefulness are very different things, and if a dumb but useful person needs a piece of paper that says 'certifiably smart' to go off and do good things with their useful qualities, then I'm all for them cheating to pull it off. Would you rather have the earthly incarnation of virtue running your stock portfolio, or the guy who cheated on every test in college but never got caught, and knows a few dozen insiders?
People who can't succede in a university environment also have a responsibility to themselves to cheat. Until the income gap between those with college degrees and those without college degrees narrows a bit, the stupid owe it to themselves to at least try to get through a college program without getting caught before resigning themselves to poverty or near-poverty.
I've never cheated in school in my life, and I know that there are plenty who do. I like to think that this knowledge pushes me a bit harder.
Anyway, I doubt anyone will agree with me, but it's a useful point to consider.:)
This is easy. Right now, technology does not exist to fully take advantage of fair use of high-resolution video as fair use. But it will. Thinking back to my film studies, I can not overstate how valuable it would have been for me to be able to embed brief, high resolution video clips in my papers. These papers were composed on a computer, of course. The only 4 elements missing for this obviously fair use to become practical are:
a) Better broadband at my school. This is constantly evolving and is just a matter of time. Less than ten years. Tops.
b) Network submission of homework assignments. The literature department is behind in this at my school, but many other departments are doing this, and when the Lit people see the advantage, they will too.
c) Repealing of the DMCA.
d) Software support for embedding video in documents. This is well within current technological limits, but will probably only happen after all other considerations above have been met because a market will not exist until then.
2) The problem of code as speech
This one is harder, and is probably a question we need to answer as a country. Obviously, the people who write code consider it to be expression. Well, who defines art but the artist?
An anecdote comes to mind. At a startup I was working for a few summers ago, one of my coworkers wrote a script to aid him that was actually quite funny to read. It was later of use to a broader group within the company, and people discovered the humor when they first tried to modify it to suit their needs. It's an odd sight, seeing four or five grown men hunched over a monitor, reading code... and laughing their asses off.:)
Is that speech? Expression? Obviously. It is a human product that evokes a human response.
So what about DeCSS? Can it be considered just bad art, and protected as such? A joke no one gets? I would imagine so. It seems logical to me that once you've protected one object in a medium as art, all objects in that medium must be protected as well, because legislation can't discriminate within a medium, and if it could, it'd be worthless. Take DeCSS, it may not be expression as originally written, but a lot of people have made it into expression, once the need arose.
If they can have code that automatically scans music, and can accurately identify it, it's use will NOT be in licencing it to existing search engines. The search engines simply wouldn't buy it unless some law forced them to. It could only serve to alienate users.
It's far more likely that they'll get hired (by the RIAA, or certain artists I can think of) to write their own spiders that go out and seek music, and write script-generated cease-and-desist E-Mails to webmasters and ISPs.
It's almost certainly possible to plug something like this into Napster or Gnutella as well.
If this kind of technology is both efficient and accurate, it *could* actually change things.
The story description for this that is posted on/.s main page looks to me like the first paragraph from the story it links to. Although the link points to the original work, you seem to be crediting the submiter of the story for that (apparently) copied paragraph. You might want to update that. =)
I disagree with your "James Bond" movie comment. I would contend that if the adversary in your threat model is willing to commit breaking and entering, they are probably not above assault either.
Once you make the assumption that corporate entities are taking on the levels of risk that are associated with any kind of felony criminal activity, it seems obvious to me that assault and even murder are potential threats that must be addressed.
Remember, businesses have risk analysis in lieu of morals. Assault may have a higher level of risk than B&E, but there will always be a sweeter potential gain that can balance that risk out.
I spent some time studying in Mexico a few years ago. One day I was killing time in an arcade, and a kid who was probably about 5 came up and started playing me.
After I let him win, I realized that he was one of the little guys selling chiclets on the street sidewalk, and that the price of his chiclets == the price of the game. I doubt that the money he was spending was really his to spend.
My point is that this kid was so hooked on this stupid video game, that he was playing with what was probably his families food money.
"Rather, under the effects test, a defendant's actions constitute 'purposeful availment' so long as those actions are (1) intentional actions (2) expressly aimed at the forum state (3) causing harm which is suffered -- and which the defendant knows or reasonably should have 13 known is likely to be suffered "
I don't see how they can claim that DeCSS was "expressly aimed" at California. Because the 'aim' is to enable free DVD decoding, and that decoding can take place in any state, it doesn't seem to me that any state can claim that DeCSS was 'aim'ed at it.
All of their arguments that DeCSS was aimed at california seem to be of the form: 'Industry A is in California, and we think Industry A is harmed by DeCSS. Thus, DeCSS must be expressly aimed at California.'
Hopefully the Judge knows logic gaps when he sees them. =)
In most of the languages I've used, network IO is abstracted almost as well as file IO. However, you might still want to give them some canned code to get them started.
A simple search engine is a cool project, but requires some datastructures that you might not have time to expose them to. Another project tht might be cool is an http client that goes out and checks to see if a page has been updated since the last time you checked, but that might be too simple. A bare bones http server might be good. =)
In any event, the nice thing about web projects is that students feel that they're doing something that's relevant.
However, the web is a crazy, and often frustrating programming environment. You might find yourself saying: "don't worry about cases like that" frequently. =)
Re: "What would Mendel have thought of this? How about Watson and Crick?"
I know that at least one of the Watson and Crick duo was alive and doing reseach into cog-sci as of last year. . . and signing books at my university. =) I have a friend that got his high school bio book signed by him. =)
Re: Pubs and burgers (offtopic)
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The point has been made that this patent is at the very least not what it claims to be. It describes laptops better than it describes MP3 players. They don't want to force companies like Sony to pay them, they want one to buy them out! With a patent that is so weak it would never stand up in court, I think their only prayer at getting paid for this patent is through the stock market. I think they know this too because they weren't terribly subtle in letting people know that they're public in the press release.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really.
The client needs to run fast, but most of the problems it's solving scale well. The server needs to do things like collision detection that tend to grow O(nlogn)on large datasets (and you only get that if you're really clever.) Clustering your server gives rise to the possibility of hosting many more players with more diverse projectile possibilities.
The client is a relatively 'dumb' rendering terminal in many FPS games. Unless you're talking about trying to make the cluster do the things the graphics card does, but I suspect that the latencies involved would inherently rule anything like that out.
I agree with the first responder on this one, you're kind of forcing this problem into a OO solution. A better example might be a polynomial object that contains methods to calculate roots and derivatives.
Someone gets that done, so that problem's been solved, and later you realize that you need to multiply and divide polynomials too. That's the kind of situation where OO is really nice, because you can just extend your (or someone elses) previous polynomial class.
This still isn't a large enough problem to fully show how OO is nice, but I think the revised example illustrates better the utility of OO for dealing with a situation where your needs from a piece of code are changing frequently.
Da.
:)
My girlfriend gave me a translation of that for my birthday last year, and I can attest that it's definitely an excellent work.
The author kind of plays with witchcraft and totalitarian oppression in some really fun ways. I'm sure I'm missing a good deal in the tranlsation, but enough of the beauty of that work is story dependent that you can still enjoy it even in translation. (I exhausted my Russian vocabulary on the first line of this post.
However, I wouldn't call it science fiction. Heinlein hated that term because the genre often has very little to do with science. He preferred speculative fiction, which is much more broad, and even consistent with how most book stores stock their shelves these days (clumping together sci-fi and fantasy.) I'd call The Master and Margarita speculative fiction, even though it is neither fantasy nor sci-fi.
The DMCA only deals with accessing copyrighted works. I don't know if passwords are copyrightable. It seems to me that if I could copyright my password, I could sue all of you for typing "root." err I mean... "god" err... doh.
They're already slightly profitable, actually. According to Lackey at his talk at DefCON yesterday, that is. He said that they get a big chunk of their business from companies that had already gone overseas for their hosting, but had crappy service in underdeveloped countries. He also claimed that their hosting prices aren't all that steep compared to others in Europe.
The problem with little states getting on the "liberal laws" hosting business, is that little states with liberal laws can, and do, change those laws when it ceases to be in their interest.
-Lux
Actually, I heard Lackey give a talk at DefCon yesterday, and it sounds like he burns most of his free time on the internet. They've got an assload of bandwidth out there. :)
He also said that if someone gives him $5 million, he'd start laying the fiber tomorrow, but since they recently achieved profitability, they'd rather not go into debt just now. It sounds like fiber is a few years off for HavenCO to me.
-Lux
LOL.
Just the other day I finally got around to wiping the copy of slakware-current I had on my hard drive left over from the install on my laptop. It's just a little winbook (;->) 100 or so Mhz with no CD-drive, so I did a minimal network floppy install and then ftp'd in and downloaded the whole shebang. Then I installed over the minimal install from my hard disk. I left the files on disk until I needed the space for something else though.
-Lux
The prosecution puts it best:
:)
"they don't just make a copy, they make a perfect copy. And then they are able to take that perfect copy and put it on the Internet and distribute it worldwide. This is something that Congress can protect against. "
Yup... Congress sure can protect against that copy being put on the internet. I think someone should write some laws against that.
Hmm... I think you're taking a position that strays dangerously close to elitism. Allow me to explain:
:)
Are all people smart enough to succede in a competitive four year university environment? No. Do these people not deserve to succede? I'm not so sure. Inteligence and usefulness are very different things, and if a dumb but useful person needs a piece of paper that says 'certifiably smart' to go off and do good things with their useful qualities, then I'm all for them cheating to pull it off. Would you rather have the earthly incarnation of virtue running your stock portfolio, or the guy who cheated on every test in college but never got caught, and knows a few dozen insiders?
People who can't succede in a university environment also have a responsibility to themselves to cheat. Until the income gap between those with college degrees and those without college degrees narrows a bit, the stupid owe it to themselves to at least try to get through a college program without getting caught before resigning themselves to poverty or near-poverty.
I've never cheated in school in my life, and I know that there are plenty who do. I like to think that this knowledge pushes me a bit harder.
Anyway, I doubt anyone will agree with me, but it's a useful point to consider.
1) The problem of fair use.
:)
This is easy. Right now, technology does not exist to fully take advantage of fair use of high-resolution video as fair use. But it will. Thinking back to my film studies, I can not overstate how valuable it would have been for me to be able to embed brief, high resolution video clips in my papers. These papers were composed on a computer, of course. The only 4 elements missing for this obviously fair use to become practical are:
a) Better broadband at my school. This is constantly evolving and is just a matter of time. Less than ten years. Tops.
b) Network submission of homework assignments. The literature department is behind in this at my school, but many other departments are doing this, and when the Lit people see the advantage, they will too.
c) Repealing of the DMCA.
d) Software support for embedding video in documents. This is well within current technological limits, but will probably only happen after all other considerations above have been met because a market will not exist until then.
2) The problem of code as speech
This one is harder, and is probably a question we need to answer as a country. Obviously, the people who write code consider it to be expression. Well, who defines art but the artist?
An anecdote comes to mind. At a startup I was working for a few summers ago, one of my coworkers wrote a script to aid him that was actually quite funny to read. It was later of use to a broader group within the company, and people discovered the humor when they first tried to modify it to suit their needs. It's an odd sight, seeing four or five grown men hunched over a monitor, reading code... and laughing their asses off.
Is that speech? Expression? Obviously. It is a human product that evokes a human response.
So what about DeCSS? Can it be considered just bad art, and protected as such? A joke no one gets? I would imagine so. It seems logical to me that once you've protected one object in a medium as art, all objects in that medium must be protected as well, because legislation can't discriminate within a medium, and if it could, it'd be worthless. Take DeCSS, it may not be expression as originally written, but a lot of people have made it into expression, once the need arose.
-Lux
When things don't stick that should, duct tape.
When things stick that shouldn't, WD-40.
Anyone who tells you differently probably eats quiche.
If they can have code that automatically scans music, and can accurately identify it, it's use will NOT be in licencing it to existing search engines. The search engines simply wouldn't buy it unless some law forced them to. It could only serve to alienate users.
It's far more likely that they'll get hired (by the RIAA, or certain artists I can think of) to write their own spiders that go out and seek music, and write script-generated cease-and-desist E-Mails to webmasters and ISPs.
It's almost certainly possible to plug something like this into Napster or Gnutella as well.
If this kind of technology is both efficient and accurate, it *could* actually change things.
-Lux
The story description for this that is posted on /.s main page looks to me like the first paragraph from the story it links to. Although the link points to the original work, you seem to be crediting the submiter of the story for that (apparently) copied paragraph. You might want to update that. =)
I disagree with your "James Bond" movie comment. I would contend that if the adversary in your threat model is willing to commit breaking and entering, they are probably not above assault either.
Once you make the assumption that corporate entities are taking on the levels of risk that are associated with any kind of felony criminal activity, it seems obvious to me that assault and even murder are potential threats that must be addressed.
Remember, businesses have risk analysis in lieu of morals. Assault may have a higher level of risk than B&E, but there will always be a sweeter potential gain that can balance that risk out.
This form will ask for a state/zip, and spit back your representative. http://www.house.gov/writerep/
"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
If it got circumvented, it couldn't have been controlling access very effectively, now could it? =)
I spent some time studying in Mexico a few years ago. One day I was killing time in an arcade, and a kid who was probably about 5 came up and started playing me.
After I let him win, I realized that he was one of the little guys selling chiclets on the street sidewalk, and that the price of his chiclets == the price of the game. I doubt that the money he was spending was really his to spend.
My point is that this kid was so hooked on this stupid video game, that he was playing with what was probably his families food money.
There has to be something in the DMCA that would allow M$ to be sued for this. =)
I wouldn't say that we don't care about school shoot-outs and gang warfare. It's just that lawyers aren't too good at handling those problems.
We don't like to do solve problems that can't be solved with lawyers. Not profitable.
From the plaintiff's brief:
"Rather, under the effects test, a defendant's actions constitute 'purposeful availment' so long as those actions are (1) intentional actions (2) expressly aimed at the forum state (3) causing harm which is suffered -- and which the defendant knows or reasonably should have 13 known is likely to be suffered "
I don't see how they can claim that DeCSS was "expressly aimed" at California. Because the 'aim' is to enable free DVD decoding, and that decoding can take place in any state, it doesn't seem to me that any state can claim that DeCSS was 'aim'ed at it.
All of their arguments that DeCSS was aimed at california seem to be of the form: 'Industry A is in California, and we think Industry A is harmed by DeCSS. Thus, DeCSS must be expressly aimed at California.'
Hopefully the Judge knows logic gaps when he sees them. =)
IANAL.
In most of the languages I've used, network IO is abstracted almost as well as file IO. However, you might still want to give them some canned code to get them started.
A simple search engine is a cool project, but requires some datastructures that you might not have time to expose them to. Another project tht might be cool is an http client that goes out and checks to see if a page has been updated since the last time you checked, but that might be too simple. A bare bones http server might be good. =)
In any event, the nice thing about web projects is that students feel that they're doing something that's relevant.
However, the web is a crazy, and often frustrating programming environment. You might find yourself saying: "don't worry about cases like that" frequently. =)
Supersonic is just faster than the speed of sound, so you can't really go faster than supersonic. There's no upper bound on how fast supersonic is. =)
Re: "What would Mendel have thought of this? How about Watson and Crick?"
I know that at least one of the Watson and Crick duo was alive and doing reseach into cog-sci as of last year. . . and signing books at my university. =) I have a friend that got his high school bio book signed by him. =)
mmmmm. . . pubs.
I had a really good burger at a pub today.
;)
The point has been made that this patent is at the very least not what it claims to be. It describes laptops better than it describes MP3 players. They don't want to force companies like Sony to pay them, they want one to buy them out! With a patent that is so weak it would never stand up in court, I think their only prayer at getting paid for this patent is through the stock market. I think they know this too because they weren't terribly subtle in letting people know that they're public in the press release.