That's because FX technology was, and is, always developing. This expectation that CG is somehow infallibe, and all its imagery should somehow be perfect and consistent, is rubbish.
The CG has progressed to the point where it's no longer the weak link in Lucas's filmmaking chain. The writing, directing, and acting -- those are the weak links. The CG, he mostly gets right. (Mostly, I say, because a few scenes looked a lot like undergraduate ray-tracing term projects.)
There's probably a very good reason there wasn't a CGI Yoda in Episode I
There was a CG Yoda in Episode I. When he walks, in the Jedi council, that's CG. There's a distinct lack of puppeteer in that scene.
Why all of a sudden this warrants another "George Lucas sucks" troll of a story is beyond me.
Did you actually read the article? The rough flow (if you slog through all five pages of it) is: Animators make CG Yoda, Lucas tells them to make CG Yoda fight, animators whine, audiences love the scene, animators admit they were wrong. The point of the article is that that fight was a good scene. It's not clear that the submitter made it to the final page of the article, either.
would just download ControlTower v1.0 from sourceforge, compile it, and
go?
Absolutely not. Most projects on Sourceforge, including ControlTower, are
nowhere near a 1.0 release. The FAA would download ControlTower
v0.01-beta-20020602-snapshot.tar.gz, compile it, and go.
it's not like we're stealing Norton Doublespace or anything
Doublespace was based on Stacker. AFAIK, Norton never released
transparent drive-compression software. Microsoft did buy the rights to
old copies of Norton Disk Doctor and Disk Defragmenter to make Scandisk
and Defrag.
As for whether or not MS stole Stacker, the judgment (which did go in
Stacker's favor) hinged on violation of an old, bad software patent that
Stacker had bought.
Microsoft has stolen many ideas and bought much code, but they tend to
know better than to steal code.
More like $450-$475 from everything I've read. Microsoft wasn't even close to breaking even when Xboxes cost $300. At $200, they're losing even more. Amortized development costs and falling hardware costs may have made the consoles a bit cheaper to make, but probably not much. The XBox console itself will never be a profit center for MS.
the screen (the ultrasharp 15" model) has no problems that you would notice with blurring in any FPS
Really? I have the Dell 8100 with what I assumed was the same 15" screen, and playing platform games on it makes me physically ill -- really! --after half an hour or so. I haven't set up any FPS games yet.
waiting for better support of suspending
Lots of people have gotten the 8100 to work with a suspend-to-disk (s2d) partition. I got it to suspend with the kernel software suspend feature, but only if X wasn't running (nvidia's drivers aren't APM compliant).
Them's fightin' words. Copies are not inherently an inferior product -- the act of buying from a pirate rather than a legal retail channel doesn't degrade the quality of a movie. What degrades the quality of a movie is reducing its bit-rate to 1mbit/s so that it will fit on a CDR.
Even if DivX movies were being sold legally at retail, they would still suck. It has nothing to do with the copy-ness of it.
Even original DVDs have noticeable mpeg2 artifacts
Just because a DVD isn't as good as watching uncompressed video digitally projected in a theater doesn't mean it isn't a hell of a lot better than DivX. Yes, I've downloaded 15+ DivX movies. Yes, most of them were DVD rips. Yes, they all showed visible and distracting artifacts.
Download DivX movies if you want, but don't try to convince me that they're as good as DVDs or worth all the effort just to save $2-$4 on a rental.
The kid selling the modding service and the pirated movies and games will need the $25 soldering equipment, the broadband connection and the $500 computer (which, presumably, most tech-inclined kids already have).
All the customer needs is their $200 Xbox, a TV and $2 dollars to buy a film or a game.
I doubt that people will make much of a business out of selling DivX CDs. It's already possible to rip DVDs to a VCD, which will play in most DVD players. This practice is common in southeast Asian markets, but it doesn't fly here, because the content industry has done a reasonable job of cracking down on physical piracy.
like yourself, opt for the convenience of continuing to do so. The real benefit will be to younger and less well-off people who don't have that kind spare cash
I'm not quite as overwhelmingly wealthy as you seem to think, and I'm pretty stingy with what money I do have. I just see DVD rentals ($1.75 apiece if you know where to buy perfectly legitimate prepaid Blockbuster cards) as a better deal than pirated DivX disks, whether I'm doing the downloading or whether I'm paying some street merchant $2 apiece for them.
If, however, the film has been ripped straight from DVD and sized to the very limits of a 700mb CDR, the quality can be absolutely great
It varies. I've seen 10-15 DivX movies. The theater-rip ones are, without exception, utterly unwatchable. The DVD-rip ones vary, but they all -- even a 1.4 GB, 2-CD copy of "The Pledge" -- show visible color banding and edge rippling that's very distracting if you know it's there.
I have no doubt that people will download and watch DivX disks. I just think it's more about subversion than about economic sense, and I don't think by any means that it spells the end for retail video channels.
the overall result will almost certainly be more profits as the Warez kiddies mature, get proper incomes and feed their pop culture appetite from official, licensed sources
Quite probably. File-swapping is a much better grassroots promotion scheme than anything else the movie industry is doing. Shareware is to software as radio is to music as libraries are to books as perhaps DivX is (or will be) to movies.
... as the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone.;)
watching films at your workstation is uncomfortable and cabling the signal to your main television is a little too messy
If connecting video and sound cables is too messy, how do you intend to handle the 29 solder points for the X-box mod chip?
the studios, the premium channels and Blockbuster all have a HUGE problem
Only if people decide that it's cheaper to spend $200 on an X-box, $60 on a mod chip, $25 on soldering equipment, $500 on a computer with a CD-R drive, and $50/mo on a cable modem connection than it is to spend $4.25 to rent a DVD for 5 days at Blockbuster, all while putting up with the fact that DivX quality is noticeably worse than DVD.
Me? I've got the computer, the soldering equipment, and the cable modem connection, and I still think it makes more sense to rent DVDs.
need much much higher quality than an NVidia can put out
It's more about technique than quality. 3-D hardware cranks out texture-mapped triangles. Rendered films tend to use raytracing and/or radiosity to get more interesting shapes and more realistic lighting. Rendering farms also spend plenty of cycles on physics simulations -- rendering water or smoke or flame involves as much particle simulation as it involves thinking about pixels.
The solution instead is to serialize each instance of the software sold and cross-reference that serial number with the credit card or other identification of the purchaser
This has a big pile of problems.
First, those serial numbers can always be removed. It's not always easy, but only one person has to do it for an unnumbered copy to "escape" onto the web.
Second, if the serial number is used to trigger million-dollar court cases, then someone who steals a DVD from your briefcase is causing you a million-dollar problem (he can distribute it and get you sued) instead of a $20 problem (replacing the DVD).
Third, mass-market digital media formats (DVDs, CDs, etc) are stamped from a master, which leaves them not well suited to serialization. Software serialization only works because you type in the number yourself.
And last, tying serial numbers to identification is heavy-handed. It pretty much eliminates the possibility of cash purchases, movie rental, or resale. The market simply won't bear it.
Frankly, I doubt that even in the software world, where serialization roughly works, that it would be sufficient evidence to convict someone of piracy in a court of law.
preserved (or applied? I still don't know where exactly this comes from) the Macromedia protection
Applied. Macromedia is a separate chip that goes into all VCRs, all licensed DVD players, and apparently all TV video-out cards. Macromedia encoding is patented, so that would be just one more way in which this "beautiful" player would be illegal.
The Macromedia chip adds bright bursts in the off-screen areas of the video signal, which screw up a VCR's color-calibration circuitry. Those bursts are _not_ present in the raw MPEG2 stream on the DVD.
Incidentally, Macromedia is only enabled if the movie indicates that it should be. So some DVDs can be protected only in parts, and others can be not protected at all. I have a DVD copy of "Army of Darkness" that is not Macrovision-protected at all.
actually build a DVD player using the free DeCSS code.... What will the DVD Cartel say then?
The DVDCCA would point out that the unlicensed player almost certainly violates a long list of patents. Oh, and it would still violate the DMCA, because it would be circumventing encryption that controls access to a copyrighted work. The DMCA is about protecting works from access, not just from copying.
Go read the positively glowing MSNBC article linked from the story. The advantages appear to be that it stores 500MB, stores 5 hours of "CD quality" music, is the size of a quarter, will cost $12 for a blank disk, and can include audio, video, and text clips in addition to the music.
In constract, clunky old CDs store 700MB, store 12 hours of "CD quality" music if you cheat and use compression (which Dataplay clearly is), are big enough that you won't lose them between couch cushions, cost as little as a dime for a blank disk, and can include any data representable as bits (yes, that includes video clips).
If size is that big a deal, buy an MP3 player based on a 2.5" disk or flash memory. Some of the flash memory MP3 players are the size of a fat pen, and even the most expensive ones cost no more than the Dataplay players will.
Every advantage of this thing, aside from its size, is something CDs or MP3s can do cheaper and better without forcing you to buy a new device. As annoying as it may be to have the submitter and the editor so obviously biased, they're actually right. Dataplay is about as consumer-friendly as DivX (the DVD rival, not the MPEG4 spin-off).
People will be gasping for air at sea level, and the 'dead zone' on mountains (which the oxygen level is too low to support human life) will include cities like Denver and Mexico City.
On the contrary, if we use up the oxygen in our atmosphere, it will generate so much water that cities like Denver and Mexico City will be at sea level and more livable than they are now. It's cities like, well, everything else that will have oxygen problems -- because they'll be underwater!
Start speculating on Tibetan real estate now. The Chinese government has a substantial head start, but don't let that stop you.
--Patrick, who, at only 435 feet above sea level, would be one of the first to be flooded out
IMO generic GNOME stuff like the excelent kick-ass panel should be easily portable to fb.
The panel has hundreds of references to X types and functions. Only applications built purely on top of GTK+GDK port cleanly to the framebuffer. It's fixable, but it's not about to build unmodified.
It never really lived. It appears that Nat's 1998 ALS talk oversold the project's readiness, and that GNU Rope was never finished or released. In a note to Alan Cox on the gnome-hackers list, Miguel summed up the status (as of October 2000) thus:
Last I head Nat dumped all his patches on Richard Henderson, or was trying to dump them to him.
Currently there is no set of tools that would match IRIX's pixie/cord tools which is what we would ideally want to see.
Typo. That should be http://grope.nat.org/. net.org is the National Environmental Trust. nat.org is Nat Friedman's vanity domain. Of course, GNU Rope does not appear at either domain.
Very straightforward and insightful. I agree with all twelve of your suggestions. One thing to add:
If your congresscritter is Republican:
This bill is Big Government at its worst. It places a prior restraint on technological innovation. Worse, it mandates a technological standard that hasn't even been written yet and won't be written for a year or more after the bill passes. Give the force of law to a standard yet to be developed is almost certainly unconstitutional.
True conservatives let the market solve market problems. Friction between the technology and content industries is a market problem.
--Patrick
Self-deleting e-mail is (mostly) smoke and mirrors
on
Self-Shredding E-Mail
·
· Score: 2
I'm surprised CNN managed to get fooled by such obvious nonsense. They
claim "Senders can destroy messages either remotely or automatically,
without a recipient's consent or cooperation." This is nonsense.
A fundamental law of information sharing is this: if I can read (or watch
or listen to) it once, I can read (etc) it forever. I have the message,
and I have all of the keys necessary to view it. All I have to do is
keep them. Even simpler, I can copy and paste text out of the
document, or I can just print it. Faced with the knowledge that all of
your e-mail will be deleted after N days, you are much more likely to
print anything of lasting value.
For the recipient to choose not to copy, print, or keep the message, he
is cooperating with you. There is no way to prevent re-readability
when the recipient is untrusted. Period. Saying otherwise is like
claiming to have discovered perpetual motion.
I titled the post "(Mostly) smoke and mirrors" because a self-deleting
e-mail system works unless the recipient specifically subverts it. In a
normal e-mail system, messages are saved forever unless specifically
deleted. So the marginal improvement is one of default behavior, not one
of security.
75 Mhz is not just over four times as fast as the GBA, it is faster than all the previous generation consoles. Imagine a portable gaming console that is faster than a N64
The N64 ran at about 90MHz. This new toy is a bit slower and most likely doesn't have the audio/video coprocessor that the N64 does. Don't expect it to run the likes of Goldeneye or Zelda 64.
ARM processors in general are a little weak. Think of a 75MHz ARM as roughly comparable to a 25-40 MHz Pentium (no, such things never existed) without an FPU. Puzzle games, yes. 3-D shooters, no.
Why would JVC develop a new digital video standard based on magnetic tapes? Does anyone else suspect it has something to do with JVC's aging patents on VHS and S-VHS?
The only solution is to structure the network by using "super clients" or "servants" or "super nodes", call them what you want, the later is what KaZaa and Morphus have accomplished; this makes the number of messages exchanged grows in a logarithmic way
That's not logarithmic. If every client node connects to a "super node," and every other "super node," then what you have is a two-level tree. Growth at each level is O(sqrt{n}), not logarithmic.
Chord, a p2p research project from MIT, is truly logarithmic. Go read their SIGCOMM'01 paper for an explanation of how their system works.
You forgot case 8: Reece Sellin finished the ground-breaking, cache kernel-based Freedows OS (but uncharacteristically told no one about it), and Lindows is selling a packaged version of that.
Only marginally more absurd than your cases 1 and 2.:)
Yes and no. Yes, this (and large file distribution in general) is an interesting, legitimate use for peer-to-peer file networks. No, Gnutella isn't the right one for the job.
A proper p2p network needs to scale to millions of nodes, provide consistent and spam-proof search capabilities, and have some notion of locality. That is, no operation should require a global broadcast, and downloads should be automatically directed to the closest available replica. Better yet, downloads should be interleaved from multiple nearby replicas.
Take everything that's good about FastTrack, Napster, CHORD, and CAN. Stir. Maybe then we'd have a p2p system worthy of our praise and our software.
Slashdot Mirror
The CG has progressed to the point where it's no longer the weak link in Lucas's filmmaking chain. The writing, directing, and acting -- those are the weak links. The CG, he mostly gets right. (Mostly, I say, because a few scenes looked a lot like undergraduate ray-tracing term projects.)
There's probably a very good reason there wasn't a CGI Yoda in Episode I
There was a CG Yoda in Episode I. When he walks, in the Jedi council, that's CG. There's a distinct lack of puppeteer in that scene.
Why all of a sudden this warrants another "George Lucas sucks" troll of a story is beyond me.
Did you actually read the article? The rough flow (if you slog through all five pages of it) is: Animators make CG Yoda, Lucas tells them to make CG Yoda fight, animators whine, audiences love the scene, animators admit they were wrong. The point of the article is that that fight was a good scene. It's not clear that the submitter made it to the final page of the article, either.
--Patrick
Absolutely not. Most projects on Sourceforge, including ControlTower, are nowhere near a 1.0 release. The FAA would download ControlTower v0.01-beta-20020602-snapshot.tar.gz, compile it, and go.
Doublespace was based on Stacker. AFAIK, Norton never released transparent drive-compression software. Microsoft did buy the rights to old copies of Norton Disk Doctor and Disk Defragmenter to make Scandisk and Defrag.
As for whether or not MS stole Stacker, the judgment (which did go in Stacker's favor) hinged on violation of an old, bad software patent that Stacker had bought.
Microsoft has stolen many ideas and bought much code, but they tend to know better than to steal code.
More like $450-$475 from everything I've read. Microsoft wasn't even close to breaking even when Xboxes cost $300. At $200, they're losing even more. Amortized development costs and falling hardware costs may have made the consoles a bit cheaper to make, but probably not much. The XBox console itself will never be a profit center for MS.
Really? I have the Dell 8100 with what I assumed was the same 15" screen, and playing platform games on it makes me physically ill -- really! --after half an hour or so. I haven't set up any FPS games yet.
waiting for better support of suspending
Lots of people have gotten the 8100 to work with a suspend-to-disk (s2d) partition. I got it to suspend with the kernel software suspend feature, but only if X wasn't running (nvidia's drivers aren't APM compliant).
Them's fightin' words. Copies are not inherently an inferior product -- the act of buying from a pirate rather than a legal retail channel doesn't degrade the quality of a movie. What degrades the quality of a movie is reducing its bit-rate to 1mbit/s so that it will fit on a CDR.
Even if DivX movies were being sold legally at retail, they would still suck. It has nothing to do with the copy-ness of it.
Even original DVDs have noticeable mpeg2 artifacts
Just because a DVD isn't as good as watching uncompressed video digitally projected in a theater doesn't mean it isn't a hell of a lot better than DivX. Yes, I've downloaded 15+ DivX movies. Yes, most of them were DVD rips. Yes, they all showed visible and distracting artifacts.
Download DivX movies if you want, but don't try to convince me that they're as good as DVDs or worth all the effort just to save $2-$4 on a rental.
--Patrick
All the customer needs is their $200 Xbox, a TV and $2 dollars to buy a film or a game.
I doubt that people will make much of a business out of selling DivX CDs. It's already possible to rip DVDs to a VCD, which will play in most DVD players. This practice is common in southeast Asian markets, but it doesn't fly here, because the content industry has done a reasonable job of cracking down on physical piracy.
like yourself, opt for the convenience of continuing to do so. The real benefit will be to younger and less well-off people who don't have that kind spare cash
I'm not quite as overwhelmingly wealthy as you seem to think, and I'm pretty stingy with what money I do have. I just see DVD rentals ($1.75 apiece if you know where to buy perfectly legitimate prepaid Blockbuster cards) as a better deal than pirated DivX disks, whether I'm doing the downloading or whether I'm paying some street merchant $2 apiece for them.
If, however, the film has been ripped straight from DVD and sized to the very limits of a 700mb CDR, the quality can be absolutely great
It varies. I've seen 10-15 DivX movies. The theater-rip ones are, without exception, utterly unwatchable. The DVD-rip ones vary, but they all -- even a 1.4 GB, 2-CD copy of "The Pledge" -- show visible color banding and edge rippling that's very distracting if you know it's there.
I have no doubt that people will download and watch DivX disks. I just think it's more about subversion than about economic sense, and I don't think by any means that it spells the end for retail video channels.
the overall result will almost certainly be more profits as the Warez kiddies mature, get proper incomes and feed their pop culture appetite from official, licensed sources
Quite probably. File-swapping is a much better grassroots promotion scheme than anything else the movie industry is doing. Shareware is to software as radio is to music as libraries are to books as perhaps DivX is (or will be) to movies.
--Patrick
If connecting video and sound cables is too messy, how do you intend to handle the 29 solder points for the X-box mod chip?
the studios, the premium channels and Blockbuster all have a HUGE problem
Only if people decide that it's cheaper to spend $200 on an X-box, $60 on a mod chip, $25 on soldering equipment, $500 on a computer with a CD-R drive, and $50/mo on a cable modem connection than it is to spend $4.25 to rent a DVD for 5 days at Blockbuster, all while putting up with the fact that DivX quality is noticeably worse than DVD.
Me? I've got the computer, the soldering equipment, and the cable modem connection, and I still think it makes more sense to rent DVDs.
--Patrick
It's more about technique than quality. 3-D hardware cranks out texture-mapped triangles. Rendered films tend to use raytracing and/or radiosity to get more interesting shapes and more realistic lighting. Rendering farms also spend plenty of cycles on physics simulations -- rendering water or smoke or flame involves as much particle simulation as it involves thinking about pixels.
--Patrick
If Jon Bon Jovi is in it, it's not worth watching.
U-571, Homegrown, Ally McBeal. Yeah, whatever. Move along, nothing to see here.
This has a big pile of problems.
First, those serial numbers can always be removed. It's not always easy, but only one person has to do it for an unnumbered copy to "escape" onto the web.
Second, if the serial number is used to trigger million-dollar court cases, then someone who steals a DVD from your briefcase is causing you a million-dollar problem (he can distribute it and get you sued) instead of a $20 problem (replacing the DVD).
Third, mass-market digital media formats (DVDs, CDs, etc) are stamped from a master, which leaves them not well suited to serialization. Software serialization only works because you type in the number yourself.
And last, tying serial numbers to identification is heavy-handed. It pretty much eliminates the possibility of cash purchases, movie rental, or resale. The market simply won't bear it.
Frankly, I doubt that even in the software world, where serialization roughly works, that it would be sufficient evidence to convict someone of piracy in a court of law.
Applied. Macromedia is a separate chip that goes into all VCRs, all licensed DVD players, and apparently all TV video-out cards. Macromedia encoding is patented, so that would be just one more way in which this "beautiful" player would be illegal.
The Macromedia chip adds bright bursts in the off-screen areas of the video signal, which screw up a VCR's color-calibration circuitry. Those bursts are _not_ present in the raw MPEG2 stream on the DVD.
Incidentally, Macromedia is only enabled if the movie indicates that it should be. So some DVDs can be protected only in parts, and others can be not protected at all. I have a DVD copy of "Army of Darkness" that is not Macrovision-protected at all.
--Patrick
The DVDCCA would point out that the unlicensed player almost certainly violates a long list of patents. Oh, and it would still violate the DMCA, because it would be circumventing encryption that controls access to a copyrighted work. The DMCA is about protecting works from access, not just from copying.
--Patrick
Go read the positively glowing MSNBC article linked from the story. The advantages appear to be that it stores 500MB, stores 5 hours of "CD quality" music, is the size of a quarter, will cost $12 for a blank disk, and can include audio, video, and text clips in addition to the music.
In constract, clunky old CDs store 700MB, store 12 hours of "CD quality" music if you cheat and use compression (which Dataplay clearly is), are big enough that you won't lose them between couch cushions, cost as little as a dime for a blank disk, and can include any data representable as bits (yes, that includes video clips).
If size is that big a deal, buy an MP3 player based on a 2.5" disk or flash memory. Some of the flash memory MP3 players are the size of a fat pen, and even the most expensive ones cost no more than the Dataplay players will.
Every advantage of this thing, aside from its size, is something CDs or MP3s can do cheaper and better without forcing you to buy a new device. As annoying as it may be to have the submitter and the editor so obviously biased, they're actually right. Dataplay is about as consumer-friendly as DivX (the DVD rival, not the MPEG4 spin-off).
--Patrick
On the contrary, if we use up the oxygen in our atmosphere, it will generate so much water that cities like Denver and Mexico City will be at sea level and more livable than they are now. It's cities like, well, everything else that will have oxygen problems -- because they'll be underwater!
Start speculating on Tibetan real estate now. The Chinese government has a substantial head start, but don't let that stop you.
--Patrick, who, at only 435 feet above sea level, would be one of the first to be flooded out
The panel has hundreds of references to X types and functions. Only applications built purely on top of GTK+GDK port cleanly to the framebuffer. It's fixable, but it's not about to build unmodified.
--Patrick
It never really lived. It appears that Nat's 1998 ALS talk oversold the project's readiness, and that GNU Rope was never finished or released. In a note to Alan Cox on the gnome-hackers list, Miguel summed up the status (as of October 2000) thus:
Last I head Nat dumped all his patches on Richard Henderson, or was trying to dump them to him.
Currently there is no set of tools that would match IRIX's pixie/cord tools which is what we would ideally want to see.
--Patrick
Typo. That should be http://grope.nat.org/. net.org is the National Environmental Trust. nat.org is Nat Friedman's vanity domain. Of course, GNU Rope does not appear at either domain.
--Patrick
If your congresscritter is Republican:
This bill is Big Government at its worst. It places a prior restraint on technological innovation. Worse, it mandates a technological standard that hasn't even been written yet and won't be written for a year or more after the bill passes. Give the force of law to a standard yet to be developed is almost certainly unconstitutional.
True conservatives let the market solve market problems. Friction between the technology and content industries is a market problem.
--Patrick
A fundamental law of information sharing is this: if I can read (or watch or listen to) it once, I can read (etc) it forever. I have the message, and I have all of the keys necessary to view it. All I have to do is keep them. Even simpler, I can copy and paste text out of the document, or I can just print it. Faced with the knowledge that all of your e-mail will be deleted after N days, you are much more likely to print anything of lasting value.
For the recipient to choose not to copy, print, or keep the message, he is cooperating with you. There is no way to prevent re-readability when the recipient is untrusted. Period. Saying otherwise is like claiming to have discovered perpetual motion.
I titled the post "(Mostly) smoke and mirrors" because a self-deleting e-mail system works unless the recipient specifically subverts it. In a normal e-mail system, messages are saved forever unless specifically deleted. So the marginal improvement is one of default behavior, not one of security.
--Patrick
The N64 ran at about 90MHz. This new toy is a bit slower and most likely doesn't have the audio/video coprocessor that the N64 does. Don't expect it to run the likes of Goldeneye or Zelda 64.
ARM processors in general are a little weak. Think of a 75MHz ARM as roughly comparable to a 25-40 MHz Pentium (no, such things never existed) without an FPU. Puzzle games, yes. 3-D shooters, no.
--Patrick
Why would JVC develop a new digital video standard based on magnetic tapes? Does anyone else suspect it has something to do with JVC's aging patents on VHS and S-VHS?
That's not logarithmic. If every client node connects to a "super node," and every other "super node," then what you have is a two-level tree. Growth at each level is O(sqrt{n}), not logarithmic.
Chord, a p2p research project from MIT, is truly logarithmic. Go read their SIGCOMM'01 paper for an explanation of how their system works.
--Patrick
Only marginally more absurd than your cases 1 and 2. :)
A proper p2p network needs to scale to millions of nodes, provide consistent and spam-proof search capabilities, and have some notion of locality. That is, no operation should require a global broadcast, and downloads should be automatically directed to the closest available replica. Better yet, downloads should be interleaved from multiple nearby replicas.
Take everything that's good about FastTrack, Napster, CHORD, and CAN. Stir. Maybe then we'd have a p2p system worthy of our praise and our software.
--Patrick