The FAQ section you linked to is specific to the LGPL. The LZO library is licensed under the GPL, which means any application that uses it, and is distributed publicly, must be released with full source licensed under the GPL. This is an important distinction between the LGPL and GPL...
Those of us who worked and actually innovated in VR in the late 80s and early 90s have always been a little worried about Worlds, as they liked to run off to the patent office with all the ideas the collected from the rest of us. All of their patent claims existed in other products - even their first patents were an attempt to claim basic VR tech shown several years before by several groups, including the one I worked with (OnLive Traveler). There is plenty of prior art to invalidate these patents, but in our glorious patent system it will cost millions to do so. And like SCO, their legal zombie remains keep trying to extend old claims and collect something for the little invalid patent portfolio that was passed on when they shut down. The software patent apocalypse continues....
Irrespective of how you might choose to translate the Hebrew word, pronounced without the missing sounds as "Yad-Hey-Vad-He", it is a personal name. Words like Adonai are titles, translated in English as "God", "Lord", which leads to to ridiculous translations like "the Lord my Lord said untoeth my Lord". Why should Christians maintain a Jewish superstition? (Didn't Jesus say he made God's name manifest? Did he say Lord? Didn't he teach his followers to pray for the sanctification of his Father's name? What name was that?) I've always found it amusing and sad that the 'author' of the Bible has had his name removed and replaced by titles, and this continues to be justified by people who claim to follow Jesus teachings.
I've also found it interesting how many smart people who studied the Bible came to the conclusion that the Trinity was a pagan teaching unsupported by scripture, Issac Newton being one of my favorite examples.
I first approached the Bible as an agnostic leaning towards atheism, read with an open mind, and a goal of proving my parents wrong. At the time my idea of light reading was books on particle physics and molecular and evolutionary biology, I came away with two strong opinions - 1) the Bible was a much more interesting book than its critics gave it credit for, especially in the few places it touched on science and the many places where it touched on archaeological history, and 2) what most people who call themselves Christians believe has very little to do with the book they claim to base their beliefs on - modern churches and teachings are nothing like first century Christians. Studying the bits of of history of Christianity that survived the many purges and burnings explains very well why this is the case.
The primary concern the clergy had with the laity having Bible's in their own language was that they might actually read it and compare what it said to what was being taught from the pulpit. Christianity has had almost 2000 years of significant forks - its history is rife with individuals trying to make their church more popular by blending in local non christian concepts, softening the tone of unpopular language, and removing or changing phrases that might offend. My favorite data point - God's name appears almost 7000 times in the original texts, yet most modern translations have dropped that to between three and zero! Why? Because 'its tradition not to use it', and 'it might confuse people who should believe that Jesus is God', which is hard to make people accept if the Bible is left in its original state as referring to Jesus as the Son of an Almighty God with a different name that most Christians have been told they should not even pronounce.
The power of the clergy came from them telling the people that the Bible was best left in Latin, they should believe what they were told, and follow what the King said. Their telling people to obey the King kept their comfortable relationship with the ruling classes. For a long time anyone in possession of a Bible in English would be executed, most often because they quickly realized the Trinity was a false teaching. For example, the last person officially burnt alive for this in England was a medical student in 1612.
Fun quote: "Canon 14. We prohibit also that the laity should not be permitted to have the books of the Old or New Testament; we most strictly forbid their having any translation of these books." - The Church Council of Toulouse 1229 AD
Think what you could do with an unlimited budget and sufficient taps of peering and backbone links. Now add in CALEA backdoors with poor security, and think about how these scale. Now think about how anonymizers work. Now read up on traffic analysis. Don tin foil hat...
For tires with TPMS systems or RFID tags, vehicle tracking is already possible with simple antennas at a far lower cost than license plate OCR, and its harder to change your tires than your plates...
According to the email I received, go to www.bn.com/borders and enter the email you registered under. You'll need access to that account to click through the confirmation email...
You miss the point - the researchers discovered an application of the laws of physics to cryptanalysis. Cool, interesting, but not inherently patentable. Then they patented every way to fix that problem, many of which would be obvious to someone skilled in the art.
If I discover that 1+2 = 3, I cannot patent that equation. If I discover an application of that equation to a physical problem, the intent of the framers in patent law was that only a non obvious application may be patented. The fact that they discovered the problem doesn't (at least by law) eliminate or nullify the PHOSITA requirement.
The researchers found a hard to find problem, then patented the obvious solutions to that problem.
This is one of the problem with patents in general - patents are being issued where the person "skilled in the art", i.e. someone who has the same degree of specialization, would have developed the same solution, and the USPTO no longer makes a reasonable effort to prevent that.
Not everyone who complains on Slashdot is naive on patent realities, and the problem is real and ugly.
Aside from the legal fiction of the PHOSITA (Person Having Ordinary Skill In The Art), the intent of this clause by the framers was that it should not be possible for anyone to obtain a patent on something that would be obvious to someone working in the field.
In this specific case, once the feasibility of power vector side channel attacks was understood, any ideas that should have been obvious to someone having ordinary skill in the applicable fields (cryptanalysis of side channels, EE, FPGA layout internals) should not be patentable.
While credit must be given to researches who discovered these attack vectors, the fact remains that the patents they obtained are broad enough to intersect essentially every idea a PHOSITA would come up with. While it is possible to interpret claims narrowly through the context of the background and description, juries often (especially in East Texas) fail to narrow interpretations sufficiently, and just attempting just a narrow interpretation will still cost you $1-3M in legal fees.
If your job includes evaluation of risk of patent infringement (which mine does, for one of the worlds largest companies) then you would understand that the combination of lowering the bar on "obvious" and "prior art", along with the challenges that venue shopping presents, have created a situation where it has become nearly impossible to do anything interesting without infringing many patents that should NOT have been issued.
Many of the fundamental techniques used to defend against DPA and other side-channel attacks are patented by Cryptography Research, Inc.... One of CRI's businesses today is licensing this portfolio of very fundamental patents. Nearly all the secure microcontrollers used in smart cards, set-top boxes, SIM cards for GSM phones and Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) for personal computers are built under license to CRI, amounting to about 4.5 billion chips per year in total.
Yet another critical set of concepts which should be obvious to anyone working in the field locked behind a paywall due to USPTO incompetence and/or malfeasance...
The only thing changing is that IT in general is generally considered a "cost center" to trim, IT security an even less indirectly profitable component of that cost center, and management of most organizations is becoming more aggressive at reducing that cost. Add outsourcing and subcontracting issues and you end up with a system where there is real interest only in having an appearance of security, and standard practices revolve around plausible deniability and passing the buck.
Almost everyone whose been in enterprise security for a while has a collection of cringe worthy stories they cannot share... (sigh)
FWIW... I'm a game industry veteran, working on something you sound like target audience for - AAA engine, MMO over P2P back end, 2 authoring levels - simple (point and click) and pro (API), all free for non commercial use, cross platform. Hopefully done this year - watch vscape.com for updates, site is dead looking placeholder, busy team behind.
As nearly anyone working on the "front lines" of security will tell you, most companies don't really care about security past some low level of lip service. Corporate networks [nearly] always have firewalls, but most of the time the IT staff is paid to care more about restricting employees from 'wasting company time' than in managing advanced multi-level defenses (why most networks are 'crunch on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside.') Equipment and software vendors provide password level security, often with authentication integration into LDAP/AD, but rarely support real tokens or PKI's backed by an HSM, as most companies don't want to pay for a real HSM (and with post dot bomb price escalation, that's often understandable - $40k for a 1U server with layered tamper switches and a custom app?) CSO's are treated as a cost center along with the rest of IT, and its often the policy to force people to keep quiet when major breaches occur. Its simpler and cheaper to make sure the board and stockholders don't know how often the databases and repositories are exported to FTP sites in China than to actually make it really difficult to succeed, as real security often costs real money. There's a whole underground industry of targeted penetration, as ethics and patriotism fall to greed - the underlying problems are far deeper than basic "cybersecurity".
The processes of science have changed in the last century, and not for the better.
Once upon a time, scientists wrote and freely published papers that contained sufficient information that anyone qualified in the relevant fields and with access to relevant equipment could test the hypothesis, reproduce the experiment, and vet the results. Science still had great trouble coming to terms with large changes, hence the saying – 'old scientists never change their mind, but they do die'.
Today the practice of science is driven largely by the highly politicized grant funding process, and most scientific papers are available only behind paywalls of increasing height. The peer review process has in most cases devolved to 'looking over' someones work rather than testing and reproducing it, and it is rare for an experiment that truly threatens the status quo to be funded.
Science needs to respond to sincere questions by making their data and models available for open scrutiny, not by circling their wagons and proclaiming to be the sole keepers of truth which the layperson and denier dare not challenge.
I should trust science because I can test their hypothesis myself, NOT because they tell me I must trust them. Otherwise what separates them from religion?
The public may have lost the skills to test most of the assertions of modern science, but the public can still recognize bombastic attitudes, and is properly skeptical when they recognize that data is being withheld. The words "trust me" still raise alarm, whether coming from someone in a business suit or lab coat...
It seems like these approaches are constrained in connection complexity by semiconductor fabrication, which would seem to severely limit the geometry to 2d. The article doesn't go into this, and it seems likely they put some effort into working around this with traditional approaches using buses and the like, but it does seem like you can't achieve the same degree of interconnection complexity on a thin 2d wafer as is seen in a typical 3d brain...
If you want your VR system to succeed, then just built it - a hundred other groups are doing the same. If you want it open, post the source and docs somewhere like Sourceforge. If you really want people to use it, post the code under BSD instead of GPL.
Defensive patents are interesting, but the patent system is so broken that a better approach is a simple defensive publication of the architecture and protocols. Frankly, no matter how you built it, you're basically guaranteed to be infringing at least dozens of patents...
I to am sitting on an expiring provisional patent for a large scale VR protocol, actually VR over P2P. We decided some time ago to stop wasting our effort on the broken patent system and focus on releasing the system.
We're going this route, building a AAA game platform integrated with P2P MMO back end, all in cross platform code. We're not posting code or docs until we deploy publicly so we can enjoy first mover advantage, but we plan to open the source in phased releases as we grow - the only part we currently plan to retain control over us the underlying PKI.
All that matters in the end within the VR domain is who can build the first massively scalable system that can also be a fun place for a broad cross section of the public. If anyone builds such a system with closed source and/or protocols, it will be recreated with open source and protocols.
Its for the tinkerer who wishes to learn more about high vacuum pumps (absorption, ion, vane, turbo...), vacuum chamber design (welding, management of outgassing...), low pressure measurement, low pressure gas flow, high voltage (flybacks, diode stacks, corona discharge, flashover...), particle detectors (scintillators, avalanche photodiodes, image intensifiers, calibrated op amps...), instrument design (fast ADCs, multi-channel analyzers...), oh and some cool stuff related to nuclear physics thrown in. Most of us can't buy all the gear, so we make it all from scrounged parts. And learn a tremendous amount of related engineering in the process. Look at it this way - its like the difference between building an RC car and rebuilding a classic car - anyone can toss together a kit, but if you want to learn how to restore an older car you end up learning dozens of skills you didn't realize you need. Its one of the most interesting educational projects in modern science that isn't illegal (yet).
The output of any decent encryption algorithm should be indistinguishable from random noise for any non-trivial size sample, which breaks compression. In practice, most compressions of encrypted data are slightly larger than the original, as they generally are comprised of a header stating "use this directly", then the original data.
Some of us working in the bleeding edge of p2p have been playing with these ideas for years to improve performance (I'm building open VR/MMO over P2P), here's the basics...
Most true p2p systems use something called a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to store and search for metadata such as file location and file metadata. Examples are Pastry, Chord, and (my favorite) Kademlia. These systems index data by ids which are generally a hash (MD5 or SHA1) of the data.
Without going into the details of the algorithms, the search process exploits the topology of the DHT, which becomes something called an "overlay network". This lets you efficiently search millions of nodes for the IDs you're interested in in seconds, but it doesn't guarantee the nodes you find will be anywhere near you in physical or network topology space.
The trick some of us are playing with is including topology data in our DHT structure and/or search, to weigh the search to nodes which happen to be close in network topology space.
What they are likely doing is something along these lines, since they have the real topology instead of what we can map using tools like tracert.
If they really want to help p2p, then they would expose this topology information to us p2p developers, and let us use it to make all our applications better. What they're likely planning is pushing their own p2p, which will be faster and less stressful on their internal network (by avoiding peering point traversal at all costs, which is when bandwidth actually costs THEM). The problem is their p2p will likely include other less desired features, like RIAA/MPAA friendly logging and DRM, and then they'll have a plausible reason to start degrading other p2p systems which aren't as friendly by their metrics, such as distributing content they don't control or can't monetize... Then again, maybe I'm just a cynic...
Thanks for the response, and I'd like to ask a follow-up...
I can understand how initial density can place a limit on fluctuation sizes, but these results presume that the signal we're seeing is most likely the residual noise of the original bang. What I'm curious about is how other signal sources can be ruled out?
From the papers at the site it looks like WMAP had sufficient instrument resolution high enough to overcome Nyquist limits on input w/r/t desired measurement, and they feel they have a good model to subtract noise from galactic sources (synchrotron and thermal dust emissions), so we are likely looking at the multipole moment of the intergalactic background. I have no problem there. They also show a compelling fit between the measured signal and that predicted by Lambda CDM, which is interesting, and how they reach conclusions like a better Hubble estimation and the like.
What I'm curious about is what research is being done to come up with alternate explanations for the intergalactic background signal? Ever since COBE I keep seeing this presumption that this signal is Big Bang noise. I'm NOT arguing against the Big Bang here, and I'm not trying to bring back the aether:), but I am wondering is how we can characterize other signal sources sufficiently to rule out anything but the Big Bang...
The assertions in the article are derived from the following postulate:
If the universe were open, the brightest microwave background fluctuations (or "spots") would be about half a degree across. If the universe were flat, the spots would be about 1 degree across. While if the universe were closed, the brightest spots would be about 1.5 degrees across.
I've heard these sweeping statements before, can anyone point out a reasonably accessible proof that overcomes basic statistical counterarguments? Basic common sense here - I can infer some interesting characteristics about gravity by splashing paint on my wall and studying the results from across the room, but I don't really have enough data to overcome a host of other contributing factors...
A very illuminating Microsoft Confidential presentation from the antitrust discovery process. If you're in a hurry start with the slides at page 9. This is what he should have been asked about...
We have a few test apps we're assembling in VScape - a first person shooter, a vehicle combat game, a Sims2 clone, and a kids game that could be considered a cross between Animal Crossing and some of the Harvest Moon games.
First person is simple with good architecture and low latency, frankly its the easiest game to build (and we have team members that have worked on several such AAA titles), although FPS is difficult to differentiate from the myriads of entries in that space. Physics is a religious issue inside games - they're highly overrated outside of a few niche applications where they shine, like ragdoll effects, some collision dynamics, and IK/FK. We've been playing with ODE, but often application specific solvers are far better.
And thanks for the heads on the news, almost all of our web work to date has been in the private side of the wiki, getting hundreds of docs ready to go public with the client.
Slashdot Mirror
The FAQ section you linked to is specific to the LGPL. The LZO library is licensed under the GPL, which means any application that uses it, and is distributed publicly, must be released with full source licensed under the GPL. This is an important distinction between the LGPL and GPL...
Those of us who worked and actually innovated in VR in the late 80s and early 90s have always been a little worried about Worlds, as they liked to run off to the patent office with all the ideas the collected from the rest of us. All of their patent claims existed in other products - even their first patents were an attempt to claim basic VR tech shown several years before by several groups, including the one I worked with (OnLive Traveler). There is plenty of prior art to invalidate these patents, but in our glorious patent system it will cost millions to do so. And like SCO, their legal zombie remains keep trying to extend old claims and collect something for the little invalid patent portfolio that was passed on when they shut down. The software patent apocalypse continues....
Irrespective of how you might choose to translate the Hebrew word, pronounced without the missing sounds as "Yad-Hey-Vad-He", it is a personal name. Words like Adonai are titles, translated in English as "God", "Lord", which leads to to ridiculous translations like "the Lord my Lord said untoeth my Lord". Why should Christians maintain a Jewish superstition? (Didn't Jesus say he made God's name manifest? Did he say Lord? Didn't he teach his followers to pray for the sanctification of his Father's name? What name was that?) I've always found it amusing and sad that the 'author' of the Bible has had his name removed and replaced by titles, and this continues to be justified by people who claim to follow Jesus teachings.
I've also found it interesting how many smart people who studied the Bible came to the conclusion that the Trinity was a pagan teaching unsupported by scripture, Issac Newton being one of my favorite examples.
I first approached the Bible as an agnostic leaning towards atheism, read with an open mind, and a goal of proving my parents wrong. At the time my idea of light reading was books on particle physics and molecular and evolutionary biology, I came away with two strong opinions - 1) the Bible was a much more interesting book than its critics gave it credit for, especially in the few places it touched on science and the many places where it touched on archaeological history, and 2) what most people who call themselves Christians believe has very little to do with the book they claim to base their beliefs on - modern churches and teachings are nothing like first century Christians. Studying the bits of of history of Christianity that survived the many purges and burnings explains very well why this is the case.
The primary concern the clergy had with the laity having Bible's in their own language was that they might actually read it and compare what it said to what was being taught from the pulpit. Christianity has had almost 2000 years of significant forks - its history is rife with individuals trying to make their church more popular by blending in local non christian concepts, softening the tone of unpopular language, and removing or changing phrases that might offend. My favorite data point - God's name appears almost 7000 times in the original texts, yet most modern translations have dropped that to between three and zero! Why? Because 'its tradition not to use it', and 'it might confuse people who should believe that Jesus is God', which is hard to make people accept if the Bible is left in its original state as referring to Jesus as the Son of an Almighty God with a different name that most Christians have been told they should not even pronounce.
The power of the clergy came from them telling the people that the Bible was best left in Latin, they should believe what they were told, and follow what the King said. Their telling people to obey the King kept their comfortable relationship with the ruling classes. For a long time anyone in possession of a Bible in English would be executed, most often because they quickly realized the Trinity was a false teaching. For example, the last person officially burnt alive for this in England was a medical student in 1612.
Fun quote: "Canon 14. We prohibit also that the laity should not be permitted to have the books of the Old or New Testament; we most strictly forbid their having
any translation of these books." - The Church Council of Toulouse 1229 AD
Think what you could do with an unlimited budget and sufficient taps of peering and backbone links. Now add in CALEA backdoors with poor security, and think about how these scale. Now think about how anonymizers work. Now read up on traffic analysis. Don tin foil hat...
For tires with TPMS systems or RFID tags, vehicle tracking is already possible with simple antennas at a far lower cost than license plate OCR, and its harder to change your tires than your plates...
Honest question, have found only a few useful comments online. Has anyone else not already committed to either deployed both and compared?
According to the email I received, go to www.bn.com/borders and enter the email you registered under. You'll need access to that account to click through the confirmation email...
This is the real reason why most large companies now have email retention policies and auto-delete everything after 30..90 days.
It is a cheaper "fix".
You miss the point - the researchers discovered an application of the laws of physics to cryptanalysis. Cool, interesting, but not inherently patentable. Then they patented every way to fix that problem, many of which would be obvious to someone skilled in the art.
If I discover that 1+2 = 3, I cannot patent that equation. If I discover an application of that equation to a physical problem, the intent of the framers in patent law was that only a non obvious application may be patented. The fact that they discovered the problem doesn't (at least by law) eliminate or nullify the PHOSITA requirement.
The researchers found a hard to find problem, then patented the obvious solutions to that problem.
This is one of the problem with patents in general - patents are being issued where the person "skilled in the art", i.e. someone who has the same degree of specialization, would have developed the same solution, and the USPTO no longer makes a reasonable effort to prevent that.
Not everyone who complains on Slashdot is naive on patent realities, and the problem is real and ugly.
Aside from the legal fiction of the PHOSITA (Person Having Ordinary Skill In The Art), the intent of this clause by the framers was that it should not be possible for anyone to obtain a patent on something that would be obvious to someone working in the field.
In this specific case, once the feasibility of power vector side channel attacks was understood, any ideas that should have been obvious to someone having ordinary skill in the applicable fields (cryptanalysis of side channels, EE, FPGA layout internals) should not be patentable.
While credit must be given to researches who discovered these attack vectors, the fact remains that the patents they obtained are broad enough to intersect essentially every idea a PHOSITA would come up with. While it is possible to interpret claims narrowly through the context of the background and description, juries often (especially in East Texas) fail to narrow interpretations sufficiently, and just attempting just a narrow interpretation will still cost you $1-3M in legal fees.
If your job includes evaluation of risk of patent infringement (which mine does, for one of the worlds largest companies) then you would understand that the combination of lowering the bar on "obvious" and "prior art", along with the challenges that venue shopping presents, have created a situation where it has become nearly impossible to do anything interesting without infringing many patents that should NOT have been issued.
An interesting blurb from the Actel linked page:
Many of the fundamental techniques used to defend against DPA and other side-channel attacks are patented by Cryptography Research, Inc. ... One of CRI's businesses today is licensing this portfolio of very fundamental patents. Nearly all the secure microcontrollers used in smart cards, set-top boxes, SIM cards for GSM phones and Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) for personal computers are built under license to CRI, amounting to about 4.5 billion chips per year in total.
Yet another critical set of concepts which should be obvious to anyone working in the field locked behind a paywall due to USPTO incompetence and/or malfeasance...
The only thing changing is that IT in general is generally considered a "cost center" to trim, IT security an even less indirectly profitable component of that cost center, and management of most organizations is becoming more aggressive at reducing that cost. Add outsourcing and subcontracting issues and you end up with a system where there is real interest only in having an appearance of security, and standard practices revolve around plausible deniability and passing the buck.
Almost everyone whose been in enterprise security for a while has a collection of cringe worthy stories they cannot share... (sigh)
FWIW... I'm a game industry veteran, working on something you sound like target audience for - AAA engine, MMO over P2P back end, 2 authoring levels - simple (point and click) and pro (API), all free for non commercial use, cross platform. Hopefully done this year - watch vscape.com for updates, site is dead looking placeholder, busy team behind.
As nearly anyone working on the "front lines" of security will tell you, most companies don't really care about security past some low level of lip service. Corporate networks [nearly] always have firewalls, but most of the time the IT staff is paid to care more about restricting employees from 'wasting company time' than in managing advanced multi-level defenses (why most networks are 'crunch on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside.') Equipment and software vendors provide password level security, often with authentication integration into LDAP/AD, but rarely support real tokens or PKI's backed by an HSM, as most companies don't want to pay for a real HSM (and with post dot bomb price escalation, that's often understandable - $40k for a 1U server with layered tamper switches and a custom app?) CSO's are treated as a cost center along with the rest of IT, and its often the policy to force people to keep quiet when major breaches occur. Its simpler and cheaper to make sure the board and stockholders don't know how often the databases and repositories are exported to FTP sites in China than to actually make it really difficult to succeed, as real security often costs real money. There's a whole underground industry of targeted penetration, as ethics and patriotism fall to greed - the underlying problems are far deeper than basic "cybersecurity".
The processes of science have changed in the last century, and not for the better.
Once upon a time, scientists wrote and freely published papers that contained sufficient information that anyone qualified in the relevant fields and with access to relevant equipment could test the hypothesis, reproduce the experiment, and vet the results. Science still had great trouble coming to terms with large changes, hence the saying – 'old scientists never change their mind, but they do die'.
Today the practice of science is driven largely by the highly politicized grant funding process, and most scientific papers are available only behind paywalls of increasing height. The peer review process has in most cases devolved to 'looking over' someones work rather than testing and reproducing it, and it is rare for an experiment that truly threatens the status quo to be funded.
Science needs to respond to sincere questions by making their data and models available for open scrutiny, not by circling their wagons and proclaiming to be the sole keepers of truth which the layperson and denier dare not challenge.
I should trust science because I can test their hypothesis myself, NOT because they tell me I must trust them. Otherwise what separates them from religion?
The public may have lost the skills to test most of the assertions of modern science, but the public can still recognize bombastic attitudes, and is properly skeptical when they recognize that data is being withheld. The words "trust me" still raise alarm, whether coming from someone in a business suit or lab coat...
It seems like these approaches are constrained in connection complexity by semiconductor fabrication, which would seem to severely limit the geometry to 2d. The article doesn't go into this, and it seems likely they put some effort into working around this with traditional approaches using buses and the like, but it does seem like you can't achieve the same degree of interconnection complexity on a thin 2d wafer as is seen in a typical 3d brain...
If you want your VR system to succeed, then just built it - a hundred other groups are doing the same. If you want it open, post the source and docs somewhere like Sourceforge. If you really want people to use it, post the code under BSD instead of GPL.
Defensive patents are interesting, but the patent system is so broken that a better approach is a simple defensive publication of the architecture and protocols. Frankly, no matter how you built it, you're basically guaranteed to be infringing at least dozens of patents...
I to am sitting on an expiring provisional patent for a large scale VR protocol, actually VR over P2P. We decided some time ago to stop wasting our effort on the broken patent system and focus on releasing the system.
We're going this route, building a AAA game platform integrated with P2P MMO back end, all in cross platform code. We're not posting code or docs until we deploy publicly so we can enjoy first mover advantage, but we plan to open the source in phased releases as we grow - the only part we currently plan to retain control over us the underlying PKI.
All that matters in the end within the VR domain is who can build the first massively scalable system that can also be a fun place for a broad cross section of the public. If anyone builds such a system with closed source and/or protocols, it will be recreated with open source and protocols.
Its for the tinkerer who wishes to learn more about high vacuum pumps (absorption, ion, vane, turbo...), vacuum chamber design (welding, management of outgassing...), low pressure measurement, low pressure gas flow, high voltage (flybacks, diode stacks, corona discharge, flashover...), particle detectors (scintillators, avalanche photodiodes, image intensifiers, calibrated op amps...), instrument design (fast ADCs, multi-channel analyzers...), oh and some cool stuff related to nuclear physics thrown in. Most of us can't buy all the gear, so we make it all from scrounged parts. And learn a tremendous amount of related engineering in the process. Look at it this way - its like the difference between building an RC car and rebuilding a classic car - anyone can toss together a kit, but if you want to learn how to restore an older car you end up learning dozens of skills you didn't realize you need. Its one of the most interesting educational projects in modern science that isn't illegal (yet).
The output of any decent encryption algorithm should be indistinguishable from random noise for any non-trivial size sample, which breaks compression. In practice, most compressions of encrypted data are slightly larger than the original, as they generally are comprised of a header stating "use this directly", then the original data.
Some of us working in the bleeding edge of p2p have been playing with these ideas for years to improve performance (I'm building open VR/MMO over P2P), here's the basics...
Most true p2p systems use something called a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to store and search for metadata such as file location and file metadata. Examples are Pastry, Chord, and (my favorite) Kademlia. These systems index data by ids which are generally a hash (MD5 or SHA1) of the data.
Without going into the details of the algorithms, the search process exploits the topology of the DHT, which becomes something called an "overlay network". This lets you efficiently search millions of nodes for the IDs you're interested in in seconds, but it doesn't guarantee the nodes you find will be anywhere near you in physical or network topology space.
The trick some of us are playing with is including topology data in our DHT structure and/or search, to weigh the search to nodes which happen to be close in network topology space.
What they are likely doing is something along these lines, since they have the real topology instead of what we can map using tools like tracert.
If they really want to help p2p, then they would expose this topology information to us p2p developers, and let us use it to make all our applications better. What they're likely planning is pushing their own p2p, which will be faster and less stressful on their internal network (by avoiding peering point traversal at all costs, which is when bandwidth actually costs THEM). The problem is their p2p will likely include other less desired features, like RIAA/MPAA friendly logging and DRM, and then they'll have a plausible reason to start degrading other p2p systems which aren't as friendly by their metrics, such as distributing content they don't control or can't monetize... Then again, maybe I'm just a cynic...
Thanks for the response, and I'd like to ask a follow-up...
:), but I am wondering is how we can characterize other signal sources sufficiently to rule out anything but the Big Bang...
I can understand how initial density can place a limit on fluctuation sizes, but these results presume that the signal we're seeing is most likely the residual noise of the original bang. What I'm curious about is how other signal sources can be ruled out?
From the papers at the site it looks like WMAP had sufficient instrument resolution high enough to overcome Nyquist limits on input w/r/t desired measurement, and they feel they have a good model to subtract noise from galactic sources (synchrotron and thermal dust emissions), so we are likely looking at the multipole moment of the intergalactic background. I have no problem there. They also show a compelling fit between the measured signal and that predicted by Lambda CDM, which is interesting, and how they reach conclusions like a better Hubble estimation and the like.
What I'm curious about is what research is being done to come up with alternate explanations for the intergalactic background signal? Ever since COBE I keep seeing this presumption that this signal is Big Bang noise. I'm NOT arguing against the Big Bang here, and I'm not trying to bring back the aether
The assertions in the article are derived from the following postulate:
If the universe were open, the brightest microwave background fluctuations (or "spots") would be about half a degree across. If the universe were flat, the spots would be about 1 degree across. While if the universe were closed, the brightest spots would be about 1.5 degrees across.
I've heard these sweeping statements before, can anyone point out a reasonably accessible proof that overcomes basic statistical counterarguments? Basic common sense here - I can infer some interesting characteristics about gravity by splashing paint on my wall and studying the results from across the room, but I don't really have enough data to overcome a host of other contributing factors...
A very illuminating Microsoft Confidential presentation from the antitrust discovery process. If you're in a hurry start with the slides at page 9. This is what he should have been asked about...
Comes-3096.pdf
We have a few test apps we're assembling in VScape - a first person shooter, a vehicle combat game, a Sims2 clone, and a kids game that could be considered a cross between Animal Crossing and some of the Harvest Moon games.
First person is simple with good architecture and low latency, frankly its the easiest game to build (and we have team members that have worked on several such AAA titles), although FPS is difficult to differentiate from the myriads of entries in that space. Physics is a religious issue inside games - they're highly overrated outside of a few niche applications where they shine, like ragdoll effects, some collision dynamics, and IK/FK. We've been playing with ODE, but often application specific solvers are far better.
And thanks for the heads on the news, almost all of our web work to date has been in the private side of the wiki, getting hundreds of docs ready to go public with the client.