One thing is rather clear to me: We won't run out of IPv4 addresses anytime soon, instead the price will increase more and more and thus people will end up behind ISP enforced NATs, because IPs are to expensive for the average consumer. This is after all already the case, at least in part, static IPs are a premium service, not something you get for free from most ISPs.
So how to fix this? How about some good old government regulation? If you want to provide a "Internet service", you have to provide IPv6 or you can't call it "Internet". With a little force it shouldn't take all that long till the switch to IPv6 is done. But unless that happens the rarity of IPv4 addresses will simply be seen as a nice way to make money, instead of a problem that needs to be fixed.
Soo.......is there any room for compromise in that model? I think a good compromise or first step would be to allow non commercial sharing of a degraded copy of a work. So that sharing a DVD image would be illegal, but sharing a downsampled reencoded version AVI of the DVD would be ok, same with music, wav or flac would be forbidden, 128kbs MP3 would be ok. That way there would still be a good reason to get the original thing.
That solution would of course still have its problems, but we really have to move away from sticking half the population with one leg into the jail.
No, but neither artist nor label has the $10 now. And when the downloader types 'rm *.mp3' he doesn't have the songs anymore either. A very large portion of the stuff that gets downloaded simply gets downloaded because it is so easy, not because the downloader wants to have and use that piece of data, this is especially true with torrents, where you might get a whole collection from everything an artist ever created instead of just a single mp3.
Wouldn't such a system assume that everyone uses only one handle - or, their real name - all the time for every project? You can register on the page and link all the different aliases back to together to refer to a single person.
I think its a much bigger issue that all those people sending patches will be ignored, since there isn't really a standard way in most version tracking systems to keep track of the patch submitter instead of those that actually commit it into the repository.
The Windows API is available on Linux thanks to Wine,the MacOSX API isn't available on Linux. That tiny bit of POSIX layer that Linux and MacOSX share helps you very little when you want to port a GUI application, since the GUI APIs are completly different on MacOSX and Linux. The only reason why Linux -> MacOSX porting is easy is because MacOSX can run X11 applications, just like Linux, but all native MacOSX tools don't use X11.
The Xbox360 doesn't have a HD-DVD drive it has a normal old DVD drive. The HD-DVD is an extra thing that you have to buy and place next to your XBox360, Microsoft will simply release a BluRay extension drive. For games it doesn't matter, since neither is used in games.
And then they will answer "So, what?". Maybe they even willingly published that information themselves, all those social network sides are after all build exactly for that.
I think it is much more important to first get a clearly what the heck you want to protect them from:
1) publishing private information of you doing things your peers should not know about might get you into trouble with your peers, parents, school or workplace 2) publishing creditcard information, SSN and stuff might make you an easy target for criminals 3) lettings shops keep records of what you buy might create targeted advertisment 4) allowing the government to create large databases of private information makes you an easy target for a corrupt goverment
Point 1) depends heavily on what you are doing, if you have some interesting hobby you might not care at all if somebody finds out about it. If you want to apply for a job in a bank on the other side you might not want them to see pictures of you drunk at a party. It simply depends on the individual on how to handle this and there really isn't a clear "do" or "don't" guideline.
Point 2) is rather clear, there is no benefit for you from publishing those information, so you should do whatever you can to keep them secret. Privacy here is important.
Point 3) is a matter of convenience, targeted advertisment can be a good thing or a bad thing. I am personally more annoyed by Amazon to present me books I already brought then about it presenting me recommendation that might fit my taste, but other people might see that different. Again no clear yes or no answer.
Point 4) is a tricky one. In theory total surveillance can be a good thing, even if it doesn't stop the terrorist from planting a bomb, it is a very helpful tool in catching them afterwards so that they don't plant a second one. The problem here is it won't only be used for catching terrorist. Sooner or later politicians might get creative with the surveillance tools they have at hand. You drove to fast on a highway? Now they can catch you automatically. You visited PirateBay? Lets tell RIAA and let them sue you. You talked about drugs? Time to raid your home, maybe they'll find some to put you in the jail. You stepped over some other tiny unimportant law that you didn't even Know about? Now they can catch you at any moment. In short total surveillance gives the government absolute power, in theory it can be used for good, but in practice all governments are corrupt and more power would corrupt them even more. You really don't want your government to have that much power.
They all provide verifiably-secure authentication... Verifiable security sure, but not practical security. I very much doubt that anybody would notices a wrong SSL certificate, they click 'ok' and continue with whatever they where about to do. The only practical security of HTTPS is that you get end-to-end encryption, but I wouldn't believe for a second that it would have any practical benefit to stop man-in-the-middle attacks. Maybe when you use a seperate client that would actively block anything with a suspicious certificate, but with a normal browser where overriding the certificate warning is just a click away, not a chance.
Doesn't really look scary at all. For one thing it is obviously pure fantasy, but more importantly loss of privacy here simply means you get better service. You call pizza place and they instantly now your address? That isn't scary, that it is extremely convenient.
The point is that many people dismiss video games as art because they are 'games'. They think of soccer and chess and say, "Hey, those aren't art and video games are not that different, so they aren't art either.", but they completly miss that not all video games are like chess or soccer. Some of course have similar rules, you fight against and opponent and win or lose, but most games are very different. An text adventure is much closer to a book then it is to chess or soccer, it tells a story just like a book and depending on the game it might be almost as linear as a book. Books can be art, so why shouldn't video games when they aren't all that different?
I think the thing to keep in mind is that there isn't just one type of video games. Video games are by far the most flexible medium of all. Take a text adventure with easy puzzles and a linear story and you have something that is very similar to a book, take some 3D game with heavy focus on cutscenes and you have something that is very similar to a movie and you can even completly move away from books and movies and do a game like Tetris, which is something completly different again. You can also create interactive worlds that don't have any fixed narrative at all, but which turn the player into the story creator or explorer.
Video games simply can be so many different things that there really is no limit in what they can do. They can be as linear or as flexible as you want them or as playful as you want them. They can be a toy or a teaching tool or both or something completly different. They can even be a social meeting place.
Whose law? US law or German law, but there aren't many countries that will allow you to sell porn to minors.
Besides, this already exists (the ratings) The point isn't really the rating/whitelisting, but establishing that the Internet isn't for kids. We have movie ratings and game ratings for a reason, while the Internet really isn't really much regulated at all, and while that is a "Good Thing"[tm] it causes constant demands that search engines should filter or provider should filter or things like that which all target to make the Internet 'child save', which however would just be an illusion. People have to accept that the Internet is full of tons of nasty things and the only way to fix that is to not let your kids unsupervised and/or uneducated into the raw net, because you simply can't fix the net itself. If one wants to let kids on the net unsupervised and still keep them away from the nasty stuff blacklisting everything and then just whitelisting a few sites is the only way to go.
but I will point out that the promise that you could directly view the source of any XO activity directly on the XO itself does not appear to be realized, There is a Develop activity in development that should handle the task, but its not finished and not in the stable builds. Just installing your favorite text editor via yum and using that will however work.
Currently many things in the XO's software are very unfinished and at this point in time "It's open source, so fix it" is really the best advise, since there simply is a lot that isn't done and when you want it fast you have to do it yourself. Its a little sad, but true.
Anyway, for eBook reading I have hacked together a little eBook reader of my own, its far from being finished and only good for viewing images, so one has to convert things first (pdfimages, pdftopnm, etc.), but once done is works nicely for reading.
When it comes to plain text reading I also hacked together a few scripts to make them more viewable with the HTML browser, i.e. split them up, convert to HTML, add a TOC and such. All rather hacky and not really end-user ready, but it works with a little extra effort.
Last not least I would strongly recommend to install Opera, it has much more features then the rather unfinished Browse activity, which can't even handle bookmarks properly.
What if I don't want to submit my Web site to be rated? One simple fix for that would be to let the page administrator handle the rating themselves. If the admin knowingly makes porn available to minors you just punish him by law. Unless I am mistaken it is already illegal to sell porn to minors, just handle this in a similar manner.
Why should I have to be blacklisted because I refuse to be evaluated? You wouldn't be blacklisted, there wouldn't be a blacklist in the first place, there would be a whitelist and only that. If you want to make your page available for children you would have to figure out how to get on that whitelist. If you don't care about children you just don't do anything, since for adults nothing would change, just for children who access the internet via some filtered proxy thing.
If you have a forum where everybody could post, you just don't mark that as 'for children'.
but an opt-in filter approach is sure to fail. Quite the opposite, it is the only approach that would work. It of course would also mean to basically cut of the kids from the internet, but I don't consider that such a bad thing, since it is the only way to make sure that the Internet won't be filtered for adults. Currently we try to make the Internet work for both kids and adult at the same time, which however just can't work without restricting the adults. It of course can neither work to protect the kids. So we end up with crap like age-gates before every movie or game trailer, but hardcore porn is still just a click away for every child.
I think it should be clearly established that the Internet is not for kids and adults only and we should end the discussion of how search engines can filter themselves right there. Than of course we can discuss on how to open it up a little bit for children again, but if you really want an effective filter blacklisting is never going to work with the Internet, since you will never catch all the bad sites.
And probably even more important: A passenger is in your car and knows what is happening, while somebody on the phone is not and has no clue. A passenger is much more likely to not distract you when the situation requires your attention, while somebody on the phone will just keep on talking, no matter what kind of situation you are currently in.
How about the other way around? Add a meta tag for stuff that isn't porn. Pages that are ok for children can be unlocked and the rest be easily blocked. This would be basically the same like most other rating works, when you have a game that isn't ESRB, USK, PEGI or whatever rated it is handled the same as an age-18/AO title, it doesn't go into the shops, it doesn't even get released for a console.
There simply is zero hope to ever get everybody to mark their 'bad' content, but there is a good chance that some people will mark their 'good' content.
How exactly does the consumer benefit from competing standards? Blu-Ray and HD-DVD were in terms of user-visible features pretty much identical and neither of them had really any innovation (like DVD, but "bigger") and more importantly neither can really innovate once released, because it has to remain compatible to the already released players.
Consumer benefits from competing products, those however can only compete when you have one standard that they can follow, else you end up with look-in to a specific format and that is the thing that slows down the progress.
The OLPC laptops are not meant to work in isolation, they are meant to be used in combination with a school server that handles extra content and backup.
The thumbstick is just a smaller version of the joystick. Only partly, the "newer" joysticks (i.e. everything after Sidewinder 3D Pro) had three axes instead of just two, one of them was used for rudder and used by rotating the stick around the Z-axis. Also you had a thrust lever that provided you with absolute control, i.e. you move it into a position and it stays there and doesn't flip back like a thumbstick.
That aside however the main difference is in their use, in PC flightsims you used to control the plane, in current day plane-games however you don't control the plane, but only your aim, the plane automatically follows wherever you aim at.
There weren't any gamepads on the C64 or Amiga, that was all joysticks. Even the PC started with only joysticks, only after the Gravis Game Pad was released you saw some gamepads on the PC.
but if you want to know what the best game in the history of console gaming is, odds are its on NES. Actually I would very much doubt that. Other then MarioBros3 there really isn't much on the NES that can compete with later games on the SNES. A Zelda3 beats a Zelda1 in almost every aspect, FF3/6 beats FF1 and its the same with most other games. The only reason why MarioBros3 can hold up is because it was a very late game on the NES and could thus make the most of the available hardware and is aside from lack of more colorful sprites is mostly equivalent to SNES games (multi-dimensional scrolling, worldmap, etc.).
It gets even more obvious when looking at the Atari2600. How many games do people still play from that machine? I couldn't name one. Maybe some play it for nostalgia, but you will have a hard time to find people playing it today just for the fun. The games on that machine simply have been superseded, there are better version around these days thanks to improved hardware.
That of course doesn't mean that graphics should dominate things, but one really shouldn't underestimate the influence hardware has, even for simple games.
Where are the great graphics in Tetris, in Pac Man, and others. Which version of PacMan do you prefer, the arcade one or the Atari2600 port? Graphics do make better games. Graphics alone however are not enough to carry a game alone, but they do improve games, sometimes a lot. When you look back at the great games of the past you will quickly realize that almost all of them had great graphics for their time. And even Tetris can be improved with better graphics, a simple look at more modern versions like the DS one or TGM should quickly show that or if that isn't enough have a look at Luminess.
Configure the screen in Ubuntu Linux is rather straightforward That dialog is straight forward, but it is also extremely limited in what it can do. When you want to fine tune stuff you still have to go down to 'vi/etc/X11/xorg.conf'.
I've given a dozen distros and flavors of Linux a try on the desktop... This is part of your problem, you try to fix the problem by switching to another distro instead of trying to fix the actual problem itself. This leads to lots of frustration and wasted time. I don't blame you, since xorg.conf is indeed a horrible horrible mess and editing Modelines is nothing short of black magic, but simply sticking to a distro (preferably Ubuntu due to its huge community and openness) and attacking the problem from there is a much better way to get the thing fixed then hoping that yet another distro and reinstall will help in any way. Linux isn't Windows and just doing a reinstall often does pretty much nothing to fix your problem.
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One thing is rather clear to me: We won't run out of IPv4 addresses anytime soon, instead the price will increase more and more and thus people will end up behind ISP enforced NATs, because IPs are to expensive for the average consumer. This is after all already the case, at least in part, static IPs are a premium service, not something you get for free from most ISPs.
So how to fix this? How about some good old government regulation? If you want to provide a "Internet service", you have to provide IPv6 or you can't call it "Internet". With a little force it shouldn't take all that long till the switch to IPv6 is done. But unless that happens the rarity of IPv4 addresses will simply be seen as a nice way to make money, instead of a problem that needs to be fixed.
That solution would of course still have its problems, but we really have to move away from sticking half the population with one leg into the jail.
I think its a much bigger issue that all those people sending patches will be ignored, since there isn't really a standard way in most version tracking systems to keep track of the patch submitter instead of those that actually commit it into the repository.
The Windows API is available on Linux thanks to Wine,the MacOSX API isn't available on Linux. That tiny bit of POSIX layer that Linux and MacOSX share helps you very little when you want to port a GUI application, since the GUI APIs are completly different on MacOSX and Linux. The only reason why Linux -> MacOSX porting is easy is because MacOSX can run X11 applications, just like Linux, but all native MacOSX tools don't use X11.
The Xbox360 doesn't have a HD-DVD drive it has a normal old DVD drive. The HD-DVD is an extra thing that you have to buy and place next to your XBox360, Microsoft will simply release a BluRay extension drive. For games it doesn't matter, since neither is used in games.
And then they will answer "So, what?". Maybe they even willingly published that information themselves, all those social network sides are after all build exactly for that.
I think it is much more important to first get a clearly what the heck you want to protect them from:
1) publishing private information of you doing things your peers should not know about might get you into trouble with your peers, parents, school or workplace
2) publishing creditcard information, SSN and stuff might make you an easy target for criminals
3) lettings shops keep records of what you buy might create targeted advertisment
4) allowing the government to create large databases of private information makes you an easy target for a corrupt goverment
Point 1) depends heavily on what you are doing, if you have some interesting hobby you might not care at all if somebody finds out about it. If you want to apply for a job in a bank on the other side you might not want them to see pictures of you drunk at a party. It simply depends on the individual on how to handle this and there really isn't a clear "do" or "don't" guideline.
Point 2) is rather clear, there is no benefit for you from publishing those information, so you should do whatever you can to keep them secret. Privacy here is important.
Point 3) is a matter of convenience, targeted advertisment can be a good thing or a bad thing. I am personally more annoyed by Amazon to present me books I already brought then about it presenting me recommendation that might fit my taste, but other people might see that different. Again no clear yes or no answer.
Point 4) is a tricky one. In theory total surveillance can be a good thing, even if it doesn't stop the terrorist from planting a bomb, it is a very helpful tool in catching them afterwards so that they don't plant a second one. The problem here is it won't only be used for catching terrorist. Sooner or later politicians might get creative with the surveillance tools they have at hand. You drove to fast on a highway? Now they can catch you automatically. You visited PirateBay? Lets tell RIAA and let them sue you. You talked about drugs? Time to raid your home, maybe they'll find some to put you in the jail. You stepped over some other tiny unimportant law that you didn't even Know about? Now they can catch you at any moment. In short total surveillance gives the government absolute power, in theory it can be used for good, but in practice all governments are corrupt and more power would corrupt them even more. You really don't want your government to have that much power.
Doesn't really look scary at all. For one thing it is obviously pure fantasy, but more importantly loss of privacy here simply means you get better service. You call pizza place and they instantly now your address? That isn't scary, that it is extremely convenient.
The point is that many people dismiss video games as art because they are 'games'. They think of soccer and chess and say, "Hey, those aren't art and video games are not that different, so they aren't art either.", but they completly miss that not all video games are like chess or soccer. Some of course have similar rules, you fight against and opponent and win or lose, but most games are very different. An text adventure is much closer to a book then it is to chess or soccer, it tells a story just like a book and depending on the game it might be almost as linear as a book. Books can be art, so why shouldn't video games when they aren't all that different?
I think the thing to keep in mind is that there isn't just one type of video games. Video games are by far the most flexible medium of all. Take a text adventure with easy puzzles and a linear story and you have something that is very similar to a book, take some 3D game with heavy focus on cutscenes and you have something that is very similar to a movie and you can even completly move away from books and movies and do a game like Tetris, which is something completly different again. You can also create interactive worlds that don't have any fixed narrative at all, but which turn the player into the story creator or explorer.
Video games simply can be so many different things that there really is no limit in what they can do. They can be as linear or as flexible as you want them or as playful as you want them. They can be a toy or a teaching tool or both or something completly different. They can even be a social meeting place.
Currently many things in the XO's software are very unfinished and at this point in time "It's open source, so fix it" is really the best advise, since there simply is a lot that isn't done and when you want it fast you have to do it yourself. Its a little sad, but true.
Anyway, for eBook reading I have hacked together a little eBook reader of my own, its far from being finished and only good for viewing images, so one has to convert things first (pdfimages, pdftopnm, etc.), but once done is works nicely for reading.
When it comes to plain text reading I also hacked together a few scripts to make them more viewable with the HTML browser, i.e. split them up, convert to HTML, add a TOC and such. All rather hacky and not really end-user ready, but it works with a little extra effort.
Last not least I would strongly recommend to install Opera, it has much more features then the rather unfinished Browse activity, which can't even handle bookmarks properly.
If you have a forum where everybody could post, you just don't mark that as 'for children'.
I think it should be clearly established that the Internet is not for kids and adults only and we should end the discussion of how search engines can filter themselves right there. Than of course we can discuss on how to open it up a little bit for children again, but if you really want an effective filter blacklisting is never going to work with the Internet, since you will never catch all the bad sites.
And probably even more important: A passenger is in your car and knows what is happening, while somebody on the phone is not and has no clue. A passenger is much more likely to not distract you when the situation requires your attention, while somebody on the phone will just keep on talking, no matter what kind of situation you are currently in.
How about the other way around? Add a meta tag for stuff that isn't porn. Pages that are ok for children can be unlocked and the rest be easily blocked. This would be basically the same like most other rating works, when you have a game that isn't ESRB, USK, PEGI or whatever rated it is handled the same as an age-18/AO title, it doesn't go into the shops, it doesn't even get released for a console.
There simply is zero hope to ever get everybody to mark their 'bad' content, but there is a good chance that some people will mark their 'good' content.
How exactly does the consumer benefit from competing standards? Blu-Ray and HD-DVD were in terms of user-visible features pretty much identical and neither of them had really any innovation (like DVD, but "bigger") and more importantly neither can really innovate once released, because it has to remain compatible to the already released players.
Consumer benefits from competing products, those however can only compete when you have one standard that they can follow, else you end up with look-in to a specific format and that is the thing that slows down the progress.
The OLPC laptops are not meant to work in isolation, they are meant to be used in combination with a school server that handles extra content and backup.
That aside however the main difference is in their use, in PC flightsims you used to control the plane, in current day plane-games however you don't control the plane, but only your aim, the plane automatically follows wherever you aim at.
There weren't any gamepads on the C64 or Amiga, that was all joysticks. Even the PC started with only joysticks, only after the Gravis Game Pad was released you saw some gamepads on the PC.
It gets even more obvious when looking at the Atari2600. How many games do people still play from that machine? I couldn't name one. Maybe some play it for nostalgia, but you will have a hard time to find people playing it today just for the fun. The games on that machine simply have been superseded, there are better version around these days thanks to improved hardware.
That of course doesn't mean that graphics should dominate things, but one really shouldn't underestimate the influence hardware has, even for simple games.