Dumbass. Not only did I read it, I went and DID it to see if it works.
Go read it, and you'll find out any program with a text box will do
You've got to be trolling... NO, not "any program with a text box" will do. The only susceptible text boxes belong to services running with privileged access, which generally aren't coded to HAVE text boxes, since that would be unsecure. I can't believe you told me to read it again when you get the facts so very wrong in only a couple sentences... Way to give me a perfect example of the cluelessness I was speaking of...
I don't know much about audio, though -- I would love to hear any suggestions or resources you could point me to, esp. regarding isolating human voices
The best tip I've heard on this is to get yourself a minidisc recorder. It is small enough to fit in a person's pocket, records decent quality sound (certainly good enough for spoken word, not bad even for music) and can power a small lavalier mic. When you begin shooting a new scene make a loud percussive noise (clapper, anyone?) so that you can line up the audio from the minidisc and the camcorder visually in your editing software. Poor man's SMPTE. : )
under Windows a shell is about as useful as a one legged man in an arse kicking competition so he used something else.
Actually the included 'spoit did kick off a command shell, directed to a TCP port for easy access from a remote computer. And this is useful for several reasons, not the least of which would be to create a user, set a password and join the admin group - pretty much the same as on a unix box. Too bad the user has to be running VirusScan or some other badly coded service for it to work. Funny how clueless nix users can be about their "enemy".
So you won't mind if a take a copy of the complete text of your book, put my name on it, and pass it around for free.... right?
Umm... Looks like he is doing just that by providing a link, except for putting your name on it. The plagiarism part is completely irrelevant to the free music debate as there is no claim that a music trader created the music he is trading. Jerk.
The GUI comes from a DLL running inside the process space of MMC.EXE. It uses a fairly secure RPC/IPC mechanism to talk to Windows.
Then how come when I stick the sploit code into the edit box and use the debugger to search MMC's memory I don't find "NOOF"? It looks to me like I just stuck it into a dialog owned by Winmgmt.exe which runs as a seperate process from MMC. Unfortunately, Winmgmt is priviliged and the debugger can't attach to the process so I'm back to square one.
...you gotta check out QuadraSID. It's a VSTi for Cubase. Emulates 4 SID chips simultaneously for a total of 12 voices per instance of the VSTi. This is definitely one of my favorite virtual instruments. The sounds bring back fond memories of C64 Tetris - best soundtrack for a game EVER, even today. It was 40 minutes long for chrissake!:)
With pro CD-players, the latency is generally 0.01 seconds. This means that when you hit the cue button, it spits the beat out with less than 1/100 of a second delay. Some cheaper players are around 0.03 to 0.05 - I consider this too slow for pro use. So I would like someone to tell me what sort of latency exists in the FS solution, with it's specially encoded vinyl, decoders, laptop, mp3 player etc. I find it hard to believe that it can approach vinyl or CD.
I believe that FS runs on a computer so the latency would depend on your sound card. A decent 150 USD sound card (M-Audio 2496) gets me a latency of about 8 ms (.008 secs) so that would technically be better than a "pro" cd player. I don't think latency would be a problem in any of these cases, anything up to 25 ms is pretty good (unoticeable) in my book. Anyway after he queues up your track and hits play a DJ will probably fine-tune the mix by ear (pushing/pulling the vinyl to line up the beat) before mixing over to it so the audience can hear the new track. He/she can compensate for latency by listening to his cue mix.
The next step ought to be DJing from multitrack recordings, with each instrument on a separate track. That's usually what was originally recorded, but it was mixed down to two tracks for volume distribution.
That would be the equivalent of a software company giving out their source code to every consumer that bought the product. A high profile DJ doing a remix for a major label artist usually does get the multitrack masters for the remix but they would never want to make multitracks commercially available. It's an invitation to "illegal" samplers.
I wonder how feasible it would be for someone like Borders (trying to compete with Amazon as a music retailer) to directly sign for tracks with artists.
The problem with this is that any artist that you have heard of has already signed a contract with one record label or another and is not allowed to perform on any outside recordings. So if you want an artist who already has a record deal you gotta go through their label, no ifs ands or buts. For all practical purposes they own the artists and their talent for the duration of the contract. Changing the distribution channel doesn't circumvent the RIAA's stranglehold on commercial music. Unless you are talking about P2P.:)
Coincidentally I had just typed up a nice message for the customer service department at MusicNet. I thought it was only fair that I check out their service, just in case it might be a viable product. Not to worry: upon examination it's just as bad as it seems like it would be. This note may be one notch less than polite but they are valid questions that the industry needs to address.
Hi. Just a few questions:
1. You fail to mention the bit rate of your content anywhere on the site. 128k I assume? Or worse? 2. You don't offer any way for me to see what I might want to download from your catalog. How do I know if you have what I want (hint: it's not necessarily Britney and nsync). If you don't have the song I'm looking for do I have any other option besides going to four or five other major label marketing machine sites until I happen on the one that has the music I want? Then I have to register again, download another client, pay again, etc...?? 3. How does your software enable CD burns and rips that are "faster than ever"? I thought my drive limited the burn and rip speeds and my CPU limited the encoding speed. 4. What happens if a download stops before it is finished? Do I get my download credit back? What if I don't like the song? 5. What if I DO like the song? Can I get a higher quality version without going to Tower? Can I burn anything I might hear on your site? Even streams? 6. Does your software collect any information about me, my listening or my surfing habits? Can it be disabled? Is it going to install some inane and unecessary "download manager" which will play commercials without asking me while taking up loads of my precious screen real estate? Can it be easily uninstalled without ending my subscription? 7. Is the video content encoded in an unbearably small resolution with a low frame rate and accompanied by tinny low bitrate sound? Can I fast forward and rewind at a reasonable speed? Why shouldn't I just turn on my TV? Can you make sure it doesn't drop out while I'm watching? I hate that. 8. Why would a consumer want to shell out $10 a month for a product that is of inferior quality compared to an ordinary CD? If I buy the CD then I can do what I want with it, including backing it up for security, giving it to my friends on a mix tape, digitally encoding it without DRM in any format and quality I want, urinating on it, etc... I would NEVER put it online. But I could do all that other stuff without breaking the law, right?
If anybody there can give me some reasonable answers I will plunk down my money for a month right now. It looks to me like your service is highly limited, expensive for what it is and inconsiderate of my personal privacy.
Alex Mizell Atlanta, GA music fan, sound engineer, dj
Don't even THINK about adding me to a mailing list. I opt out.
If anyone is at all interested in VR they should check out eXistenZ. It's by David Cronenberg who did Crash and Naked Lunch so you know it's bizarre. Might not be to everyone's taste but it does a good job of showing the profound weirdness created by high-quality VR systems which are likely to be widely available in the coming years. You can already buy a cheap-o VFX1 head mounted display on eBay for a couple hundred bucks. It's not too terribly impressive yet but it'll make ya think.
Well you could render information about the network - network management software like HP Openview and Unicenter TNG do just that - but the worlds are really only useful for the network admins and engineers who are monitoring it for faults. But if the WWW had a 3D stereoscopic interface along with some already-existing data glove type device it could be very similar to what Gibson was envisioning. A hyperlink in a 3D virtual world is like a "portal" between computers that allows for an illusion of seamless connection between the virtual spaces. Taken together all of that is what makes cyberspace. It is kind of an illusion, but we treat it as if it's real. BTW, I liked what you were saying about ping, tracert and netstat being part of cyberspace. Certainly they are part of it. Used to diagnose problems with the underlying equipment from the inside of the command-line virtual space.
Hay, my name's David, not Eistein, and I don't appreciate sarcasm. Okay?
I'm sorry for calling you Einstein, David. No sarcasm. I guess I was frustrated because I felt you were pushing my buttons.
Anyway, you're saying that Internet itself is cyberspace? That's interesting. Internet is simply a collection of nodes that can send packets to each other. Anything above that is application-specific. Therefore, Internet itself cannot entail cyberspace, but only applications that use Internet.
No that is not what I am saying, either. If you read back to my second post you will see that my (personal) definition of cyberspace is "that place where you are when you are communicating with the world outside of your immediate surroundings." It seems to me that even the Internet is only a subset of cyberspace. Now, you can make up your own definition if you want but don't try to tell me that there is no such thing as an information space that we communicate through, seperate from the routers, nodes etc. I believe that it exists only as an abstract construct in my mind instead of as something tangible I can show you. If you look at a switch or a router when it is operating you don't immediately see all the conversations, games, commerce, etc that are flowing through them but that doesn't make all that social interaction less real. It happens in the mind. That's not the same as not being real.
As for the application, I think this all depends on how you would define "virtual rendering".
Rendering is a fairly well defined term in computer science. I don't see what there is to argue about. Your definition which seems to be something like "showing information about the current state of the network on any kind of display device" seems like a perfectly good take on it. Why does this matter, again?
On the gripping hand, we aren't really rendering anything to do with the network at all. We are just using the network to transmit the ideas that we want to render. Therefore, Slashdot is not cyberspace.
Ideas are being transmitted, through a communication medium (the network) and being rendered to a viewable form on your chosen output device, giving you a sense of a intangible (not the same as nonexistant) "virtual" world. How is that not a descrition of "cyberspace". You're going on and on about what it isn't but you still haven't said what it is. The word exists. I want to hear your definition, straight up, and why that thing that we all are using everyday doesn't exist, in terms that would convince a normal person (which I am).
Hay, what about that Doom game? By itself, it's just rendering. But with that patch (sorry, I can't give you the URL) that somebody wrote so that a monster is created for every process on the system and shooting a monster kills the processes with which t is associated, then it becomes cyberspace, correct?
I don't understand the distinction you're making here. I would say if you are playing doom online (even over a dialup with a single friend) then that could be considered cyberspace because the two of you are creating a virtual space between you to interact inside. A single player game running on only one machine is a virtual world but to me one step short of a cyberspace because there is no communication going on (between humans, at least.) I don't know why linking a monster in Doom with a process on the machine would make it cyberspace. This just reflects a very simplistic and limited understanding of networks. Killing a process in the virtual world is no different from killing a process from Windows task manager. Who cares how you control your system? The key concept is the space between communicating nodes, not linking a virtual world to the Real World. They always have to be linked that way or they are no use to us.
Cell phones used to be much bigger but they still work as well (or better probably) now than they did due to better protocols and engineering over time. Wouldn't you expect the same here? Maybe what they'll end up with is a subscriber module that is both a medium power receiver and a low power transmitter in one.
Those are actually well thought out points. But they don't invalidate the concept of cyberspace in any way - I can make a good case for the existance of namespaces within the cyberspace of the Internet as well as outside of it.
The WWW is only the most popular information access service in cyberspace. You may or may not be aware of many other Internet services that run on the Internet such as FTP, Usenet, MUDs, MPOGs, MMORPGS discussion forums, blogs, IRC, IM, etc etc etc etc etc So no, Einstein, I'm not claiming that the WWW is equivalent to cyberspace. It is a part of cyberspace, sort of the infrastructure (I won't use that other term for it because I know how mad it makes you to hear these silly overused buzzwords).
How can you use the word "namespace" in a sentence that claims that cyberspace doesn't exist? Cyberspace exists in the same place as namespace (which you apparently have no problem comprehending).
What "virtual renderings of computer networks"?
I don't see any virtual renderings of computer networks. Am I missing something blatantly obvious? If that is the case, please spell it out for me.
Yes, happy to. It's the BROWSER, dude. It is rendering the virtual world of slashdot onto your monitor right now. See it? Okay, now this page you're reading isn't made of paper is it? It isn't exactly made of glass and metal, either. It isn't exactly just pixels. It isn't exactly just electrons or bits or anything else. It's a kind of mishmash that inside your brain adds up to a "virtual" community where we can all talk. Without the community, you couldn't read this. Without the virtualness of it, we'd have to all meet together in some physical location. Okay? Would you like to miss my point a third time?
But what kind of freaky geek commune are you going to find that needs 1200 BB connections in a two mile radius?
Cmon people, use your imaginations. You know that wireless is going to hit big, sooner or later. You know that there is a big "last mile" problem. How long before motorola works this out so that you CAN get wireless NICs and PCMCIA cards. Then you buy a list of all the people within a 2 mile radius of your house (I believe that you can get this from your Post Office) and mass mail say three hundred neighbors and friends in the area offering to set up a neighborhood net co-op and they can buy in for some amount. At this point I have to admit that I am not a business major so I dunno shit about the economics. But I am a techy and I know that this is a bigger story than it appears to be at this moment. These devices are probably going to be what brings broadband to the masses. Maybe give em a version or two to work out the kinks but the other guys are going to be copying this and wishing they'd engineered it first. Video on demand anyone?
Gibson was talking about virtual reality renderings of computer networks through which a user could navigate the net, access information and join virtual communities. With the exception of "jacking in" with a plug in your head this is almost a perfect description of the current Internet. Neuromancer was published in 1986 when the net was a pretty boring place for the average person.
I'm a little perturbed that you claim that cyberspace doesn't exist but then fail to explain yourself. By most reasonable definitions it does exist and you're soaking in it as you read. But you can call it whatever you want, no skin off my nose.
Ummmm... P2P servers? I think you should go read up on the concept of peer to peer networking... The whole gist of my post is to put YOUR peer on a p2p network that is invisible to the corps. Only you and your friends know, so only you can connect to these peers. Thus the amount of bandwidth at their disposal is irrelevant.
I liked the article's note about "phonespace" to show the silliness of "cyperspace". Whoever coined that tern deserves to be executed (same with that bletcherous "Information Super Highway").
I believe William Gibson coined the term in his novel Neuromancer. I gotta ask - why do you hate the word cyberspace? I would have to admit that it's overused but since there IS actually something that we all agree needs a name and is currently called cyberspace, I think it's valid. What would YOU call it?
On a side note, I think any good definition of cyberspace would have to include the phone system, even back when it was new. The concept is linked to communication between nodes (people, computers, whatever) and could probably be stretched to include radio and TV. Cyberspace to me has always been that place where you are when you are communicating with the world outside of your immediate surroundings. Maybe native Americans sending smoke signals were interfacing through cyberspace.
Slashdot Mirror
Dumbass. Not only did I read it, I went and DID it to see if it works.
Go read it, and you'll find out any program with a text box will do
You've got to be trolling... NO, not "any program with a text box" will do. The only susceptible text boxes belong to services running with privileged access, which generally aren't coded to HAVE text boxes, since that would be unsecure. I can't believe you told me to read it again when you get the facts so very wrong in only a couple sentences... Way to give me a perfect example of the cluelessness I was speaking of...
alex
I don't know much about audio, though -- I would love to hear any suggestions or resources you could point me to, esp. regarding isolating human voices
The best tip I've heard on this is to get yourself a minidisc recorder. It is small enough to fit in a person's pocket, records decent quality sound (certainly good enough for spoken word, not bad even for music) and can power a small lavalier mic. When you begin shooting a new scene make a loud percussive noise (clapper, anyone?) so that you can line up the audio from the minidisc and the camcorder visually in your editing software. Poor man's SMPTE. : )
alex
under Windows a shell is about as useful as a one legged man in an arse kicking competition so he used something else.
Actually the included 'spoit did kick off a command shell, directed to a TCP port for easy access from a remote computer. And this is useful for several reasons, not the least of which would be to create a user, set a password and join the admin group - pretty much the same as on a unix box. Too bad the user has to be running VirusScan or some other badly coded service for it to work. Funny how clueless nix users can be about their "enemy".
alex
So you won't mind if a take a copy of the complete text of your book, put my name on it, and pass it around for free.... right?
Umm... Looks like he is doing just that by providing a link, except for putting your name on it. The plagiarism part is completely irrelevant to the free music debate as there is no claim that a music trader created the music he is trading. Jerk.
alex
Never mind, I'm an idiot. I would mod myself down if I could. Winmgmt is not related to MMC at all. But still, where is FOON if not in MMC's memory?
alex
I meant FOON.
The GUI comes from a DLL running inside the process space of MMC.EXE. It uses a fairly secure RPC/IPC mechanism to talk to Windows.
Then how come when I stick the sploit code into the edit box and use the debugger to search MMC's memory I don't find "NOOF"? It looks to me like I just stuck it into a dialog owned by Winmgmt.exe which runs as a seperate process from MMC. Unfortunately, Winmgmt is priviliged and the debugger can't attach to the process so I'm back to square one.
alex
...you gotta check out QuadraSID. It's a VSTi for Cubase. Emulates 4 SID chips simultaneously for a total of 12 voices per instance of the VSTi. This is definitely one of my favorite virtual instruments. The sounds bring back fond memories of C64 Tetris - best soundtrack for a game EVER, even today. It was 40 minutes long for chrissake! :)
alex
With pro CD-players, the latency is generally 0.01 seconds. This means that when you hit the cue button, it spits the beat out with less than 1/100 of a second delay. Some cheaper players are around 0.03 to 0.05 - I consider this too slow for pro use. So I would like someone to tell me what sort of latency exists in the FS solution, with it's specially encoded vinyl, decoders, laptop, mp3 player etc. I find it hard to believe that it can approach vinyl or CD.
I believe that FS runs on a computer so the latency would depend on your sound card. A decent 150 USD sound card (M-Audio 2496) gets me a latency of about 8 ms (.008 secs) so that would technically be better than a "pro" cd player. I don't think latency would be a problem in any of these cases, anything up to 25 ms is pretty good (unoticeable) in my book. Anyway after he queues up your track and hits play a DJ will probably fine-tune the mix by ear (pushing/pulling the vinyl to line up the beat) before mixing over to it so the audience can hear the new track. He/she can compensate for latency by listening to his cue mix.
alex
The next step ought to be DJing from multitrack recordings, with each instrument on a separate track. That's usually what was originally recorded, but it was mixed down to two tracks for volume distribution.
That would be the equivalent of a software company giving out their source code to every consumer that bought the product. A high profile DJ doing a remix for a major label artist usually does get the multitrack masters for the remix but they would never want to make multitracks commercially available. It's an invitation to "illegal" samplers.
alex
I wonder how feasible it would be for someone like Borders (trying to compete with Amazon as a music retailer) to directly sign for tracks with artists.
:)
The problem with this is that any artist that you have heard of has already signed a contract with one record label or another and is not allowed to perform on any outside recordings. So if you want an artist who already has a record deal you gotta go through their label, no ifs ands or buts. For all practical purposes they own the artists and their talent for the duration of the contract. Changing the distribution channel doesn't circumvent the RIAA's stranglehold on commercial music. Unless you are talking about P2P.
alex
Coincidentally I had just typed up a nice message for the customer service department at MusicNet. I thought it was only fair that I check out their service, just in case it might be a viable product. Not to worry: upon examination it's just as bad as it seems like it would be. This note may be one notch less than polite but they are valid questions that the industry needs to address.
Hi. Just a few questions:
1. You fail to mention the bit rate of your content anywhere on the site. 128k I assume? Or worse?
2. You don't offer any way for me to see what I might want to download from your catalog. How do I know if you have what I want (hint: it's not necessarily Britney and nsync). If you don't have the song I'm looking for do I have any other option besides going to four or five other major label marketing machine sites until I happen on the one that has the music I want? Then I have to register again, download another client, pay again, etc...??
3. How does your software enable CD burns and rips that are "faster than ever"? I thought my drive limited the burn and rip speeds and my CPU limited the encoding speed.
4. What happens if a download stops before it is finished? Do I get my download credit back? What if I don't like the song?
5. What if I DO like the song? Can I get a higher quality version without going to Tower? Can I burn anything I might hear on your site? Even streams?
6. Does your software collect any information about me, my listening or my surfing habits? Can it be disabled? Is it going to install some inane and unecessary "download manager" which will play commercials without asking me while taking up loads of my precious screen real estate? Can it be easily uninstalled without ending my subscription?
7. Is the video content encoded in an unbearably small resolution with a low frame rate and accompanied by tinny low bitrate sound? Can I fast forward and rewind at a reasonable speed? Why shouldn't I just turn on my TV? Can you make sure it doesn't drop out while I'm watching? I hate that.
8. Why would a consumer want to shell out $10 a month for a product that is of inferior quality compared to an ordinary CD? If I buy the CD then I can do what I want with it, including backing it up for security, giving it to my friends on a mix tape, digitally encoding it without DRM in any format and quality I want, urinating on it, etc... I would NEVER put it online. But I could do all that other stuff without breaking the law, right?
If anybody there can give me some reasonable answers I will plunk down my money for a month right now. It looks to me like your service is highly limited, expensive for what it is and inconsiderate of my personal privacy.
Alex Mizell
Atlanta, GA
music fan, sound engineer, dj
Don't even THINK about adding me to a mailing list. I opt out.
If anyone is at all interested in VR they should check out eXistenZ. It's by David Cronenberg who did Crash and Naked Lunch so you know it's bizarre. Might not be to everyone's taste but it does a good job of showing the profound weirdness created by high-quality VR systems which are likely to be widely available in the coming years. You can already buy a cheap-o VFX1 head mounted display on eBay for a couple hundred bucks. It's not too terribly impressive yet but it'll make ya think.
alex
Well you could render information about the network - network management software like HP Openview and Unicenter TNG do just that - but the worlds are really only useful for the network admins and engineers who are monitoring it for faults. But if the WWW had a 3D stereoscopic interface along with some already-existing data glove type device it could be very similar to what Gibson was envisioning. A hyperlink in a 3D virtual world is like a "portal" between computers that allows for an illusion of seamless connection between the virtual spaces. Taken together all of that is what makes cyberspace. It is kind of an illusion, but we treat it as if it's real. BTW, I liked what you were saying about ping, tracert and netstat being part of cyberspace. Certainly they are part of it. Used to diagnose problems with the underlying equipment from the inside of the command-line virtual space.
aight then, nuff said.
alex
Hay, my name's David, not Eistein, and I don't appreciate sarcasm. Okay?
I'm sorry for calling you Einstein, David. No sarcasm. I guess I was frustrated because I felt you were pushing my buttons.
Anyway, you're saying that Internet itself is cyberspace? That's interesting. Internet is simply a collection of nodes that can send packets to each other. Anything above that is application-specific. Therefore, Internet itself cannot entail cyberspace, but only applications that use Internet.
No that is not what I am saying, either. If you read back to my second post you will see that my (personal) definition of cyberspace is "that place where you are when you are communicating with the world outside of your immediate surroundings." It seems to me that even the Internet is only a subset of cyberspace. Now, you can make up your own definition if you want but don't try to tell me that there is no such thing as an information space that we communicate through, seperate from the routers, nodes etc. I believe that it exists only as an abstract construct in my mind instead of as something tangible I can show you. If you look at a switch or a router when it is operating you don't immediately see all the conversations, games, commerce, etc that are flowing through them but that doesn't make all that social interaction less real. It happens in the mind. That's not the same as not being real.
As for the application, I think this all depends on how you would define "virtual rendering".
Rendering is a fairly well defined term in computer science. I don't see what there is to argue about. Your definition which seems to be something like "showing information about the current state of the network on any kind of display device" seems like a perfectly good take on it. Why does this matter, again?
On the gripping hand, we aren't really rendering anything to do with the network at all. We are just using the network to transmit the ideas that we want to render. Therefore, Slashdot is not cyberspace.
Ideas are being transmitted, through a communication medium (the network) and being rendered to a viewable form on your chosen output device, giving you a sense of a intangible (not the same as nonexistant) "virtual" world. How is that not a descrition of "cyberspace". You're going on and on about what it isn't but you still haven't said what it is. The word exists. I want to hear your definition, straight up, and why that thing that we all are using everyday doesn't exist, in terms that would convince a normal person (which I am).
Hay, what about that Doom game? By itself, it's just rendering. But with that patch (sorry, I can't give you the URL) that somebody wrote so that a monster is created for every process on the system and shooting a monster kills the processes with which t is associated, then it becomes cyberspace, correct?
I don't understand the distinction you're making here. I would say if you are playing doom online (even over a dialup with a single friend) then that could be considered cyberspace because the two of you are creating a virtual space between you to interact inside. A single player game running on only one machine is a virtual world but to me one step short of a cyberspace because there is no communication going on (between humans, at least.) I don't know why linking a monster in Doom with a process on the machine would make it cyberspace. This just reflects a very simplistic and limited understanding of networks. Killing a process in the virtual world is no different from killing a process from Windows task manager. Who cares how you control your system? The key concept is the space between communicating nodes, not linking a virtual world to the Real World. They always have to be linked that way or they are no use to us.
alex
Cell phones used to be much bigger but they still work as well (or better probably) now than they did due to better protocols and engineering over time. Wouldn't you expect the same here? Maybe what they'll end up with is a subscriber module that is both a medium power receiver and a low power transmitter in one.
alex
Those are actually well thought out points. But they don't invalidate the concept of cyberspace in any way - I can make a good case for the existance of namespaces within the cyberspace of the Internet as well as outside of it.
alex
The WWW is only the most popular information access service in cyberspace. You may or may not be aware of many other Internet services that run on the Internet such as FTP, Usenet, MUDs, MPOGs, MMORPGS discussion forums, blogs, IRC, IM, etc etc etc etc etc
So no, Einstein, I'm not claiming that the WWW is equivalent to cyberspace. It is a part of cyberspace, sort of the infrastructure (I won't use that other term for it because I know how mad it makes you to hear these silly overused buzzwords).
alex
How can you use the word "namespace" in a sentence that claims that cyberspace doesn't exist? Cyberspace exists in the same place as namespace (which you apparently have no problem comprehending).
What "virtual renderings of computer networks"? I don't see any virtual renderings of computer networks. Am I missing something blatantly obvious? If that is the case, please spell it out for me.
Yes, happy to. It's the BROWSER, dude. It is rendering the virtual world of slashdot onto your monitor right now. See it? Okay, now this page you're reading isn't made of paper is it? It isn't exactly made of glass and metal, either. It isn't exactly just pixels. It isn't exactly just electrons or bits or anything else. It's a kind of mishmash that inside your brain adds up to a "virtual" community where we can all talk. Without the community, you couldn't read this. Without the virtualness of it, we'd have to all meet together in some physical location. Okay? Would you like to miss my point a third time?
alex
5200 SM - Canopy Subscriber Module
Measures 11.75" X 3.4" X 3.4"
Single cable - standard RJ45, 8-pin Ethernet
Simple indoor AC adapter
UL-approved
This is the spec on the box that the user has to have in his home. Small isn't it? Couldn't it be a lot smaller in a short amount of time?
alex
But what kind of freaky geek commune are you going to find that needs 1200 BB connections in a two mile radius?
Cmon people, use your imaginations. You know that wireless is going to hit big, sooner or later. You know that there is a big "last mile" problem. How long before motorola works this out so that you CAN get wireless NICs and PCMCIA cards. Then you buy a list of all the people within a 2 mile radius of your house (I believe that you can get this from your Post Office) and mass mail say three hundred neighbors and friends in the area offering to set up a neighborhood net co-op and they can buy in for some amount. At this point I have to admit that I am not a business major so I dunno shit about the economics. But I am a techy and I know that this is a bigger story than it appears to be at this moment. These devices are probably going to be what brings broadband to the masses. Maybe give em a version or two to work out the kinks but the other guys are going to be copying this and wishing they'd engineered it first. Video on demand anyone?
alex
Gibson was talking about virtual reality renderings of computer networks through which a user could navigate the net, access information and join virtual communities. With the exception of "jacking in" with a plug in your head this is almost a perfect description of the current Internet. Neuromancer was published in 1986 when the net was a pretty boring place for the average person.
I'm a little perturbed that you claim that cyberspace doesn't exist but then fail to explain yourself. By most reasonable definitions it does exist and you're soaking in it as you read. But you can call it whatever you want, no skin off my nose.
alex
Ummmm... P2P servers? I think you should go read up on the concept of peer to peer networking... The whole gist of my post is to put YOUR peer on a p2p network that is invisible to the corps. Only you and your friends know, so only you can connect to these peers. Thus the amount of bandwidth at their disposal is irrelevant.
alex
I liked the article's note about "phonespace" to show the silliness of "cyperspace". Whoever coined that tern deserves to be executed (same with that bletcherous "Information Super Highway").
I believe William Gibson coined the term in his novel Neuromancer. I gotta ask - why do you hate the word cyberspace? I would have to admit that it's overused but since there IS actually something that we all agree needs a name and is currently called cyberspace, I think it's valid. What would YOU call it?
On a side note, I think any good definition of cyberspace would have to include the phone system, even back when it was new. The concept is linked to communication between nodes (people, computers, whatever) and could probably be stretched to include radio and TV. Cyberspace to me has always been that place where you are when you are communicating with the world outside of your immediate surroundings. Maybe native Americans sending smoke signals were interfacing through cyberspace.
alex