Having the same 'ogg' file extension for both audio and video may match the modular format well, but will confuse users and impair the usability of ogg media in file shells and media-management apps.
Highly recommend: alternate extensions for audio and vide.
Wondering: What MIME type(s) are used for ogg theora video?
You're right, NASA couldn't design the necessary robotics in time. But competitive private efforts could!
Model it after Battlebots or the DARPA Grand Challenge. Let entrants audition their robots in the same groundside Hubble-repair simulations used by Astronauts. Give the best entrant a ride to Hubble to make real fixes.
Heritrix is just a crawler for collecting web resources recursively, within some defined parameters -- it doesn't offer Internet Archive Wayback Machine (IA WM) functionality.
FYI, there is a GPL'd web access tool that's very much like the IA WM, and even surpasses it in some ways: the NWA (Nordic Web Archive) Toolset 1.0. It doesn't do crawling, but if you can coerce what you've crawled into its input format, it offers URL-based, date-based, and full-text search plus "back-in-time" viewing of an archive. (Check out their demo, but remember it's only got a small number of pages from www.nb.no, so confine your searches to things like "Norway".)
Heritrix release 0.2.0 was mainly a test of our new release procedure; we would not recommend the code for outside use yet. We use it for crawls of up to hundreds of sites, taking a week or more to complete, but it still requires expert attention to crawl well.
We intend to improve its stability and scalability until it is capable of web-scale crawls -- billions of pages -- but that requires many incremental improvements, including extension to run on networks of cooperating crawling machines -- not planned until later in the year. (Heritrix currently crawls from a single machine.)
We are eager for contributors who would like to extend Heritrix in various ways, especially ways that would make it more valuable to researchers, librarians, and archivists. Optional modules for new fetch protocols, new media format link-extractors, or on-the-fly content-analysis to help direct further crawling would all be very interesting to us.
IA currently receives almost all of its full-web collection via an agreement with Alexa Internet, who have been crawling the web for the Internet Archive since 1996.
(P.S.: Yes, 'inheritess' should be 'inheritRess'/'heiress'. Oops.)
Though NavTech supplies many of the consumer-facing map portals, those portals don't all update their data at the same frequency. For example, many months after San Francisco's central skyway was closed and knocked down, MSN and MapQuest still showed it as a drivable road. Yahoo, which also uses NavTech, had a valid map.
Everyone has a license automatically: you can freely share any and all information on demand, with ability to pay, market friction, and technological restraints (DRM/DMCA/Palladium/etc) all irrelevant. No tech company nor end user would ever be prosecuted for sharing media. That's a desirable future, at least if it could be achieved at low cost.
Instead, some fee would be collected elsewhere. It could come out of general revenues, or it might be a levy on those physical goods which are complements (in the economist's lingo) of digital media. This fee then has to be divvyed up in some way that rewards creators, so that we have as much new art as we'd like.
In contrast to other compulsory proposals -- which often involve giant privacy-invading monitoring mechanisms or highly game-able sampling -- this proposal says that everyone who paid the tax gets a virtual "vote" as to where the money goes.
Many/most people might abstain from voting -- in which case I would suggest that their share be added back into the pool to be split up in accordance with the overall voting. Many people might set up (or accept) on their media hardware software to anonymously meter and subdivide their vote -- but this need not be required.
A thousand allocation techniques might bloom. Groups of interested people might get together to pool their votes. Some people would try to pay themselves their shares; some would sell their shares for cash. As long as such people are not the majority, and some checks exist on blatant fraud (like hacking into someone's machine to steal their votes), the system as a whole could deliver more money to creators, as a more accurate function of how much society appreciates their output, than other schemes (including the current flawed "creator-gets-a-monopoly-on-approved-copying-of-th eir-work" scheme, aka traditional copyright).
I'm not a big fan of compulsory collection/licensing schemes. I think voluntary support of art in the digital era deserves greater respect, and that other new conventions (like the "street performer protocol" and other ways to extract income freely-distributed output) still need to be tried, and may do "good enough" for society. But if a compulsory system is to be enacted, I'd want its monies to be allocated via a decentralized, democratic, individually-voted system, rather than some central bureacracy like is often implied.
If Sun were ever to be in a dominant market position, this sort of "bundling" would likely be considered actionably anticompetitive, like the MS OEM licenses which charged PC makers for every PC shipped, whether it had an MS OS or not.
Jim has incorrectly assumed that OCN uses the same sort of content-encoding as Justin Chapweske's previous project, SwarmCast. It doesn't: OCN strictly uses standard HTTP requests, overlaid with a series of extra headers and URI conventions that help participants find and use mirrors of the desired content.
Because the OCN's techniques use minimal deltas atop HTTP, well-documented in open specifications, it has the potential to become a standard mix-in for almost all web servers and clients... transparently bringing the power of ad-hoc replication to every web transaction.
DHTs are also the key to the next generation of efficient, centerless P2P file-sharing.
Two well-known academic DHT projects are Chord and Kademlia.
Kademlia is the basis for VarVar and EDonkey's successor, Overnet. There's an experimental effort to add a Chord-style query routing option to Gnutella, to find exact files over the whole network with far less traffic.
Possessive "its" has no apostrophe. Just like "hers", "yours", "theirs".
Only "it's" for "it is" takes an apostrophe.
This is a common error; thus it pays to be polite when pointing it out. So now that you know the correct rule, next time you step in to correct someone, be nice.
Bitzi and similar descriptive/discussion services never store, deliver, or link to the location of any specific files. Only accurate identifying info is collected and republished.
There are overwhelming legitimate uses for a service which distinguishes between official and unofficial, safe and unsafe, accurate and fraudulently labelled files. Further, it is undoubtedly legal to survey and report on P2P activity -- in fact, large copyright holders have themselves have hired outsiders to do just this.
So a service which simply "tells the truth" about what's circulating, without itself delivering or offering access to any files, has a much firmer legal standing than any centralized network which actually enables the sharing of files.
New laws and novel indirect infringement prosecution theories could arise, but in the case of an open directory/review publishing site, like Bitzi, such legal attacks would also have to overcome first amendment protections for free speech -- protections which even cover much speech describing illegal activities. (If this were not the case, Hollywood's own movies and music about all sorts of criminal activity would be under constant attack!)
Shameless but extremely relevant plug: My company, Bitzi, solves the P2P pollution problem -- as well as preventing all sorts of other dangerous lies about file contents.
As a number of posters have pointed out, you want some shared database/website which collects strong file checksums (crypto hashes), accurate descriptions of the corresponding files, and has a login/reputation system that allows bad users/data to eventually be weeded out.
Then third parties, no matter how prevalent on the P2P networks, can't mislead you about file contents, and their attempts to pollute the shared database can be more easily detected and suppressed.
This is exactly what my company, Bitzi, does. It is a general tool for disseminating accurate descriptive, rating, and editorial information about files -- as collected and cross-checked by an open community process.
Of course there are plenty of companies, now and in the past, whose names begin "Active...". But an innovative company that's done its homework usually doesn't enter a market with a name that closely apes the name of an existing player in the space.
So let's just say that the name is just another data point that the ActiveBuddy crew is neither (1) original nor (2) diligent.
More of the voluminous public discussion of exactly the methods and systems ActiveBuddy claims to have invented:
At Activerse we were inspired by this and other prior work dating back to the first multi-user computer systems decades ago -- we didn't claim an "invention" where none existed.
Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to look like idiots when they claim to have invented it.
My company in 1998, Activerse, developed a product called the "DingBot SDK" for creating interactive IM response Bots like those ActiveBuddy claims a patent on. It worked in our own (all-Java, radically peer-to-peer, web-services-like) IM/Presence system, but featured an API specifically designed to allow multi-IM-system bots.
We demoed an early version of the product at the "Demo 98" conference, in February 1998. PCWeek ran an article about us mentioning the DingBot SDK later that month.
The Activerse press release announcing the product's general availability, in November 1998, is still available at the Internet Archive.
ActiveBuddy was founded in March 2000. So, not only were their "IM bots" a old idea by the time they filed their patent (August 2000), a ripoff of both Activerse's offerings and more than a decade of practice on IRC networks and in MUDs/MOOs, but their very name was derivative of an existing player in the same market ("Activerse"->"ActiveBuddy") and their main product (an SDK/server) and business model (licensing) mimicked Activerse as well.
Their founder claims with a straight face "we invented interactive agents" and "I am fairly confident, there were no interactive agents on IM at that point when the application was filed. I'm certainly not aware of any." That only goes to show you have to be *studiously* ignorant and/or dishonest in order to effectively twist the flaws of the software patent system to personal advantage.
(Postscript on Activerse: It was acquired by high-flying internet conglomerate CMGI in April 1999. Though the initial aim was to expand and promote the Ding IM/bot products throughout the CMGI network of compnaies, as CMGI itself unravelled, Activerse was dismantled through a series of mostly arbitrary and faddish organizational moves which completely ignored the promise of the growing IM space.)
This still seems to have a dependence on OpenDJ's reservation/scheduling/archiving server, and I don't see how it uses P2P techniques to multiply the listener base at no cost to the broadcaster.
There's no need to actually invent new P2P-stream-distribution techniques: a better approach would be to merge live, refreshing station playlists
with existing P2P file-sharing networks, like Gnutella, ED2K, FastTrack, etc.
You can think of this as as "Judo Radio"
because it uses a tiny, smart control channel to throw around a
giant amount of content that lives and travels on outside networks.
It's not quite the same as typical P2P-webcasting proposals because
it leverages open, ownerless content-distribution networks that are
already in place, and in fact the "stations" can be agnostic about
how the data arrives to audiences. They just say, "get and listen to this next", ad infinitum.
Whether the "stations" need any licenses whatsoever to the tracks
they "recommend" seems a debatable point to me: the stations
themselves make no copies of copyrighted material at all, instead
leaving that completely up to the audience to do on their own.
This approach thus has the same resiliency (or weakness) of the underlying P2P file-sharing networks themselves.
Fon't forget NetRisk, Intellivision Sea Battle
on
HIstory of RTS Games
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In 1989, maybe even a couple years earlier, there was a real-time version of Risk that you could play on Macs over an Appletalk network. All the rules were the same as Risk, except -- no turns! Move & attack as fast as you could click, reinforcements would appear gradually as a function of your territory.
It was great fun, and definitely fits as a "RTS" game.
Going back even further, to about 1982, Intellivision's Sea Battle had two players simultaneously deploying and giving directional orders to fleets on a worldwide map, with "zooms" into fleet-to-fleet battles (like Ancient Art of War). Sea Battle could definitely be considered proto-RTS.
Bitzi & FreeDB attack different problems: Bitzi does discrete digital files (not just audio), while FreeDB does physical CDs.
So while there are some similarities, and if you could get perfect bit-for-bit CD rips then Bitzi would duplicate a lot of what FreeDB does, there's no pressing need for a combined offering. If there was, it wouldn't be too hard for either project to use whatever data it needed from the other, within the free licenses.
Slashdot Mirror
Having the same 'ogg' file extension for both audio and video may match the modular format well, but will confuse users and impair the usability of ogg media in file shells and media-management apps.
Highly recommend: alternate extensions for audio and vide.
Wondering: What MIME type(s) are used for ogg theora video?
...and WiFi the Austin Moontowers.
Hey! They should be offering a prize to the best low-cost, low-risk tech to save Hubble.
Model it after Battlebots or the DARPA Grand Challenge. Let entrants audition their robots in the same groundside Hubble-repair simulations used by Astronauts. Give the best entrant a ride to Hubble to make real fixes.
More discussion at Send Asimo to Save Hubble and Hubble Rescue Battlebots .
Heritrix is just a crawler for collecting web resources recursively, within some defined parameters -- it doesn't offer Internet Archive Wayback Machine (IA WM) functionality.
FYI, there is a GPL'd web access tool that's very much like the IA WM, and even surpasses it in some ways: the NWA (Nordic Web Archive) Toolset 1.0. It doesn't do crawling, but if you can coerce what you've crawled into its input format, it offers URL-based, date-based, and full-text search plus "back-in-time" viewing of an archive. (Check out their demo, but remember it's only got a small number of pages from www.nb.no, so confine your searches to things like "Norway".)
Heritrix release 0.2.0 was mainly a test of our new release procedure; we would not recommend the code for outside use yet. We use it for crawls of up to hundreds of sites, taking a week or more to complete, but it still requires expert attention to crawl well.
We intend to improve its stability and scalability until it is capable of web-scale crawls -- billions of pages -- but that requires many incremental improvements, including extension to run on networks of cooperating crawling machines -- not planned until later in the year. (Heritrix currently crawls from a single machine.)
We are eager for contributors who would like to extend Heritrix in various ways, especially ways that would make it more valuable to researchers, librarians, and archivists. Optional modules for new fetch protocols, new media format link-extractors, or on-the-fly content-analysis to help direct further crawling would all be very interesting to us.
IA currently receives almost all of its full-web collection via an agreement with Alexa Internet, who have been crawling the web for the Internet Archive since 1996.
(P.S.: Yes, 'inheritess' should be 'inheritRess'/'heiress'. Oops.)
'Inheritess' is femal form of 'inheritor' -- 'someone who inherits' (female). AKA 'heiress'.
Though NavTech supplies many of the consumer-facing map portals, those portals don't all update their data at the same frequency. For example, many months after San Francisco's central skyway was closed and knocked down, MSN and MapQuest still showed it as a drivable road. Yahoo, which also uses NavTech, had a valid map.
See my blog entry on comparing map websites for details.
Everyone has a license automatically: you can freely share any and all information on demand, with ability to pay, market friction, and technological restraints (DRM/DMCA/Palladium/etc) all irrelevant. No tech company nor end user would ever be prosecuted for sharing media. That's a desirable future, at least if it could be achieved at low cost.
Instead, some fee would be collected elsewhere. It could come out of general revenues, or it might be a levy on those physical goods which are complements (in the economist's lingo) of digital media. This fee then has to be divvyed up in some way that rewards creators, so that we have as much new art as we'd like.
In contrast to other compulsory proposals -- which often involve giant privacy-invading monitoring mechanisms or highly game-able sampling -- this proposal says that everyone who paid the tax gets a virtual "vote" as to where the money goes.
Many/most people might abstain from voting -- in which case I would suggest that their share be added back into the pool to be split up in accordance with the overall voting. Many people might set up (or accept) on their media hardware software to anonymously meter and subdivide their vote -- but this need not be required.
A thousand allocation techniques might bloom. Groups of interested people might get together to pool their votes. Some people would try to pay themselves their shares; some would sell their shares for cash. As long as such people are not the majority, and some checks exist on blatant fraud (like hacking into someone's machine to steal their votes), the system as a whole could deliver more money to creators, as a more accurate function of how much society appreciates their output, than other schemes (including the current flawed "creator-gets-a-monopoly-on-approved-copying-of-th eir-work" scheme, aka traditional copyright).
I'm not a big fan of compulsory collection/licensing schemes. I think voluntary support of art in the digital era deserves greater respect, and that other new conventions (like the "street performer protocol" and other ways to extract income freely-distributed output) still need to be tried, and may do "good enough" for society. But if a compulsory system is to be enacted, I'd want its monies to be allocated via a decentralized, democratic, individually-voted system, rather than some central bureacracy like is often implied.
If Sun were ever to be in a dominant market position, this sort of "bundling" would likely be considered actionably anticompetitive, like the MS OEM licenses which charged PC makers for every PC shipped, whether it had an MS OS or not.
...in an easy-to-use package. Warsharing for the masses!
Jim has incorrectly assumed that OCN uses the same sort of content-encoding as Justin Chapweske's previous project, SwarmCast. It doesn't: OCN strictly uses standard HTTP requests, overlaid with a series of extra headers and URI conventions that help participants find and use mirrors of the desired content.
Because the OCN's techniques use minimal deltas atop HTTP, well-documented in open specifications, it has the potential to become a standard mix-in for almost all web servers and clients... transparently bringing the power of ad-hoc replication to every web transaction.
Two well-known academic DHT projects are Chord and Kademlia.
Kademlia is the basis for VarVar and EDonkey's successor, Overnet. There's an experimental effort to add a Chord-style query routing option to Gnutella, to find exact files over the whole network with far less traffic.
Yes, it's free: to use, to embed in your programs, to create derivative works.
Kazaa's new rating feature mimics what my company, Bitzi, has been offering for many months.
Further, our file ratings and metadata is freely reusable in any P2P program or other application, under a DMOZ-like license.
"AC", it is you who are wrong.
Possessive "its" has no apostrophe. Just like "hers", "yours", "theirs".
Only "it's" for "it is" takes an apostrophe.
This is a common error; thus it pays to be polite when pointing it out. So now that you know the correct rule, next time you step in to correct someone, be nice.
OK, looks like the "vinile" misspelling was silently fixed. Now how about changing "it's" to the proper "its"?
Cool. So where do you find a trusted checksum directory on a p2p network?
I've also posted elsewhere on this thread, but this is exactly what my company, Bitzi, offers. See http://bitzi.com.
Bitzi and similar descriptive/discussion services never store, deliver, or link to the location of any specific files. Only accurate identifying info is collected and republished.
There are overwhelming legitimate uses for a service which distinguishes between official and unofficial, safe and unsafe, accurate and fraudulently labelled files. Further, it is undoubtedly legal to survey and report on P2P activity -- in fact, large copyright holders have themselves have hired outsiders to do just this.
So a service which simply "tells the truth" about what's circulating, without itself delivering or offering access to any files, has a much firmer legal standing than any centralized network which actually enables the sharing of files.
New laws and novel indirect infringement prosecution theories could arise, but in the case of an open directory/review publishing site, like Bitzi, such legal attacks would also have to overcome first amendment protections for free speech -- protections which even cover much speech describing illegal activities. (If this were not the case, Hollywood's own movies and music about all sorts of criminal activity would be under constant attack!)
As a number of posters have pointed out, you want some shared database/website which collects strong file checksums (crypto hashes), accurate descriptions of the corresponding files, and has a login/reputation system that allows bad users/data to eventually be weeded out.
Then third parties, no matter how prevalent on the P2P networks, can't mislead you about file contents, and their attempts to pollute the shared database can be more easily detected and suppressed.
This is exactly what my company, Bitzi, does. It is a general tool for disseminating accurate descriptive, rating, and editorial information about files -- as collected and cross-checked by an open community process.
Check it out.
So let's just say that the name is just another data point that the ActiveBuddy crew is neither (1) original nor (2) diligent.
More of the voluminous public discussion of exactly the methods and systems ActiveBuddy claims to have invented:
Wired April 1996: Bots Are Hot!
Book published 1997: Bots: The Origin of New Species
At Activerse we were inspired by this and other prior work dating back to the first multi-user computer systems decades ago -- we didn't claim an "invention" where none existed.
Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to look like idiots when they claim to have invented it.
We demoed an early version of the product at the "Demo 98" conference, in February 1998. PCWeek ran an article about us mentioning the DingBot SDK later that month.
The Activerse press release announcing the product's general availability, in November 1998, is still available at the Internet Archive.
ActiveBuddy was founded in March 2000. So, not only were their "IM bots" a old idea by the time they filed their patent (August 2000), a ripoff of both Activerse's offerings and more than a decade of practice on IRC networks and in MUDs/MOOs, but their very name was derivative of an existing player in the same market ("Activerse"->"ActiveBuddy") and their main product (an SDK/server) and business model (licensing) mimicked Activerse as well.
Their founder claims with a straight face "we invented interactive agents" and "I am fairly confident, there were no interactive agents on IM at that point when the application was filed. I'm certainly not aware of any." That only goes to show you have to be *studiously* ignorant and/or dishonest in order to effectively twist the flaws of the software patent system to personal advantage.
(Postscript on Activerse: It was acquired by high-flying internet conglomerate CMGI in April 1999. Though the initial aim was to expand and promote the Ding IM/bot products throughout the CMGI network of compnaies, as CMGI itself unravelled, Activerse was dismantled through a series of mostly arbitrary and faddish organizational moves which completely ignored the promise of the growing IM space.)
There's no need to actually invent new P2P-stream-distribution techniques: a better approach would be to merge live, refreshing station playlists with existing P2P file-sharing networks, like Gnutella, ED2K, FastTrack, etc.
You can think of this as as "Judo Radio" because it uses a tiny, smart control channel to throw around a giant amount of content that lives and travels on outside networks.
I wrote more about it here:
It's not quite the same as typical P2P-webcasting proposals because it leverages open, ownerless content-distribution networks that are already in place, and in fact the "stations" can be agnostic about how the data arrives to audiences. They just say, "get and listen to this next", ad infinitum.Whether the "stations" need any licenses whatsoever to the tracks they "recommend" seems a debatable point to me: the stations themselves make no copies of copyrighted material at all, instead leaving that completely up to the audience to do on their own.
This approach thus has the same resiliency (or weakness) of the underlying P2P file-sharing networks themselves.
In 1989, maybe even a couple years earlier, there was a real-time version of Risk that you could play on Macs over an Appletalk network. All the rules were the same as Risk, except -- no turns! Move & attack as fast as you could click, reinforcements would appear gradually as a function of your territory.
It was great fun, and definitely fits as a "RTS" game.
Going back even further, to about 1982, Intellivision's Sea Battle had two players simultaneously deploying and giving directional orders to fleets on a worldwide map, with "zooms" into fleet-to-fleet battles (like Ancient Art of War). Sea Battle could definitely be considered proto-RTS.
Bitzi & FreeDB attack different problems: Bitzi does discrete digital files (not just audio), while FreeDB does physical CDs.
So while there are some similarities, and if you could get perfect bit-for-bit CD rips then Bitzi would duplicate a lot of what FreeDB does, there's no pressing need for a combined offering. If there was, it wouldn't be too hard for either project to use whatever data it needed from the other, within the free licenses.
(FYI: I am the CTO of Bitzi.)
...at the center of the galaxy, why can't they point the Chandra X-Ray Observatory down and find the black hole that Chandra Levy fell into?