Then you click a button and TrustRank goes away; simple as that.
Or you could use Google Local and search for Fish (which probably would continue to use the PageRank system, since it's not significantly Locale effected), or maybe even Froogle.
The biggest part of it all is, the whole system is OPT IN. Google isn't likely to change much in it's classical operation, just expand it for those users who want more.
And you've basically said exactly what I've said, except with your last line;
I don't think trustrank will always return certain sites first just because they themselves are trusted, that would be censorship and it would make the google search less accurate.
I, on the other hand, would believe they would move certain results up the list. But I think you'd have to be searching through the TrustRank interface, or simply move a radiobutton indicating that you want to see the more relevant results first.
To be implementation specific; it'd probably end up like Google putting little stars next to the link to indicate that the link was supported by TrustRank, maybe even highlighting the text gold or something. I then think that you could click a radio button turning off the other results (noise, if you want to think of it that way), returning only the TrustRank results.
It'll be interesting to see.
Re:Potential abuse?
on
Google TrustRank
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
With Google's "portal system" they're developing, the trust comes from within; the company trusts its users because they are clicking into an agreement of terms. That being said, hacks that would make this new TrustRank unreliable would probably just lead to the termination of services of the account.
This to me keys that Google's trying to become a more involved company; instead of just sitting back, caching and searching the internet, they are now trying to serve you best and give you the results you are looking for. I would imagine with TrustRank, you will see a little star or something near a link on Google's home page, and the star would indicate if it is something in your field that you would be looking for. For example, if you were a Biologist and searched for a certain kind of fish, say "Blue Tuna", it would put stars next to sites with the fish's breeding habits, etc., but if you were a general consumer, it would provide links to the local fishery.
The internet is an extremely powerful tool, and search engines have simply evolved to the point that they are now "dumb technology". Without more user invervention (and not simply by throwing in more keywords and praying), they will continue to be as they are now. Once the company better knows what we'll be looking for, they can better serve us. And that's all I see this new tech as being.
How is this different from applying a weighting to PageRank?
Will the owners of the pages / sites deemed to fall within the set of trusted seed sites get any money for all their hard work (i.e. hand-maintaining pages of links)?
Lemme give it a try;
It's probably exactly giving a weight to PageRank, but the question is "Where will the weight be applied?", before the PageRank calculation (as in giving links a higher Rank because they are from a more legit website) or after the PageRank calculation (as in giving the results a higher Rank due to their coming from a more legit site). Both systems make a drastic change to PageRank, but one makes TrustRank dependent on PageRank, the other makes it independent. Who knows as of now.
As of where will the trust be issued, I believe it will go through the gateway system they're developing now with Gmail. As Gmail users are universally better trusted (they signed up, making them humans, or so I would contest), they would most likely form the "Voting committee" for TrustRank.
The fact is, we really don't have enough information as of yet to conclude whether this is a patch to PageRank, or a secondary system, running along side PageRank. One can assume it to be the former, but the latter could work just as well with Google's new corporate concept.
Imagine going into your Gmail account settings, adding a string of a few websites you deem to be "superior" or of better quality, and then let TrustRank grab the collection of all of these, note where the highest votes go, and use these as more "Trustworthy" search results. Or, using PageRank, it simply adds an option "Vote these sites higher because they are linked to the user defined site settings."
Both schema make Search Engine spamming more controllable by Google (Simply by terminating accounts linked to spammers), and could have an interesting effect. Can't wait to see what happens with TrustRank.
Re:more censorship, unimpressed
on
Google TrustRank
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Two points:
1) Any new system Google implements will run along the side of PageRank; they've invested too much to completely switch all of Google running to TrustRank. The system might even augment current PageRank by running an algorithm over the data that PageRank returns. We can only speculate as of now. But I can assure you that one will not replace the other, and there will probably be a way to use both systems in the future if you like. Hell, using your Gmail account, you may even be able to specifically tune PageRank, making certain pages more relevant to you appear higher in search results.
2) You have the option of not using Google. Yahoo is a completely independent search engine now.
Apparently you haven't seen this alpha. This is the Alpha that's being considered to move into Beta, and I can honestly say that absolutely nothing works; there are as many as four duplicate entries in a menu named "Properties" that each bring up something different, there are random stalls, freezes, crashes..
The fact is, Alphas in this shape shouldn't be released.
The problem is, most people who use Windows every day are actually using Windows every day. These users goals are to get their jobs done. What I proposed would be a company who spent their time poking holes in the software; deleting files, running sloppy code, doing whatever they can to crash the code, and then spending time to figure out why the code crashed.
Secondly, Microsoft wouldn't release their source code, so debugging would be pointless. But if you could generate a few thousand bug entries into a database a day, it at least gives their Software Engineers a point at which to look at, and to fix their software. Microsoft's code for the most part isn't the buggiest code in the world, but when they screw up, they tend to make it quite the doosey.
As for the hypothetical Company I proposed, they would also have tonnes of hardware. If the company existed, they'd be the perfect testing grounds for any new hardware, and I'm sure most companies would give this Company their hardware to test as well, of course under the right licencing and such. Set up everything in one giant room, and start running code over it. Make bad applications and run them just to see how they affect the stack. Dump random things into services and see if they break. Do everything in your power to mince the software, and when it breaks (there is no if here), be able to explain why it broke, and be able to reproduce it.
It's not that hard really, and the company could exist, if someone cared enough to bring it into existance. Sadly, I'm just a lowly Computer Engineering student, and at this point in time, I have other priorities;).
Ever looked at a new car? Well I just so happened to be in the market for one, and let's just say the amount of plastic used to build a car nowadays is astounding to me. Where I live (Louisville Ky), I've seen far too many cars with broken plastic parts all over town to care to buy one.
Taking that idea to software, I can only imagine what I'd get if I bought from a company that didn't care such as Microsoft. My friend Paul is currently "testing" a Longhorn alpha and it's quite apparent to me that just from the quality of that alpha, the finished product won't be good. Too many coders in a hurry to lay the groundwork for too many different ideas, meanwhile sacrificing the goodbits of the operating system.
The world needs more Software Engineers; people who will actually sit down and design the damned software beforeandafter it's written. Yes it takes more time, but it's time well spent. Else you get comments like the few I've been working with this past month: //This code was written by Mike ******* /*-NOTE: Mike was terminated; don't modify this code!!! */
Well you're right about what you were saying, those words would arbit a good deal of flames. But everything has its place and there's a place for everything. Lemme explain.
Clockspeed is the easiest race, if you want to think of the CPU industry as a continuous race. All you have to do to crank out a faster CPU is continually shrink the die (because smaller gates flip faster), and make sure that everything is arranged neatly on the chip. When you hit thermal walls like we are now, it's simply time to reduce the voltage, and shrink the die again.
The only problem is, Intel's flagship for doing this now, happens to be one with a lot of baggage. The Netburst core design pretty much dictates there is to be at least two of everything, and both of them should be running all the time, especially if Hyperthreading is on. This effectively doubles your transistor count (though in reality it is less than that; there's only a single copy of bus administration, micro-op decode, etc). Keeping them on all of the time also helps jump the heat production.
But here's a truth; their CPU clock game could still be running if they would like it to. The Pentium-M is still running extremely cool. Shrink it to a 90 micron core, use SOI, strained silicon, more of their substrata magic, and a healthy dose of SpeedStep, and you could see a Pentium-M hitting 3.5GHz clockspeeds that would put both the Athlon 64 and the Pentium 4 to shame. Sadly, to build this processor is to admit defeat with the Netburst core, and Intel's being very stubborn.
On the other hand, I believe AMD's got some magic they haven't used yet up their sleeve. Though honestly I couldn't tell you what it is. There has to be a reason they aren't playing up the Turion more other than the fact it isn't scaling down as far as the Pentium-M can. I'm also surprised they're being so slow about ramping their clockspeeds, but this is probably just so their thermal profiles look superior to Intel's. A 3GHz Opteron could easily decimate a dual Xeon setup, but at the same time would probably produce just as much heat, and I think AMD would see that as a defeat.
Charge for the service, of course! I'm sure Microsoft or any other big software company wouldn't mind shelling out a nominal fee to have a company run a stress test on their software, just as long as the licencing constraints were all in place, and the firm could be deemed "secure". It's a hell of a lot better than beta testing if you can do it (insures you software doesn't leak as often), and it's only slightly more costly, but in the end, if you product contains fewer bugs, that's less time you have to pay your developers to fix them, and that time saved is money saved.
Virtual machines can help with this; running the kernel in a sandbox to get an actual snapshot of the kernel in action. But at the same time, the kernel's going to be running, and userland/kernel-land interaction will cause plenty of bugs to crop up and show themselves. But you are right; it's hard to poke at a kernel to see what's broken, especially when some code paths are very hard to follow and others are almost never used on certain systems.
Long answer; kinda. You can use core dumps and system logs to interpret what's going on, but you can never really know for sure. Besides, the kind of errors that are in the kernel are the kinds of errors that really don't return error codes; they're the kind that crash the computer and make you reboot.
Microsoft's method is for some of the higher up software, and so is Apple's. If there's a bug in the kernel it's very unlikely that their code will catch it. Or at least that's been my experience.
If the problem is that Linux is so buggy, we just need to run it on a bunch more machines, and start randomly poking it as hard as we can until we break something. Once we've broken it, do it again to make sure it's not hardware, and then go to work fixing it. Good old brute force repairs.
I'm really surprised no company really has used this as a business model.
I think it'd be awesome to run a software debugging/testing firm, where basically you have a bunch of computers and a bunch of users come in and try their best to break the software. Cheap labor and a good variety in machines, and you could quite quickly clean up even some of the nastiest code.
Furthermore, with Microsoft being a convicted monopolist, (ignore the weak googlebombing...) wouldn't the SEC have to look into the merger first? I mean how fair would it be for Microsoft to once again have a monopoly on any technology?
I think the SEC would see that Flash has really no rival technology at the moment, and that it is a software monopoly simply out of caring; No company has cared to implement anything like it, even though the technology and standards exist to rival it. Microsoft owning it would be yet another way they could use their economic position to hose competition (kinda like how Microsoft poisoned Java).
They don't need to break the encryption; they do the same thing they're doing now. Make a client, connect it to the network and start distributing files. When people get them, they snag their IP address and they're doomed.
Please tell me it is an encrypted P2P network. A legal application of P2P technology concealing the participants is sorely needed to finally stop the bullshit arguments that a) only criminals encrypt and b) P2P is only used for illegal purposes.
The fact is, this is more likely to bolster their arguments.
They have all the money in the entire world to throw at legal arguments, whereas the people they'd be attacking have little to no money at all to defend themselves with. At this point, they're the 500-lb gorilla, and Congress does their bidding.
While the battle still continues to prove that P2P has uses outside of sharing copyrighted content, and we have made small victories, we still have a long, hard road to hoe.
On the flipside, I think this should have an encryption engine as well. It'd be really easy for the RIAA to argue its misuse, but in the meantime it'd stop the RIAA's oppressive lawsuits, and eventually when a defense is designed that will stand up to the RIAA in court, we will have won.
For some reason that gave me the picture in my head of dozens of 5 petalled flowers, each petal being made of a single colored iMac. You could have a technicolor flower patch that can process on the fly!!
I'd hate to be the bee to have to pollinate those though..
The largest open source project ever seems to be working fine; Linux itself.
Just because it is one body doesn't mean that it can't have sub-bodies. Compare with the Linux kernel; broken down into archetectures.
Now onto the bitch of the subject. X is huge. So are KDE and GNOME. My proposal would be to integrate X and GTK/Qt (which is what I should have said in the first place, my thinking/typing skills have been on the fritz today, and what I typed earlier was before my 1:00 class, so undoubtedly it was time compressed). This would require an entire rework of the X protocol most likely, which is something we as a community should think about.
My entire argument comes down to this; X is old. All code needs to die sometime, and X is a perfect candidate for being put out to pasture, and a good teaching example on how a windowing system can work, due to its simplicity. But we're in a world now with needs beyond what X can deliver, and we're at a point in which we're still dragging it along. Meanwhile Mac OS X has managed to implement an entire drawing engine, add nice hardware accelleration features (Quartz Extreme), make them useful (Exposé), and add to their usability once again (Dashboard). Windows "Avalon" (if it ever gets done) will add to the mix SVG interface definitions (I wouldn't doubt if Apple doesn't come out first with SVG-window rendering capabilities).
Lastly, we need to do something we really haven't done with anything up to now (well, Mozilla and GNOME/KDE excluded; they've been really good at this in the past). We need to _design_ and _engineer_ the software, not just code it. Of course, engineers expect to be paid (even I have came to this conclusion after my last project, Charity), which is another reason open source software isn't innovating as much as we should hope.
2.4 was the only kernel I've been able to use for quite a while. 2.6 seems not to like my hardware *shrug*.
As for the rest being gibberish, why?
Take a look around at other Windowing systems on other operating systems, and tell me what we can do. I simply present the three ideas: Move your Windowing System, Rendering subsystem, and Window Manager into one software unit for managability, code reduction and speed. Design a wrapper to use ReactOS/Windows drivers under X to support better drawing. Lose the whole flamewar about which is better between GNOME and KDE (we should be working towards this anyway).
Re:Why isn't this already out?
on
Next Generation X11
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Integrating Gnome or KDE in X???
Just where do you live? Insane planet? X is underlaying layer for desktops not desktop it self.
And that's a reason I think it is broken. Most current desktop operating systems have realized that the underpinning technologies for running the Graphical User Interface are just as important as the overpinnings that make it look good, and make it useful. The "middlepinnings" and the "sub-underpinnings" like OpenGL and transparency/image blurring/antialiasing/supersampling in Linux are other examples of screw ups; where everything is implemented as seperate projects, they are all going off in different directions, each leaving each other behind. If there were a central coordinating force, they'd be working together, and getting somewhere.
Again, integrating Ati and Nvidia drivers in X? People do use other cards you know. You can't make X specific for those cards, and say screw others.
I said nothing of this? I just said that X needed better drivers, and maybe a way to do this is to wrap the Windows drivers. Besides, these are the two largest graphic card companies, and other graphic card companies have already released not only specs, but open source drivers, and it was announced here. I'm too lazy to do a search and provide links, as I'm already late for class at the moment.
What's next that you hope? Integrating X with kernel and CPU?
Hell, Windows integrated their GUI into the Kernel ages ago. Mac OS X uses their graphical environment as a kernel plugin. It's a tried and tested approach, but if you are seeking my opinion, I believe it to be flawed, and that X is doing the right thing in staying out of Kernel matters.
As for not being responsivene, either you screwed with settings, or you use some partialy supported video card.
I have a Radeon 9200, 7000 and an NVidia TNT2. Sadly, the TNT2 proved to be most usable under Linux, but still performed better under Windows. As for ATi, I've yet to get either video card working.
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Then you click a button and TrustRank goes away; simple as that.
Or you could use Google Local and search for Fish (which probably would continue to use the PageRank system, since it's not significantly Locale effected), or maybe even Froogle.
The biggest part of it all is, the whole system is OPT IN. Google isn't likely to change much in it's classical operation, just expand it for those users who want more.
And you've basically said exactly what I've said, except with your last line;
I don't think trustrank will always return certain sites first just because they themselves are trusted, that would be censorship and it would make the google search less accurate.
I, on the other hand, would believe they would move certain results up the list. But I think you'd have to be searching through the TrustRank interface, or simply move a radiobutton indicating that you want to see the more relevant results first.
To be implementation specific; it'd probably end up like Google putting little stars next to the link to indicate that the link was supported by TrustRank, maybe even highlighting the text gold or something. I then think that you could click a radio button turning off the other results (noise, if you want to think of it that way), returning only the TrustRank results.
It'll be interesting to see.
With Google's "portal system" they're developing, the trust comes from within; the company trusts its users because they are clicking into an agreement of terms. That being said, hacks that would make this new TrustRank unreliable would probably just lead to the termination of services of the account.
This to me keys that Google's trying to become a more involved company; instead of just sitting back, caching and searching the internet, they are now trying to serve you best and give you the results you are looking for. I would imagine with TrustRank, you will see a little star or something near a link on Google's home page, and the star would indicate if it is something in your field that you would be looking for. For example, if you were a Biologist and searched for a certain kind of fish, say "Blue Tuna", it would put stars next to sites with the fish's breeding habits, etc., but if you were a general consumer, it would provide links to the local fishery.
The internet is an extremely powerful tool, and search engines have simply evolved to the point that they are now "dumb technology". Without more user invervention (and not simply by throwing in more keywords and praying), they will continue to be as they are now. Once the company better knows what we'll be looking for, they can better serve us. And that's all I see this new tech as being.
How is this different from applying a weighting to PageRank? Will the owners of the pages / sites deemed to fall within the set of trusted seed sites get any money for all their hard work (i.e. hand-maintaining pages of links)?
Lemme give it a try;
It's probably exactly giving a weight to PageRank, but the question is "Where will the weight be applied?", before the PageRank calculation (as in giving links a higher Rank because they are from a more legit website) or after the PageRank calculation (as in giving the results a higher Rank due to their coming from a more legit site). Both systems make a drastic change to PageRank, but one makes TrustRank dependent on PageRank, the other makes it independent. Who knows as of now.
As of where will the trust be issued, I believe it will go through the gateway system they're developing now with Gmail. As Gmail users are universally better trusted (they signed up, making them humans, or so I would contest), they would most likely form the "Voting committee" for TrustRank.
The fact is, we really don't have enough information as of yet to conclude whether this is a patch to PageRank, or a secondary system, running along side PageRank. One can assume it to be the former, but the latter could work just as well with Google's new corporate concept.
Imagine going into your Gmail account settings, adding a string of a few websites you deem to be "superior" or of better quality, and then let TrustRank grab the collection of all of these, note where the highest votes go, and use these as more "Trustworthy" search results. Or, using PageRank, it simply adds an option "Vote these sites higher because they are linked to the user defined site settings."
Both schema make Search Engine spamming more controllable by Google (Simply by terminating accounts linked to spammers), and could have an interesting effect. Can't wait to see what happens with TrustRank.
Two points: 1) Any new system Google implements will run along the side of PageRank; they've invested too much to completely switch all of Google running to TrustRank. The system might even augment current PageRank by running an algorithm over the data that PageRank returns. We can only speculate as of now. But I can assure you that one will not replace the other, and there will probably be a way to use both systems in the future if you like. Hell, using your Gmail account, you may even be able to specifically tune PageRank, making certain pages more relevant to you appear higher in search results.
2) You have the option of not using Google. Yahoo is a completely independent search engine now.
Uhh.. call me wrong, but wouldn't that suggest IE, not require it?
I for one welcome our new IPv6 overlords.
More obscure internet addresses for everyone!
..Every week is TV Turnoff week for me; I come in and turn off the roommate's TV.
Apparently you haven't seen this alpha. This is the Alpha that's being considered to move into Beta, and I can honestly say that absolutely nothing works; there are as many as four duplicate entries in a menu named "Properties" that each bring up something different, there are random stalls, freezes, crashes..
The fact is, Alphas in this shape shouldn't be released.
The problem is, most people who use Windows every day are actually using Windows every day. These users goals are to get their jobs done. What I proposed would be a company who spent their time poking holes in the software; deleting files, running sloppy code, doing whatever they can to crash the code, and then spending time to figure out why the code crashed.
;).
Secondly, Microsoft wouldn't release their source code, so debugging would be pointless. But if you could generate a few thousand bug entries into a database a day, it at least gives their Software Engineers a point at which to look at, and to fix their software. Microsoft's code for the most part isn't the buggiest code in the world, but when they screw up, they tend to make it quite the doosey.
As for the hypothetical Company I proposed, they would also have tonnes of hardware. If the company existed, they'd be the perfect testing grounds for any new hardware, and I'm sure most companies would give this Company their hardware to test as well, of course under the right licencing and such. Set up everything in one giant room, and start running code over it. Make bad applications and run them just to see how they affect the stack. Dump random things into services and see if they break. Do everything in your power to mince the software, and when it breaks (there is no if here), be able to explain why it broke, and be able to reproduce it.
It's not that hard really, and the company could exist, if someone cared enough to bring it into existance. Sadly, I'm just a lowly Computer Engineering student, and at this point in time, I have other priorities
Ever looked at a new car? Well I just so happened to be in the market for one, and let's just say the amount of plastic used to build a car nowadays is astounding to me. Where I live (Louisville Ky), I've seen far too many cars with broken plastic parts all over town to care to buy one.
//This code was written by Mike *******
/*-NOTE: Mike was terminated; don't modify this code!!! */
Taking that idea to software, I can only imagine what I'd get if I bought from a company that didn't care such as Microsoft. My friend Paul is currently "testing" a Longhorn alpha and it's quite apparent to me that just from the quality of that alpha, the finished product won't be good. Too many coders in a hurry to lay the groundwork for too many different ideas, meanwhile sacrificing the goodbits of the operating system.
The world needs more Software Engineers; people who will actually sit down and design the damned software before and after it's written. Yes it takes more time, but it's time well spent. Else you get comments like the few I've been working with this past month:
Well you're right about what you were saying, those words would arbit a good deal of flames. But everything has its place and there's a place for everything. Lemme explain.
Clockspeed is the easiest race, if you want to think of the CPU industry as a continuous race. All you have to do to crank out a faster CPU is continually shrink the die (because smaller gates flip faster), and make sure that everything is arranged neatly on the chip. When you hit thermal walls like we are now, it's simply time to reduce the voltage, and shrink the die again.
The only problem is, Intel's flagship for doing this now, happens to be one with a lot of baggage. The Netburst core design pretty much dictates there is to be at least two of everything, and both of them should be running all the time, especially if Hyperthreading is on. This effectively doubles your transistor count (though in reality it is less than that; there's only a single copy of bus administration, micro-op decode, etc). Keeping them on all of the time also helps jump the heat production.
But here's a truth; their CPU clock game could still be running if they would like it to. The Pentium-M is still running extremely cool. Shrink it to a 90 micron core, use SOI, strained silicon, more of their substrata magic, and a healthy dose of SpeedStep, and you could see a Pentium-M hitting 3.5GHz clockspeeds that would put both the Athlon 64 and the Pentium 4 to shame. Sadly, to build this processor is to admit defeat with the Netburst core, and Intel's being very stubborn.
On the other hand, I believe AMD's got some magic they haven't used yet up their sleeve. Though honestly I couldn't tell you what it is. There has to be a reason they aren't playing up the Turion more other than the fact it isn't scaling down as far as the Pentium-M can. I'm also surprised they're being so slow about ramping their clockspeeds, but this is probably just so their thermal profiles look superior to Intel's. A 3GHz Opteron could easily decimate a dual Xeon setup, but at the same time would probably produce just as much heat, and I think AMD would see that as a defeat.
Charge for the service, of course! I'm sure Microsoft or any other big software company wouldn't mind shelling out a nominal fee to have a company run a stress test on their software, just as long as the licencing constraints were all in place, and the firm could be deemed "secure". It's a hell of a lot better than beta testing if you can do it (insures you software doesn't leak as often), and it's only slightly more costly, but in the end, if you product contains fewer bugs, that's less time you have to pay your developers to fix them, and that time saved is money saved.
Virtual machines can help with this; running the kernel in a sandbox to get an actual snapshot of the kernel in action. But at the same time, the kernel's going to be running, and userland/kernel-land interaction will cause plenty of bugs to crop up and show themselves. But you are right; it's hard to poke at a kernel to see what's broken, especially when some code paths are very hard to follow and others are almost never used on certain systems.
Long answer; kinda. You can use core dumps and system logs to interpret what's going on, but you can never really know for sure. Besides, the kind of errors that are in the kernel are the kinds of errors that really don't return error codes; they're the kind that crash the computer and make you reboot.
Microsoft's method is for some of the higher up software, and so is Apple's. If there's a bug in the kernel it's very unlikely that their code will catch it. Or at least that's been my experience.
If the problem is that Linux is so buggy, we just need to run it on a bunch more machines, and start randomly poking it as hard as we can until we break something. Once we've broken it, do it again to make sure it's not hardware, and then go to work fixing it. Good old brute force repairs.
I'm really surprised no company really has used this as a business model.
I think it'd be awesome to run a software debugging/testing firm, where basically you have a bunch of computers and a bunch of users come in and try their best to break the software. Cheap labor and a good variety in machines, and you could quite quickly clean up even some of the nastiest code.
I know it's early, but do we really have to mod everything flamebait, even if it's hilarious??? Come on..
Furthermore, with Microsoft being a convicted monopolist, (ignore the weak googlebombing...) wouldn't the SEC have to look into the merger first? I mean how fair would it be for Microsoft to once again have a monopoly on any technology?
I think the SEC would see that Flash has really no rival technology at the moment, and that it is a software monopoly simply out of caring; No company has cared to implement anything like it, even though the technology and standards exist to rival it. Microsoft owning it would be yet another way they could use their economic position to hose competition (kinda like how Microsoft poisoned Java).
They don't need to break the encryption; they do the same thing they're doing now. Make a client, connect it to the network and start distributing files. When people get them, they snag their IP address and they're doomed.
Please tell me it is an encrypted P2P network. A legal application of P2P technology concealing the participants is sorely needed to finally stop the bullshit arguments that a) only criminals encrypt and b) P2P is only used for illegal purposes.
The fact is, this is more likely to bolster their arguments.
They have all the money in the entire world to throw at legal arguments, whereas the people they'd be attacking have little to no money at all to defend themselves with. At this point, they're the 500-lb gorilla, and Congress does their bidding.
While the battle still continues to prove that P2P has uses outside of sharing copyrighted content, and we have made small victories, we still have a long, hard road to hoe.
On the flipside, I think this should have an encryption engine as well. It'd be really easy for the RIAA to argue its misuse, but in the meantime it'd stop the RIAA's oppressive lawsuits, and eventually when a defense is designed that will stand up to the RIAA in court, we will have won.
For some reason that gave me the picture in my head of dozens of 5 petalled flowers, each petal being made of a single colored iMac. You could have a technicolor flower patch that can process on the fly!!
I'd hate to be the bee to have to pollinate those though..
The largest open source project ever seems to be working fine; Linux itself.
Just because it is one body doesn't mean that it can't have sub-bodies. Compare with the Linux kernel; broken down into archetectures.
Now onto the bitch of the subject. X is huge. So are KDE and GNOME. My proposal would be to integrate X and GTK/Qt (which is what I should have said in the first place, my thinking/typing skills have been on the fritz today, and what I typed earlier was before my 1:00 class, so undoubtedly it was time compressed). This would require an entire rework of the X protocol most likely, which is something we as a community should think about.
My entire argument comes down to this; X is old. All code needs to die sometime, and X is a perfect candidate for being put out to pasture, and a good teaching example on how a windowing system can work, due to its simplicity. But we're in a world now with needs beyond what X can deliver, and we're at a point in which we're still dragging it along. Meanwhile Mac OS X has managed to implement an entire drawing engine, add nice hardware accelleration features (Quartz Extreme), make them useful (Exposé), and add to their usability once again (Dashboard). Windows "Avalon" (if it ever gets done) will add to the mix SVG interface definitions (I wouldn't doubt if Apple doesn't come out first with SVG-window rendering capabilities).
Lastly, we need to do something we really haven't done with anything up to now (well, Mozilla and GNOME/KDE excluded; they've been really good at this in the past). We need to _design_ and _engineer_ the software, not just code it. Of course, engineers expect to be paid (even I have came to this conclusion after my last project, Charity), which is another reason open source software isn't innovating as much as we should hope.
2.4 was the only kernel I've been able to use for quite a while. 2.6 seems not to like my hardware *shrug*.
As for the rest being gibberish, why?
Take a look around at other Windowing systems on other operating systems, and tell me what we can do. I simply present the three ideas: Move your Windowing System, Rendering subsystem, and Window Manager into one software unit for managability, code reduction and speed. Design a wrapper to use ReactOS/Windows drivers under X to support better drawing. Lose the whole flamewar about which is better between GNOME and KDE (we should be working towards this anyway).
Integrating Gnome or KDE in X??? Just where do you live? Insane planet? X is underlaying layer for desktops not desktop it self.
And that's a reason I think it is broken. Most current desktop operating systems have realized that the underpinning technologies for running the Graphical User Interface are just as important as the overpinnings that make it look good, and make it useful. The "middlepinnings" and the "sub-underpinnings" like OpenGL and transparency/image blurring/antialiasing/supersampling in Linux are other examples of screw ups; where everything is implemented as seperate projects, they are all going off in different directions, each leaving each other behind. If there were a central coordinating force, they'd be working together, and getting somewhere.
Again, integrating Ati and Nvidia drivers in X? People do use other cards you know. You can't make X specific for those cards, and say screw others.
I said nothing of this? I just said that X needed better drivers, and maybe a way to do this is to wrap the Windows drivers. Besides, these are the two largest graphic card companies, and other graphic card companies have already released not only specs, but open source drivers, and it was announced here. I'm too lazy to do a search and provide links, as I'm already late for class at the moment.
What's next that you hope? Integrating X with kernel and CPU?
Hell, Windows integrated their GUI into the Kernel ages ago. Mac OS X uses their graphical environment as a kernel plugin. It's a tried and tested approach, but if you are seeking my opinion, I believe it to be flawed, and that X is doing the right thing in staying out of Kernel matters.
As for not being responsivene, either you screwed with settings, or you use some partialy supported video card. I have a Radeon 9200, 7000 and an NVidia TNT2. Sadly, the TNT2 proved to be most usable under Linux, but still performed better under Windows. As for ATi, I've yet to get either video card working.