I have the feeling that I am missing something, but... does ICANN have any importance at all other than monetary ? The day it will fail at doing its job correctly or that it tries holding companies hostages by changing their DNS data, alternative DNS root server will appear.
I mean... ICANN makes one tyrannical decision, everybody will switch to OpenDNS. No ? Did I get something wrong ?
You point out another key difference : the gamers in WoW are probably less after immersion than those in Rogue (shock!) but more after dominance. They don't really care if a bug allows them to stack two armored helmets whereas people in rogue would complain if the all elusive unicorn got stuck in corners because of a buggy AI.
Maybe the difference is not in the ascii vs graphical question but rather in the singleplayer vs multiplayer ?
When all you have to entertain a player is a bunch of ASCII character, you know that you can't cheat on shiny effects. All that is left is game mechanics, sensible relationships between objects, and a thing that seems to go out of the game when the graphical cheesecake goes in : meaning.
Can you set up traps, use polymorphic spells in unpredictable ways, suffer from hallucinations or become randomly invisible in 3D RPG/FPS these days ? I heard that in WoW, it sometimes rain but it does not change a single thing to the gameplay : things keep burning, fire elemental still have a good time and no spell is affected.
If the Chinese company is willing to completely disregard IP laws, a good reverse engineering, a good hooking of the various needed libs, even if only in binary form, could provide them with enough tools to make such a game. They probably already have the tools to modify every graphical part, every text part and every story from the game. All they have to do is change some menu screens, some IP addresses and to make "different but oh so similar" models and textures in the inimitable Chinese style.
I'd rather see no one in my backyard but if it is insufficiently secured, I'd rather see someone mowing my lawn with my own lawnmower than someone coming to steal it. In fact it would give me a better opinion of humanity.
Some times I wonder if a vigilante approach à la code green (which mimicked the code red transmission but patched machines afterwards) isn't what we need. There are no authorities with a wide enough jurisdiction to prevent worms to happen or to cure them, so if one state begins to produce its own counter-worms, who could protest ?
Well, how do you explain that Joe manages to get things right while buying milk and detergeant at the *same place* ?
I guess it is all about education and labelling. Have a nice media scare or two about automedication and people will learn enough to not do stupid things.
Having to read a video in a flash player embeded in a browser is only considered a feature because it was a way that Microsoft didn't block to get cross-platform support of videos.
Today, you could make a website a la youtube and market as a revolution to allow download of videos. Have a wensite, provide a tracker and a little upload abilities and the download of the video will be as fast as youtube's. Except it will be a real download, not a streaming thingie...
Why is Joe allowed to choose his food then ?
Deceptive ads are illegal, stupidity is still legal. As long as Joe can freely get all the good information he needs, but uses his own money to buy shitty drugs, I'm perfectly fine with that.
We are damn lucky to have Free Telecom here. When they entered the ADSL business, we became in a few months one of the cheapest EU country in term of broadband connectivity. When competition really happens, it is good. But remember all the hassles it had (and still has) with France Telecom, the then monopoly who used many illegal techniques to keep the small guy out of the arena.
The bigger the companies involved, the less probable it is that real competition would occur.
If you just use 100% of your upload and 12.5% of your download bandwidth, you'll have a symmetrical connectivity in most cases. It costs you the difference between your current connectivity and a contract that provides 1/8 of the download speed. It gives you an idea of the maximum boundary for the cost. However, I suspect it to just be the choice of ISPs claiming that "people leech, they don't upload or share stuff". Do we really want this to go to the point where our upload bandwidth will be the same as a TV-remote and the download bandwidth the same as a HD TV ?
I am a singularist, I am a far cry from being a luddite. I think electronic voting is the worse idea that democratic leaders accepted recently. Why ? Currently, it is a mathematical problem that *may* be solved one day but that currently isn't, to design a cryptographic system that allows:
* Anonymousness of votes
* Verifiability of votes
* Verifiability of results/counting
* Not to rely on a trusted third party
Currently, paper ballots allow all of these and no cryptographic system works with all these features. All of these features are absolutely necessary. There are historical and even recent cases where only one was missing and the democracy failed.
P2P a la bittorrent is the only way to feed the world with vidéos. Period.
Companies like Youtube are making revenues that will not last : they occupy a temporary niche that will disappear sooner or later. Let's just hope they won't cling to their model like the **AA did.
More broadcasting power to the people ! Call for a symmetrical up/down connectivity !
In the meantime, this can be a solution to RMS latest pet peeve. Imagine that instead of running a torrent software it ran a small web server or a mail server. This is going back from this "cloud" path...
It's ridiculous to believe that everyone should run their own home server - it's not financially viable (in many cases) nor is it an appealing solution to the average user.
It is as ridiculous to believe that average Joe needs a computer at home. Financially it doesn't have to cost anything. The average user already has an old computer sleeping in a closet. The average user cares about recycling. The average user cares about privacy. They just don't care much about technical details. Therefore, it makes sense for IT specialist to help them find a solution to recycle their old junk into a solution that will help them salvage their privacy.
That is fine and all. No one is saying everyone should do this, but that if you like OSS enough to use linux as a main OS, it would be sensible to also have a server for your online needs. It is also sensible to say that the FOSS community needs to have an answer when someone says "Alright, I never realized that Google could read that easily all my emails. How can I set up an address without relying on a third party ?". And when someone like the GP says "sometimes I just need to put my pictures on a gallery", well, he is right, right now, there are no easy alternative option to using a company's service. It doesn't have to be that way.
However:
For that matter, do you really think the average home user wants to run two computers (their desktop and a server) to do what they normally do when right now they only need to run one? Do you really think the average home user will be willing to pay for a server, however low-end?
The average home user already has more than one computer. The average home user has upgraded his/her main computer several times already and probably has a computer perfectly suitable as a server sleeping in a closet.
And, sir, you are making an insightful point and making RMS statement insightful as well : the FOSS world lacks a solution for what you propose. I am of the opinion that now that it is possible to use a FOSS machine comfortably as an internet client, we need a way to put easily, securely, and without too much required knowledge a web/mail/picasa/DNS/whatever server at home and stop relying on companies to do this.
Ubuntu Server is going this way but is not there yet completely.
you are right, sometimes I just want my friends to be able browse the 200+ pictures of the party we had last weekend without sending 400 MB by email. Well, when I need that I put it on my webserver. But when my mom wants to do that, well, she uses a photo gallery of some random Mountainview company...
This content is not available on Internet, it is available in America.
Told it before and telling it again : when you serve content depending on IP address localization, you are doing something wrong on the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
I have the feeling that I am missing something, but... does ICANN have any importance at all other than monetary ? The day it will fail at doing its job correctly or that it tries holding companies hostages by changing their DNS data, alternative DNS root server will appear.
I mean... ICANN makes one tyrannical decision, everybody will switch to OpenDNS. No ? Did I get something wrong ?
You point out another key difference : the gamers in WoW are probably less after immersion than those in Rogue (shock!) but more after dominance. They don't really care if a bug allows them to stack two armored helmets whereas people in rogue would complain if the all elusive unicorn got stuck in corners because of a buggy AI.
Maybe the difference is not in the ascii vs graphical question but rather in the singleplayer vs multiplayer ?
When all you have to entertain a player is a bunch of ASCII character, you know that you can't cheat on shiny effects. All that is left is game mechanics, sensible relationships between objects, and a thing that seems to go out of the game when the graphical cheesecake goes in : meaning.
Can you set up traps, use polymorphic spells in unpredictable ways, suffer from hallucinations or become randomly invisible in 3D RPG/FPS these days ? I heard that in WoW, it sometimes rain but it does not change a single thing to the gameplay : things keep burning, fire elemental still have a good time and no spell is affected.
If the Chinese company is willing to completely disregard IP laws, a good reverse engineering, a good hooking of the various needed libs, even if only in binary form, could provide them with enough tools to make such a game. They probably already have the tools to modify every graphical part, every text part and every story from the game. All they have to do is change some menu screens, some IP addresses and to make "different but oh so similar" models and textures in the inimitable Chinese style.
"Bwahahahaha", may I add...
Ha ha ha ha ha !
Wait ? You are serious ?
You have no reason to go to MacAfee pages if you don't use their products or plan to do so. You have no reason to use them if you are not on windows.
Antivirus on Windows : doomed if you do, doomed if you don't
I'd rather see no one in my backyard but if it is insufficiently secured, I'd rather see someone mowing my lawn with my own lawnmower than someone coming to steal it. In fact it would give me a better opinion of humanity.
And I'd buy a better lock the very next day.
Some times I wonder if a vigilante approach à la code green (which mimicked the code red transmission but patched machines afterwards) isn't what we need. There are no authorities with a wide enough jurisdiction to prevent worms to happen or to cure them, so if one state begins to produce its own counter-worms, who could protest ?
Well, how do you explain that Joe manages to get things right while buying milk and detergeant at the *same place* ?
I guess it is all about education and labelling. Have a nice media scare or two about automedication and people will learn enough to not do stupid things.
Having to read a video in a flash player embeded in a browser is only considered a feature because it was a way that Microsoft didn't block to get cross-platform support of videos.
Today, you could make a website a la youtube and market as a revolution to allow download of videos. Have a wensite, provide a tracker and a little upload abilities and the download of the video will be as fast as youtube's. Except it will be a real download, not a streaming thingie...
Mod parent up! Bittorrent is youtube's most serious competitor
Why is Joe allowed to choose his food then ?
Deceptive ads are illegal, stupidity is still legal. As long as Joe can freely get all the good information he needs, but uses his own money to buy shitty drugs, I'm perfectly fine with that.
Should be. In an ideal world of really flawless corss-platform libs, the only thing to rewrite would be the makefiles...
And we even already have pictures of them !
We are damn lucky to have Free Telecom here. When they entered the ADSL business, we became in a few months one of the cheapest EU country in term of broadband connectivity. When competition really happens, it is good. But remember all the hassles it had (and still has) with France Telecom, the then monopoly who used many illegal techniques to keep the small guy out of the arena.
The bigger the companies involved, the less probable it is that real competition would occur.
If you just use 100% of your upload and 12.5% of your download bandwidth, you'll have a symmetrical connectivity in most cases. It costs you the difference between your current connectivity and a contract that provides 1/8 of the download speed. It gives you an idea of the maximum boundary for the cost. However, I suspect it to just be the choice of ISPs claiming that "people leech, they don't upload or share stuff". Do we really want this to go to the point where our upload bandwidth will be the same as a TV-remote and the download bandwidth the same as a HD TV ?
I am a singularist, I am a far cry from being a luddite. I think electronic voting is the worse idea that democratic leaders accepted recently. Why ? Currently, it is a mathematical problem that *may* be solved one day but that currently isn't, to design a cryptographic system that allows :
* Anonymousness of votes
* Verifiability of votes
* Verifiability of results/counting
* Not to rely on a trusted third party
Currently, paper ballots allow all of these and no cryptographic system works with all these features. All of these features are absolutely necessary. There are historical and even recent cases where only one was missing and the democracy failed.
P2P a la bittorrent is the only way to feed the world with vidéos. Period.
Companies like Youtube are making revenues that will not last : they occupy a temporary niche that will disappear sooner or later. Let's just hope they won't cling to their model like the **AA did.
More broadcasting power to the people ! Call for a symmetrical up/down connectivity !
In the meantime, this can be a solution to RMS latest pet peeve. Imagine that instead of running a torrent software it ran a small web server or a mail server. This is going back from this "cloud" path...
It's ridiculous to believe that everyone should run their own home server - it's not financially viable (in many cases) nor is it an appealing solution to the average user.
It is as ridiculous to believe that average Joe needs a computer at home. Financially it doesn't have to cost anything. The average user already has an old computer sleeping in a closet. The average user cares about recycling. The average user cares about privacy. They just don't care much about technical details. Therefore, it makes sense for IT specialist to help them find a solution to recycle their old junk into a solution that will help them salvage their privacy.
However:
For that matter, do you really think the average home user wants to run two computers (their desktop and a server) to do what they normally do when right now they only need to run one? Do you really think the average home user will be willing to pay for a server, however low-end?
The average home user already has more than one computer. The average home user has upgraded his/her main computer several times already and probably has a computer perfectly suitable as a server sleeping in a closet.
And, sir, you are making an insightful point and making RMS statement insightful as well : the FOSS world lacks a solution for what you propose. I am of the opinion that now that it is possible to use a FOSS machine comfortably as an internet client, we need a way to put easily, securely, and without too much required knowledge a web/mail/picasa/DNS/whatever server at home and stop relying on companies to do this.
Ubuntu Server is going this way but is not there yet completely.
you are right, sometimes I just want my friends to be able browse the 200+ pictures of the party we had last weekend without sending 400 MB by email. Well, when I need that I put it on my webserver. But when my mom wants to do that, well, she uses a photo gallery of some random Mountainview company...
This content is not available on Internet, it is available in America.
Told it before and telling it again : when you serve content depending on IP address localization, you are doing something wrong on the Internet.