On a school's network, educational and reserach users will always have the right of way over somebody who wants to download a video clip or game preview. Anything that takes up large ammounts of bandwidth for anything else can expect to be firewalled against.
A company a distribution method that is both smart and approved by the target audience?
Doesn't that violate some kind of business "decision making" law?
Nope, because what kind of PHB would turn down the chance to release content without having to pay for the bandwidth that's usually required to do so? It's a chance to get something that usually costs money for nothing...
Of course, ISPs aren't too keen on this idea. They're built around the idea that most mass-distributed content comes from server farms, and users download a lot more than they ever upload. So the idea of everybody trying to use their all of their potential upload speed at once kinda scares them...
Bit Torrent is of course going to produce a fragmented file on any FAT-based file system. The only way to not get a fragmented file is to write all of your data in sequence at that same time, and even then you have to hope that the free space you're writting to doesn't run into a used block.
Think of it this way... since Bit Torrent doesn't get the parts of file in sequence, even on a blank disk where there's nothing to get in the way, the client is still going to write the data to the disk in the order it was recieved, not the order it's supposed to be read back. By definition, you're going to get a fragmented file since it's going to be out of proper sequence. ScanDisk will have some work to do when you're done downloading, always.
I can't see why any college administrators would care much about fragmentation on a user's HD however unless their support desk is getting calls about that kind of non-network issue...
Most consumer services are asynchonus by design to prevent people from putting heavy-traffic servers of any kind on consumer bandwidth.
When you're a college student, your dormroom computer usually has the ability to push out five or six megabits of data per second onto the Internet presuming you can find an off-campus host that's able to keep up with that kind of traffic to be on the other end.
Yes, there is a "How dare you use the bandwidth we gave you access to?" factor to that... if everybody on campus ran servers the school's outbound bandwidth pipe would clog. So, they'd rather students not be filesharing anything even if it is all copyright cleared.
Bit Torrent's a lifesaver for companies that need help in distributing their content. Game downloads are a perfect example, as game publishers release huge files that everybody wants at the same moment. In order to have bandwidth that can burst up to that kind of speed, the costs would be huge. Bit Torrent is a way for fans who were lucky enough to get their copies first to help out the company by lending their most of their upstream bandwidth, which generally goes unused for the day to the company.
But universities still fell a bit awkward about this. See, in the university's opinion, a student's dormroom bandwidth isn't really their property, it's an educational tool. So, even though the copyright concern is waived off on this kind of P2P sharing, they've still got a problem with it.
When it comes down to it, a student's dormroom Internet conection leads to the big fat Internet pipe that is being paid for by the school, and in the case of a state school that's mostly government money. Every school has a rarely enforced clause in their terms of service for their Internet access that says its intended for educational use. There's defintely a clause that says that commercial use is strictly prohibited. Students can't run a a for-profit web hosting service out of their doomroom computers for example.
So, actually, the commerical embrace of Bit Torrent is going to clear up one complaint universities have about P2P, but it's going to drive them straight into another. Now, instead of hurting a company's copyrights, it's going to be used to help a for-profit company avoid costs. That's another thing that gives universities that "maybe we should block this..." feeling.
I think the main flaw in most OSS projects is that they don't have a financially motivated boss directing the development resources. Therefore, the developers persue the path that produces the best technology, but not always in a user-friendly or marketplace-friendly way like all commerical software has to be in order to sell copies.
Just consider Bill Gates as the PHB-in-chief. An OSS project needs to focus on what the users want to see, rather than what the programmers want to develop, in order to gain widespread distribution. A totally buggy and insecure program can still be sold to a user if it does the things the user wants it to do. Sure, the user should know better, but they don't, and that's why PHBs can be so stupid but connect with the marketplace so well...
Actually it would be a doubleminus good, not a doubleplus ungood. Where did you learn newspeak? And yes, I AM the thought police.
What is this "doubleminus" you newspeak of? There is no "minus" in newspeak to double. For someone in the thought police, we all think your boss is going to be very nonplussed to see you talking that way.
A law firm show might get a chance to visit all of those issues. One week a future medical malpractice case takes us to visit a new ER, another week they can deal with corperate dispute...
Let's face it, Minority Report had some great vision-of-future-tech bits with an absolutely lame story. Maybe there is something interesting in the daily civil lawsuit during that time frame...
Do ordinary Joe Public people really believe they are anonymous when browsing the web?
Yes they do. Just looks at how many people have used the "I didn't know it was illegal!" defense when accused by the RIAA/MPAA of being file-sharers...
No it doesn't, it says replacing it with an advertisement is prohibited. It's very specific. It sounds like a great law to me.
One word alone is rarely specific... and notice nobody bothered to define "advertisement" for the purposes of this law.
As much as the computer tried to predict conversations, there'd have to be a few situations where it gets one wrong. Could have been an interesting plot line to have somebody poorly named start getting communications not meant for them...
I remember a "Technical Manual" book that tried to explain the science behind Star Trek:TNG-era devices. A footnote in the section of the book about transporters revealed that the answer that the writers gave whenever asked "How do the Heisenberg Compensators work?" was always "Very well, thank you."
The interesting thing, however, is that those devices were too good to even be possible. How did the lapel button ever figure out that a communication "Picard to Crusher" would go to either the doctor or her son, since he dealt with both people on a daily basis... only a scriptwriter could route that correctly.
This is a nice try by a well intentioned legislator, but a state law will have very little effect on the operations of Internet companies not operating from their state. Let's face it, the United States has trouble geting its laws to regulate offshore casinos and offshore-based music download services.
If you don't like the laws of the jurisdiction you're setting up an Internet company, it's far too easy to set up shop in a more friendly jurisdiction. With this law being clearly written by somebody who isn't bothering to carve out a nice safe territory for targeted ads, Utah will basically lose any bit of the Internet content industry it has left to other states.
Yep... this is an interesting problem. The bill says (1) A person may not:...
(c) use a context based triggering mechanism to display an advertisement that partially or wholly covers or obscures paid avertising or other content on an Internet website in a way that interferes with a user's ability to view the Internet website.
That could be read to say program that removes any part of the website from the user's view and replaces it with either something else or even plain nothingness is prohibited. So many non-spyware user-friendly uses of technology could get caught in the crossfire...
People think a contract is always a written document, but that's not really the definition. A contract happens any time two or more people agree to make an exchange goods, services, and/or money... it's just that the writen document is a very good thing ot have in situations where proof of a contract is needed.
Nah, users will expect to be able to turn on all of the checkboxes and still have it work on their system. Some switches are best left behind the curtain, even at an interactive show.
Because your game would have to meet the Killer App threshhold... your application is so good it justify not just the purchase of itself but the hardware platform needed to run it. By being willing to run on low-end hardware, you don't have to drive the sales of hardware anymore, and your actual cost to the consumer goes all to you.
Slashdot Mirror
On a school's network, educational and reserach users will always have the right of way over somebody who wants to download a video clip or game preview. Anything that takes up large ammounts of bandwidth for anything else can expect to be firewalled against.
A company a distribution method that is both smart and approved by the target audience?
Doesn't that violate some kind of business "decision making" law?
Nope, because what kind of PHB would turn down the chance to release content without having to pay for the bandwidth that's usually required to do so? It's a chance to get something that usually costs money for nothing...
Of course, ISPs aren't too keen on this idea. They're built around the idea that most mass-distributed content comes from server farms, and users download a lot more than they ever upload. So the idea of everybody trying to use their all of their potential upload speed at once kinda scares them...
Bit Torrent is of course going to produce a fragmented file on any FAT-based file system. The only way to not get a fragmented file is to write all of your data in sequence at that same time, and even then you have to hope that the free space you're writting to doesn't run into a used block.
Think of it this way... since Bit Torrent doesn't get the parts of file in sequence, even on a blank disk where there's nothing to get in the way, the client is still going to write the data to the disk in the order it was recieved, not the order it's supposed to be read back. By definition, you're going to get a fragmented file since it's going to be out of proper sequence. ScanDisk will have some work to do when you're done downloading, always.
I can't see why any college administrators would care much about fragmentation on a user's HD however unless their support desk is getting calls about that kind of non-network issue...
Most consumer services are asynchonus by design to prevent people from putting heavy-traffic servers of any kind on consumer bandwidth.
When you're a college student, your dormroom computer usually has the ability to push out five or six megabits of data per second onto the Internet presuming you can find an off-campus host that's able to keep up with that kind of traffic to be on the other end.
Yes, there is a "How dare you use the bandwidth we gave you access to?" factor to that... if everybody on campus ran servers the school's outbound bandwidth pipe would clog. So, they'd rather students not be filesharing anything even if it is all copyright cleared.
Bit Torrent's a lifesaver for companies that need help in distributing their content. Game downloads are a perfect example, as game publishers release huge files that everybody wants at the same moment. In order to have bandwidth that can burst up to that kind of speed, the costs would be huge. Bit Torrent is a way for fans who were lucky enough to get their copies first to help out the company by lending their most of their upstream bandwidth, which generally goes unused for the day to the company.
But universities still fell a bit awkward about this. See, in the university's opinion, a student's dormroom bandwidth isn't really their property, it's an educational tool. So, even though the copyright concern is waived off on this kind of P2P sharing, they've still got a problem with it.
When it comes down to it, a student's dormroom Internet conection leads to the big fat Internet pipe that is being paid for by the school, and in the case of a state school that's mostly government money. Every school has a rarely enforced clause in their terms of service for their Internet access that says its intended for educational use. There's defintely a clause that says that commercial use is strictly prohibited. Students can't run a a for-profit web hosting service out of their doomroom computers for example.
So, actually, the commerical embrace of Bit Torrent is going to clear up one complaint universities have about P2P, but it's going to drive them straight into another. Now, instead of hurting a company's copyrights, it's going to be used to help a for-profit company avoid costs. That's another thing that gives universities that "maybe we should block this..." feeling.
I think the main flaw in most OSS projects is that they don't have a financially motivated boss directing the development resources. Therefore, the developers persue the path that produces the best technology, but not always in a user-friendly or marketplace-friendly way like all commerical software has to be in order to sell copies.
Just consider Bill Gates as the PHB-in-chief. An OSS project needs to focus on what the users want to see, rather than what the programmers want to develop, in order to gain widespread distribution. A totally buggy and insecure program can still be sold to a user if it does the things the user wants it to do. Sure, the user should know better, but they don't, and that's why PHBs can be so stupid but connect with the marketplace so well...
Actually it would be a doubleminus good, not a doubleplus ungood.
Where did you learn newspeak? And yes, I AM the thought police.
What is this "doubleminus" you newspeak of? There is no "minus" in newspeak to double. For someone in the thought police, we all think your boss is going to be very nonplussed to see you talking that way.
A law firm show might get a chance to visit all of those issues. One week a future medical malpractice case takes us to visit a new ER, another week they can deal with corperate dispute...
Let's face it, Minority Report had some great vision-of-future-tech bits with an absolutely lame story. Maybe there is something interesting in the daily civil lawsuit during that time frame...
Do ordinary Joe Public people really believe they are anonymous when browsing the web?
Yes they do. Just looks at how many people have used the "I didn't know it was illegal!" defense when accused by the RIAA/MPAA of being file-sharers...
Yet again, Canada is just a couple years behind the USA. We already know you can't be nameless online anymore...
Obviously they did zero research on this before they had their knee-jerk reaction.
No, they did bad research. This is like quoting a piece in The Onion as having come from "America's Finest News Soure" in a research paper.
Not everything on the Internet is true, and not everything that looks like research or news is really ture. There's a sucker born every minute...
Dihydrogen monooxide... two hidrogens, one oxygen... H2O... water.
No it doesn't, it says replacing it with an advertisement is prohibited. It's very specific. It sounds like a great law to me. One word alone is rarely specific... and notice nobody bothered to define "advertisement" for the purposes of this law.
As much as the computer tried to predict conversations, there'd have to be a few situations where it gets one wrong. Could have been an interesting plot line to have somebody poorly named start getting communications not meant for them...
I remember a "Technical Manual" book that tried to explain the science behind Star Trek:TNG-era devices. A footnote in the section of the book about transporters revealed that the answer that the writers gave whenever asked "How do the Heisenberg Compensators work?" was always "Very well, thank you."
The interesting thing, however, is that those devices were too good to even be possible. How did the lapel button ever figure out that a communication "Picard to Crusher" would go to either the doctor or her son, since he dealt with both people on a daily basis... only a scriptwriter could route that correctly.
How's develpment on the transporter coming?
This is a nice try by a well intentioned legislator, but a state law will have very little effect on the operations of Internet companies not operating from their state. Let's face it, the United States has trouble geting its laws to regulate offshore casinos and offshore-based music download services.
If you don't like the laws of the jurisdiction you're setting up an Internet company, it's far too easy to set up shop in a more friendly jurisdiction. With this law being clearly written by somebody who isn't bothering to carve out a nice safe territory for targeted ads, Utah will basically lose any bit of the Internet content industry it has left to other states.
Yep... this is an interesting problem. The bill says (1) A person may not:...
(c) use a context based triggering mechanism to display an advertisement that partially or wholly covers or obscures paid avertising or other content on an Internet website in a way that interferes with a user's ability to view the Internet website.
That could be read to say program that removes any part of the website from the user's view and replaces it with either something else or even plain nothingness is prohibited. So many non-spyware user-friendly uses of technology could get caught in the crossfire...
People think a contract is always a written document, but that's not really the definition. A contract happens any time two or more people agree to make an exchange goods, services, and/or money... it's just that the writen document is a very good thing ot have in situations where proof of a contract is needed.
Nah, users will expect to be able to turn on all of the checkboxes and still have it work on their system. Some switches are best left behind the curtain, even at an interactive show.
Because your game would have to meet the Killer App threshhold... your application is so good it justify not just the purchase of itself but the hardware platform needed to run it. By being willing to run on low-end hardware, you don't have to drive the sales of hardware anymore, and your actual cost to the consumer goes all to you.
Has anybody seen the minimum system req's for Duke Nukem Forever?
At which point, their friend will try to suggest the other friend needs to upgrade. :)