Ehm, no. Eminence said: "It's already irrelevant whether AOL would pull the plug on them. The source is out. GPL-ed."
And that remains absolutely correct. Of course AOL can pull the plug, but the damage has been done, in a manner of speaking. That said, AOL pulling the plug might mean there is no or hardly any support (user or developer) for WASTE now, so people will have to figure it out themselves. That might hinder the development a bit. Still, if there is demand for an app like WASTE - and I'm not sure there is - people will figure out just fine.
Um, no. It was not all written by Rockstar. There are some traces of multiplayer gaming in the original code, but this basically is a huge (and neat) hack, working only because the game tracks a list of cars the players used previously. Players joining the game then get to control those cars. And the netcode is allegedly sluggish even on a 100 Mbit LAN.
Unless they changed the mod dramatically in the previous versions, that is. This is the way it worked originally - maybe they found some wonderful other way to do it. I doubt it.
eMule offers quite detailed statistics, including some on overhead. It's only collecting on a per-session base, though, and my session hasn't been running for more than an hour or so, but at the moment I've got about 2.8% overhead for my uploads and 5 to 6% for my downloads. So 120 megs transferred for 100 megabytes of data is way too much, apparently. In fact, I'd wager the overhead is reduced significantly in longer sessions, though - I haven't really uploaded or downloaded a lot of data yet.
Even more funny: the original poster, the one who (oh so rightfully) mentioned the sad state of language skill, omitted the source statement to his quote from Dictionary.com. The full definition including source statement (first item on this page) is as follows (my emphasis):
wherefore P Pronunciation Key (hwârfôr, -fr, wâr-)
adv. For what purpose or reason; why. Therefore.
n. A purpose or cause: wanted to know all the whys and wherefores.
As others have said, Munich is not and never was the capital of modern Germany. It also wasn't the biggest city (ranked by population) before the reunification, in fact the reunification didn't change anything in the ranking: (Western) Berlin, followed by Hamburg, followed by Munich, followed by Cologne, and so on.
Also, I have to correct myself, my approximations in the original post are both a bit too high, it's more like 3.6 million for Berlin and 1.25 for Munich. Numbers are a bit dated, from 1990, but you get the point.
I know you were kidding, but for the sake of the people who haven't read the article (yet) - I know I was annoyed the Slashdot article ends without actually saying what this is about. What he expected was that a) the government would hand over the source code or b) the government would find some excuse (e.g. security through obscurity) to not reveal the source. Well, it turns out the government doesn't have the source code: "The source code is held by the Nedap/Powervote [sic] and is not available in the Department of the Environment and Local Government."
You seem intent on making this one of these black and white discussions, either X or Y - I'm not sticking to anything, I had a 3dfx when they were good, I've had Nvidia cards after that up until now. I don't intend to buy an ATI card simply because I don't intend to buy any card at the moment. Most reviewers certainly seem to agree ATI has been doing a good job recently, and if there's such a board consensus among reviewers it usually means something.
Anyway, back to what I was saying, that Nvidia hasn't ever been as undisputed as your grand-parent post makes it to be. Sure previous ATI cards "sucked", just as previous Nvidia sucked. 3dfx used to be the pack leader - basically undisputed even, for a while (ie in the days of the Voodoo 1 and 2). The first Nvidia 3d cards (Riva et al) weren't a lot better than the ATI cards at that time. Then Nvidia released a couple of cards that were on par with 3dfx, then some that were just significantly better. At that time ATI still "sucked" - which is to say, they did an awesome job giving a lot of people what they wanted, namely very cheap 2D graphics cards (while Matrix continued to serve the people who needed extremely high quality 2D gear). Some time later ATI ramped up their 3d cards, just as Nvidia had years before.
So basically, about the time when 3dfx went down the hill (Voodoo 4 and beyond), Nvidia started to get serious competition from ATI, and vice versa, when ATI wasn't around to trouble them, 3dfx still held the performance crown.
Nvidia never has been the undisputed number one. ATI wasn't "better" - whatever that exactly comes down to - until some time ago, but they were never far behind, at least not performance-wise. Take, on the other hand, graphics chipsets manufacturers like Matrox and S3 (or whatever they are called now) - those two lost contact to the lead two and have been forced into niches.
Re:"potential for anonymity"
on
P2P Meets Push
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· Score: 1
I also think that if you stay on a channel long enough, you'll start to figure out who's doing most of the distribution. With a little statistics, you should be able to guess who's who.Ah, but the node doing most of the distribution (traffic-wise) isn't necessarily or even typically the originating node. I assume there'll be a couple of very high bandwidth nodes (eg. on university connections) on any given successful channel which do far more than their share of distribution. The original node could be one of the many "standard" broadband links like ADSL or cable.
Of course, the original node is, by necessity the first node to send out the file, and you're probably correct in saying that careful monitoring of the network will likely show who is who - unless the developers implement some kind of further obfuscation.
Actually, I'm just thinking - there is no need for any single node to be the original node. As long as the author key is correct, any user can do the first transmission. Ho humm. I actually think that part may be quite well thought through, no?
In fact, this already has been done in exactly that context - music distribution. (Hardly surprising since music distribution was the root of P2P filesharing after all.) The late AudioGalaxy - one of the P2P filesharing pioneers - had a system where you could set other users as friends, and join music clubs. Users marked up that way could put songs on your queue, and so you could get up in the morning to find your hard driver more or less full with new music you didn't actually request yourself, but which was "pushed" onto your computer by other users sharing your taste in music. It was a neat concept. Obviously, it had room for abuse - someone you prematurely gave permission could spam your hard driver with junk, but generally systems like this work fairly well since the community gets rid of such idiots pretty fast.
"potential for anonymity"
on
P2P Meets Push
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· Score: 5, Insightful
anonymity of channel owners is possible even at a technical level, since it is difficult for a receiver in the network to tell which node originated a broadcast. Nodes cannot easily tell the difference between a node that originates a broadcast and a node that is simply passing on the broadcast originated by another node.
So to any given node it is unknown whether the node it's receiving a transmission is the original distributor. But still, the node it is receiving from is a distributor - that's just as illegal, at least in the context of copyright protected works. Especially since in this network, whoever distributes a given file also requested it (at least that's what I am reading out of the documentation), in contrast to other networks, eg. freenet where the fact that you have data on your HD and distribute it to other people does not imply that you requested that data to be there yourself.
(Note: I still think this is a pretty neat concept, though!)
I haven't played it and I won't, but a couple of friends have, and they haven't reported any problems whatsoever. So it might be virtually unplayable on your PC, but not on the PC. There's a multitude of possible reasons ranging from actual program bug to PEBKAC and a combination of both.
Re:What use is AI without an operating platform
on
AI Going Nowhere?
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· Score: 3, Informative
I think the point is that the engineering problems have all been solved by someone already - or, at least, that there has been some progress towards solving them, while the AI science has (allegedly) been in a stall for some time. So the students are working their asses off solving problems that have already been solved, time which would better be used in solving problems to which no one has an answer yet.
Arrr. I've not been accepted to the beta so far - perhabs because I'm in Germany, or maybe I'm just not very lucky - so I hope they do release a public beta before the game retails. I really would like to try the game, I've been following it since it was mentioned for the first time and it sounds awesome. So I'll likely buy it even if I don't get to try it, but it doesn't feel very good.
Heck, I even considered to subscribe to FilePlanet to get into the beta, but, gawd, no.
So you're suggesting to make copyrighted content available to the internet. Is that legal? I mean, it's legal for you to have the files and to transfer them to other computer, but is it legal to offer them on an open, unprotected (eg. by password) server?
And if it is, would this mean that those hilarious disclaimers, found on many distribution channels for copyrighted material saying "this is a private server, you may not download anything" and then going on to, of course, let you download at your hearts intent, are actually working? I doubt it, and I doubt this is a good idea.
(Of course, you can still sue them if they have the nerve to wipe your files. That's just obscenely illegal, whether you have a license for the data they delete or not.)
Re:cellphones being used in hijacked planes on 9/1
on
Cell Phones and Air Safety
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· Score: 3, Informative
Cell phones can work in planes. When you zip over the country, your cell phone antenna has an enormous range due to the fact that there are basically no obstructions compared to the walls and trees present on the ground. But the service providers really hate it, because you leave old and re-enter new cells at an extremely high rate, which generates a huge amound of traffic in the respective cell towers.
Because truly, optical drives are the way of the future. A tenfold increase in seek time and a tenfold decrease in sustained transfer compared to hard drives is no issue at all since I have the loudly whirring music my CDROM makes whenever a medium is accessed to listen to.
Slashdot Mirror
Ehm, no. Eminence said: "It's already irrelevant whether AOL would pull the plug on them. The source is out. GPL-ed."
And that remains absolutely correct. Of course AOL can pull the plug, but the damage has been done, in a manner of speaking. That said, AOL pulling the plug might mean there is no or hardly any support (user or developer) for WASTE now, so people will have to figure it out themselves. That might hinder the development a bit. Still, if there is demand for an app like WASTE - and I'm not sure there is - people will figure out just fine.
Um, no. It was not all written by Rockstar. There are some traces of multiplayer gaming in the original code, but this basically is a huge (and neat) hack, working only because the game tracks a list of cars the players used previously. Players joining the game then get to control those cars. And the netcode is allegedly sluggish even on a 100 Mbit LAN.
Unless they changed the mod dramatically in the previous versions, that is. This is the way it worked originally - maybe they found some wonderful other way to do it. I doubt it.
eMule offers quite detailed statistics, including some on overhead. It's only collecting on a per-session base, though, and my session hasn't been running for more than an hour or so, but at the moment I've got about 2.8% overhead for my uploads and 5 to 6% for my downloads. So 120 megs transferred for 100 megabytes of data is way too much, apparently. In fact, I'd wager the overhead is reduced significantly in longer sessions, though - I haven't really uploaded or downloaded a lot of data yet.
Of course, the Deutsche Bergbaumuseum (German page, sorry) has an actual coal mine in the basement. :)
And both are also cities. It's not exclusive over here. Nobody around here would say Munich is the biggest city in Germany.
As others have said, Munich is not and never was the capital of modern Germany. It also wasn't the biggest city (ranked by population) before the reunification, in fact the reunification didn't change anything in the ranking: (Western) Berlin, followed by Hamburg, followed by Munich, followed by Cologne, and so on.
Also, I have to correct myself, my approximations in the original post are both a bit too high, it's more like 3.6 million for Berlin and 1.25 for Munich. Numbers are a bit dated, from 1990, but you get the point.
What, you think all those idiot troll posts are made by real humans? Sheesh. Nicely spotted, BTW.
... Berlin is. Berlin has got a population of approximately 4 million, compared to Munich's approximate 1.5.
Sort of looks like a ransom note, doesn't it.
I know you were kidding, but for the sake of the people who haven't read the article (yet) - I know I was annoyed the Slashdot article ends without actually saying what this is about.
What he expected was that a) the government would hand over the source code or b) the government would find some excuse (e.g. security through obscurity) to not reveal the source. Well, it turns out the government doesn't have the source code: "The source code is held by the Nedap/Powervote [sic] and is not available in the Department of the Environment and Local Government."
You seem intent on making this one of these black and white discussions, either X or Y - I'm not sticking to anything, I had a 3dfx when they were good, I've had Nvidia cards after that up until now. I don't intend to buy an ATI card simply because I don't intend to buy any card at the moment. Most reviewers certainly seem to agree ATI has been doing a good job recently, and if there's such a board consensus among reviewers it usually means something.
Anyway, back to what I was saying, that Nvidia hasn't ever been as undisputed as your grand-parent post makes it to be. Sure previous ATI cards "sucked", just as previous Nvidia sucked. 3dfx used to be the pack leader - basically undisputed even, for a while (ie in the days of the Voodoo 1 and 2). The first Nvidia 3d cards (Riva et al) weren't a lot better than the ATI cards at that time.
Then Nvidia released a couple of cards that were on par with 3dfx, then some that were just significantly better. At that time ATI still "sucked" - which is to say, they did an awesome job giving a lot of people what they wanted, namely very cheap 2D graphics cards (while Matrix continued to serve the people who needed extremely high quality 2D gear). Some time later ATI ramped up their 3d cards, just as Nvidia had years before.
So basically, about the time when 3dfx went down the hill (Voodoo 4 and beyond), Nvidia started to get serious competition from ATI, and vice versa, when ATI wasn't around to trouble them, 3dfx still held the performance crown.
Nvidia never has been the undisputed number one. ATI wasn't "better" - whatever that exactly comes down to - until some time ago, but they were never far behind, at least not performance-wise. Take, on the other hand, graphics chipsets manufacturers like Matrox and S3 (or whatever they are called now) - those two lost contact to the lead two and have been forced into niches.
I also think that if you stay on a channel long enough, you'll start to figure out who's doing most of the distribution. With a little statistics, you should be able to guess who's who.Ah, but the node doing most of the distribution (traffic-wise) isn't necessarily or even typically the originating node. I assume there'll be a couple of very high bandwidth nodes (eg. on university connections) on any given successful channel which do far more than their share of distribution. The original node could be one of the many "standard" broadband links like ADSL or cable.
Of course, the original node is, by necessity the first node to send out the file, and you're probably correct in saying that careful monitoring of the network will likely show who is who - unless the developers implement some kind of further obfuscation.
Actually, I'm just thinking - there is no need for any single node to be the original node. As long as the author key is correct, any user can do the first transmission. Ho humm. I actually think that part may be quite well thought through, no?
Cheers.
In fact, this already has been done in exactly that context - music distribution. (Hardly surprising since music distribution was the root of P2P filesharing after all.) The late AudioGalaxy - one of the P2P filesharing pioneers - had a system where you could set other users as friends, and join music clubs.
Users marked up that way could put songs on your queue, and so you could get up in the morning to find your hard driver more or less full with new music you didn't actually request yourself, but which was "pushed" onto your computer by other users sharing your taste in music. It was a neat concept. Obviously, it had room for abuse - someone you prematurely gave permission could spam your hard driver with junk, but generally systems like this work fairly well since the community gets rid of such idiots pretty fast.
Especially since in this network, whoever distributes a given file also requested it (at least that's what I am reading out of the documentation), in contrast to other networks, eg. freenet where the fact that you have data on your HD and distribute it to other people does not imply that you requested that data to be there yourself.
(Note: I still think this is a pretty neat concept, though!)
Where did RAM temperature get into this? RAM temperature is essentially irrelevant.
I haven't played it and I won't, but a couple of friends have, and they haven't reported any problems whatsoever. So it might be virtually unplayable on your PC, but not on the PC. There's a multitude of possible reasons ranging from actual program bug to PEBKAC and a combination of both.
I think the point is that the engineering problems have all been solved by someone already - or, at least, that there has been some progress towards solving them, while the AI science has (allegedly) been in a stall for some time. So the students are working their asses off solving problems that have already been solved, time which would better be used in solving problems to which no one has an answer yet.
Yes, that's what polish is: stuff you see and think "hmm, that's neat". And a game which has none of this usually sucks.
Just so you know, you freaking own! ;)
Arrr. I've not been accepted to the beta so far - perhabs because I'm in Germany, or maybe I'm just not very lucky - so I hope they do release a public beta before the game retails. I really would like to try the game, I've been following it since it was mentioned for the first time and it sounds awesome. So I'll likely buy it even if I don't get to try it, but it doesn't feel very good.
Heck, I even considered to subscribe to FilePlanet to get into the beta, but, gawd, no.
So you're suggesting to make copyrighted content available to the internet. Is that legal? I mean, it's legal for you to have the files and to transfer them to other computer, but is it legal to offer them on an open, unprotected (eg. by password) server?
And if it is, would this mean that those hilarious disclaimers, found on many distribution channels for copyrighted material saying "this is a private server, you may not download anything" and then going on to, of course, let you download at your hearts intent, are actually working? I doubt it, and I doubt this is a good idea.
(Of course, you can still sue them if they have the nerve to wipe your files. That's just obscenely illegal, whether you have a license for the data they delete or not.)
Cell phones can work in planes. When you zip over the country, your cell phone antenna has an enormous range due to the fact that there are basically no obstructions compared to the walls and trees present on the ground. But the service providers really hate it, because you leave old and re-enter new cells at an extremely high rate, which generates a huge amound of traffic in the respective cell towers.
Because truly, optical drives are the way of the future. A tenfold increase in seek time and a tenfold decrease in sustained transfer compared to hard drives is no issue at all since I have the loudly whirring music my CDROM makes whenever a medium is accessed to listen to.