It really seems like you're talking out of your ass.
That's partly what I value most about Slashdot - the informed debate, the subtle use of logic, the marshalling of facts and stats to substantiate assertions or denials. Do you actually know anything about how farming works in the US? Do you know how much energy input every kernal of corn requires? I think not...
It really seems like you're talking out of your ass.
That's partly what I value most about Slashdot - the informed debate, the subtle use of logic, the marshalling of facts and stats to substantiate assertions or denials. Do you actually know anything about how farming works in the US? Do you know how much energy input every kernal of corn requires? I think not...
http://www.cedar.at/mailarchives/infoterra/2003/ms g02347.html
David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years... [US Farming] is an annual artificial catastrophe,
and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre
for a modem American farm. Iowa's
fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.
Less than 10% of the carbon content of plants is converted to coal, while the formation of oil and gas from plankton is less than 0.01% efficient... the fossil fuels burned in 1997 were ultimately derived from 400 years' worth of "primary production", as the organic material produced by photosynthesis is known.
The fossil fuels burned in 1997 were created from organic matter
containing 44 x 1018 g C, which is >400 times the net primary productivity (NPP) of the planet's
current biota. As stores of ancient solar energy decline, humans are likely to use an increasing share
of modern solar resources. I conservatively estimate that replacing the energy humans derive from
fossil fuels with energy from modern biomass would require 22% of terrestrial NPP, increasing the
human appropriation of this resource by ~50%.
The history of empires in the full flush of youth expanding because of population pressure and an excess of capital into marginal lands through extensive irrigation projects that eventually fail is as old as urbanism. Look up Sumeria or the Maya sometime. Or check this:
And I completely disagree that there's a fresh water shortage. Rainfall in the US has not decreased in the past decade
Rainfall rate is one small element in the hydrological cycle. The most critical part of fresh water supply is storage, and we have been draining the best storage reserves of all, aquifers, at an alarming rate. Obviously, you have not looked at the situation in India or Africa recently. Many aquifers there are drained almost past the point of possible extraction. In the US, the Olgalla aquifer is nearing the end of its usefulness. I forecast a radical drop in property prices within many of the parched interior states over the next generation or so.
Now, as for Israel & the West Bank, they don't get a whole lot of rainfall..mostly because it's a DESERT.
While it's true that they receive quite low levels of rainfall, those regions are better described as "arid mediterranean", rather similar to mid-south California. Given their high population densities, the decision by Israel to grab two-thirds of the scarce, available fresh water in the occupied territories for their colonies is bound to cause friction. But possibly more boneheaded is inducing Intel to operate enormous fabs there, consuming billions of gallons of water annually. And New Mexico!
rant on nuclear reactors for all the good it'll do ya
Also a non-renewable resource. Even assuming we move to lithium-catalysed fusion energy sources, there is only approximately as much lithium in the lithosphere as uranium.
The 1.5 metric tons of water doesn't disappear. It gets recycled in one way or another.
And how do you recycle that water? You need more inputs to do it properly, or you spend less and discharge it, soiling the water table or the ocean. You *do* know there is a fresh water shortage that will become chronic within a couple of decades. You want to know how people compete when there is not enough water? Take a look at Palestine and Israel - most of their disagreements are about the skewed rationing of the scarce water supply.
Producing advanced CMOS technology is an awfully dirty business, and much of our advanced technological base relies on the easy availability of stored solar energy as fossil fuels. As other posters have pointed out, every year even simple things like Agriculture burn several dozens or tens of dozens of years of stored solar energy. Annually I believe the total is around 400 years worth of solar input consumed per year. Obviously, things will have to change one day because the bank of solar energy is not infinite - as much as classical economists might like to think it is. Eventually your inputs disappear, or the cost to extract them is greater than potential energy yield so they are effectively worthless.
The Microdrive does need "AIR" to float the heads and typically above 10,000 ft the mass of the air is too low and the drive requires a pressurized environment similar to an aircraft or spacecraft. At high altitude the air bearings begin to loose support from the air molecules needed to provide the "air bearing" for the Negative Air Bearing Surface (NABS) design of the head. If this "air bearing" is removed or lowered (as is the case with low density air at high altitudes) the head damages the media and you could have loss of data... The OEM Functional specification defines the warranty range for operating altitude as 3,000 M or 9,000 ft (3ft/M). If the customer is mountain climbing with a GPS or digital camera above 9,000 ft the drive might have problems. (Mt Fuji ~ +13,000ft, Mt Raineer ~ +14,000 ft).
I'm reading what you posted and, unless you're a member of one of the classes here enumerated, then your defence is not explicit. Once again, it's an affirmative defence, not a right.
As for the "doctrine of first sale," I'm as interested as you are but that's not the topic of this discussion
Maybe you've forgot how this started, but I haven't. I stated that people who "bought" iTMS Product did not really "own" the Product, insofar as we usually establish ownership. One of those attributes being the doctrine of first sale. It was painful to establish this for OEM software, and you will probably still get your ass sued if you go around selling after-market OEM software. For iTMS Product, no such process has yet extended any meaningful ownership rights to this.
I don't like DRM, but it's a necessary evil. And Apple's DRM Fairplay has the best balance of consumer rights so far.
This is like being faced with a choice of death by the chair, or by guillotine. "Well at least the guillotine is painless!". Or being faced with two muggers - one will pummel you with a stick about the face until you die, while the other wants to kick you death while wearing soft slippers. Your choice.
Thanks for that tip, really. There is one thing you need to realize about the fair use doctrine as practiced in the US:
It is not a right, but in fact a defence. You do not enjoy a right to make copies, but if sued you can try to pleade "fair use" as an affirmative defence. It's up to you to prove that you were not infringing. This should be compared with the British-derived "fair dealing" enumerated rights of specific quantities of mechanical reproduction. US laws are far less strongly in favour of the defendant than most other countries.
Finally, I'd love to see the doctrine of "first sale" extended to iTMS Product and similar licensed electronic music files, but I think it will take a case similar to Softman v Adobe in scope to establish this, and I wouldn't want to be in the hotseat for this one.
what makes you think that Apple is artificially degrading sound quality when you convert from AAC to AIFF
Read carefully, I did not state that this is currently the case, but I did state that it could become the case at some point in the future. That's really up to Apple. If I was an Evil Genius with a Monpoloy Share, then at some point in the future I might allow lo-fi backups, but build in a charge for hi-fi backups. Or disallow completely, at the behest of my licensing masters.
And on the subject of burning CDDA - the error correction on CDDA discs is far from satisfactory. In fact, burning a CDDA disc has more in common with a very fine analog copying process, especially with marginal blanks or high-speeds. BLERs baby, BLERs.
The same rights you have of the AAC file you have of the CD
That is where you are wrong. The license attaches to the Product, the backup enjoys no grandfathered rights.
Again I say that personally, finding such willing advocates of DRM on/. is surprising. But then Apple has always been good at co-opting enthusiasm.
Backups. They call them backups. Backup Backup Backup. That CD you burn is a backup. A backup of what? Of the real iTMS "Product". The distinction between backup and Product is enunciated.
I also don't see how my CDs would somehow become unlicensed because I'm not using iTunes any more.
If you lose possession of or access to the iTMS Product, then the license status of your CD backups becomes questionable. I would compare them to VHS tapes of cable broadcasts, except that it took lots of lawsuits to establish the legality of such VHS "backups" and as yet nobody has established the limits of iTMS "backups". Only the Product is the licensed entity. More info here.
Firstly, there is absolutely zero loss in quality when converting AAC to AIFF
Just because Apple lets you do that conversion with minimal lossage now does not necessarily mean that it will remain high-quality.
You shall be entitled to burn and export Products solely for personal, non-commercial use.
You neglected to bold this bit:
Any burning or exporting capabilities are solely an accommodation to you and shall not constitute a grant or waiver (or other limitation or implication) of any rights of the copyright owners of any content, sound recording, underlying musical composition or artwork embodied in any Product.
The key is "accommodation". The iTMS Product remains the licensed, singular entity - the "burn" is a derivative work. As Apple repeatedly states, it is for "backup" purposes. Apple is not granting you any specific mechanical reproduction rights.
You also left out the usual get-out-jail-free clause:
Apple reserves the right to change the terms and conditions of sale at the iTunes Music Store at any time.
It says nothing about losing the right to the music if their service disappears.
Apple doesn't have to say this explicitly. Instead, it states that your use of the Product must remain in accordance with the State of California, which has civil regulations against the production or use of unlicensed derivative works:
All sales on the iTunes Music Store are governed by California law, without giving effect to its conflict of law provisions.
Your use of a DVD analogy is flawed. A DVD is a physical product that you have purchased. Because it is owned, you have resale and modification rights concerning that physical medium on which a licensed reproduction of a copyrighted work has been engraved. You enjoy no such rights of ownership over an iTMS Product.
I have to hand it to Apple - they are quite clever. A few years ago I honestly would never have thought I'd find so many people on/. defending DRM.
I can keep listening to my music just as legally, and continue to burn said files onto CD's as much as I want.
The CDs you burn are derivative works, and you have no legal right to listen to them as seperate entities non-counterminious with your license to listen to the AAC-FairPlay file.
You say you have not bought any Apple product, but you are using iTunes. Currently freeware, yes. Let's try a thought experiment - in 10 years Apple has a 90% monopoly in licensed downloaded music. It announces it's going to charge for the next upgrade to iTunes. $10 annually, say. What to do? You've spent several thousand dollars on iTMS downloads...
Now, you can say, what the hell? I won't pay and your right to listen to your AAC-FairPlay files expires. I will listen to my CDs. But those CDs are now unlicensed. You can listen to them, but you would be equally legally justified listening to CDs of tunes you downloaded from Soulseek. I know you say "what is the difference"? I say, "not much", except in copyright terms. You are breaching copyright in both cases, except in the former, Apple has your money and you are not getting it back.
You say Apple will never charge for iTunes. That may be true. Then again, iLife was "free" once upon a time. And.Mac. Things change.
A FLAC rip of a CD burnt from an AAC file sounds exactly like the AAC file. I see no problem here.
It's still an unlicensed derivative work. You might as well have downloaded the song from Soulseek - both that action and your suggested action are equivalent. Except that Apple has your dollar and you're not going to get that back, either through refund or resale.
Your current ability to create derivative copies of the iTMS product and record them onto other media does not give you the right to listen to those derivative works when and if your right to the original source material has passed. Consider also that a future revision by Apple of the licensing terms may invoke technological barriers to your ability to create derivative copies of the iTMS product. Or try this: currently there is a small but definite quality loss through the transcoding process. Apple may decide in future to increase the quality loss for the AAC->CDDA process. Where are your "rights" to listen to your music on a wide range of players then?
Your current ability to create derivative copies of the iTMS product and record them onto other media does not give you the right to listen to those derivative works when and if your right to the original source material has passed. Consider also that a future revision by Apple of the licensing terms may invoke technological barriers to your ability to create derivative copies of the iTMS product. Or try this: currently there is a small but definite quality loss through the transcoding process. Apple may decide in future to increase the quality loss for the AAC->CDDA process. Where are your "rights" to listen to your music on a wide range of players then?
You need to think about what a "subscription" means. Think different! Just because you pay up-front (instead of amortizing the cost over a periodic interval of payments) doesn't change its nature. If I paid a sum of money up-front for a Rhapsody subscription, and my license term was for the length of time the software player remained on a specific PC, would I be buying a "subscription" or a "license"?
Subscription: an arrangement for providing, receiving, or making use of something of a continuing or periodic nature on a prepayment plan.
Reselling CDs might be a pain for you, but consider someone else who might have "purchased" several thousand dollars of iTMS product. Afert several years she wants to sell the iPod with attached product to someone else. If she had CDs she could enjoy right of resale and obtain a fair market value. Because she does not own the iTMS products, but only owns a non-transferrable license, she can resell the iPod but cannot, legally, assign any value to the contents of that iPod with respect to the iTMS product.
Finally, you use rude words a lot. And a rather pathetic ad hominem insinuation about illegal narcotics, framed within a class-specific drug format denigration. Are you always this angry?
Apple features lock in as well. You stop buying iPods or Apple technology, you lose all defacto rights to play what you "bought" - which you have really just rented from Apple for a long-duration-subscription once-off license fee.
You RENT an apartment, you BUY music...
I'm now over 250 song purchased from the itunes music store and still think its the closest thing to digital music nirvana there is.
You don't own that music. What you get from iTMS is a long license to play that music on a narrow range of hardware device. You are buying a subscription, only instead of a monthly fee you pay a one-off license fee.
Don't believe me? Try reselling what you have "bought".
I suggest you look at the history and publications relating to SIMNET, an old MMOG military simulation project from the 1980s DARPA funded. The classic paper is from 1993: "The SIMNET Virtual World Architecture", Calvin & Dicken, Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium 1993, pp: 450-455.
I can't give you specifics because you have not signed an NDA. I can talk in generalities, but I can tell you that TZ's load balancing is not random. Much of the information about how to load-balance such systems can be obtained from reading "Distributing Object State" which ran in GamaSutra a while back. The key is dynamic ownership, not static ownership. As you rightly fear, static ownership leads to slowdown and player hangs.
The best way to maintain ownership would be dynamically, using some sticky heuristics to predictively anticipate where a player will "be" following a move, and alert Servers within some defined "neighborhood" or "ZOC" to update their state. This is non-trivial, because you may be dealing with non-Euclidean geometries, distance metrics, or set/guild membership. Therefore, each distributed Server can update its affected Clients on-demand, without those annoying lags you get with some systems when you can "feel" the Client loading the data from a new Server.
Alerting Servers that currently "own" those possible Regions to prepare to update relevent Entities with info is also required. If no Server owns that Region, then you should have a whole other set of heuristics to determine which game server should own that Region. It may, or it may not, be the Server that "owns" the Entity that is moving into that Region. You probably need to do cost-benefit calculations for assigning/re-assigning Region ownership. You can run Monte Carlo simulations to see how best to describe possible Entity "walks" within the topology.
Similarly, because of the expense of instantiation, you need some pretty tricky finagling to figure out when to relinquish ownership and purge any "ghost" copies of the Entity State that have been following the main Entity "around" within the topology. Of course, the nice thing is that Server-Server entity state exchanges will take place along a fat pipe backbone.
Interestingly, such systems end up looking a little like a Kohonen n-tier feedforward neural network.
A 20 person UT match requires a surprising amount of bandwidth alone to make it as "realtime" as it can get
The large quantity of bandwidth exchanged in a UT (or similar peer-based FPS game) is an artifact of a design as single object view game with no distributed Server-side processing. Instead of waiting for bandwidth and CPU nirvana, there are smarter ways to maximize Server-side entity state updates while optimizing Server-Client bandwidth and delivering only environmentally-relevent data. Also, using multiple, distributed Servers enables you to multiplex Server-Client entity state updates using multiple pipes so you don't get a blocks or racing on a single message broker.
And oh yeah, only the Servers run Java only. The Client-side API is language-agnostic and platform-agnostic. So you can write Clients in C++ or Java and compile them to Win32, XBox, PS2, GameCube. The Servers don't care which Client belongs to which platform.
The analogy I like to use is NTSC. In the early days of TV without NTSC you had no guarantee that your GE TVs would be able to pick up Motorola format broadcasts. TVs competed within closed markets and featured lock-in. Creating a common broadcast standard enabled all TVs to pick up all broadcasts. TVs could compete on quality anf fucntionality, and broadcasters could compete using content. Using a platform-agnostic MMOG Middleware lets you enjoy economies of scale because your Servers communicate with all kinds of Clients. Client experiences vary, of course, according to display resolution and frame rate ability.
how does the game world map get distributed amongst the grid servers
Dynamic ownership, distributed object-view model. Very similar to the system described in Queue. You would never maintain a complete unitary in-memory representation of a world - that sucks up too server juice.
I come from a CORBA background as well - what you see with all this kind of MMOG Middleware (Butterfly, Quazal, There.com, BigWorld) is a classic example of evolutionary convergent adaptation.
I forgot to add a standard/. angle - we support MySQL for persistence, among others. In fact, any RDBMS with JDBC should work. We also support Entity creation, modification, bandwidth optimization using an XML-based schema editor (written in Java, of course). So game programmers don't have to fiddle forever making lots of structs and trying to optimize dirty bitmasks for message delta optimization. This lets you get past the tedious stuff quickly and get to the game logic.
one's control over one's character is not real-time.
If you've attended GDC then you may have played ZonaBattle, a real-time mechanized battlecar demo game for the Terazona MMOG system. Disclaimer: I work for Shanda Zona, the developer of this MMOG architecture, and my views may not represent those of the company, etcetera.
The purpose of the ZonaBattle technology demo is to illustrate that MMOGs do not have rely on sluggish, pseudo-turn-based gameplay. Using the right architecture produces excellent results.
ZonaBattle is not as fluid as some FPS games, but it is peppy and, unlike peer-based FPS games with~64-138 players, Terazona's client-server design enables you to scale the playfield to several tens of thousands of players and those players will experience no increased lag or message bottleneck.
Of course, you can also use Terazona to build "classic" seamless MMOGs. Terazona games do not have to have zones or "shards" and feature a heuristic, autoconfiguring grid system for game servers with dynamic region ownership, environmental simulation, and load balancing. You want more performance to support more players or more complex environment? Just slap in a few more commodity servers, or racks. The game will integrate them automatically and immediately begin dispersing Players and Entities among them.
Players can also exchange state with other local or non-local Entities using various bandwidth- and set-based configurable channels. This is not as easy as it might first appear.
Finally, the entire Server-side system is Java-based, for maximum flexibility and cross-platform support.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish they'd work on some of the innovations in Woody Allen's scifi movie Sleeper. I want my own Orgasmatron!
That's partly what I value most about Slashdot - the informed debate, the subtle use of logic, the marshalling of facts and stats to substantiate assertions or denials. Do you actually know anything about how farming works in the US? Do you know how much energy input every kernal of corn requires? I think not... It really seems like you're talking out of your ass.
That's partly what I value most about Slashdot - the informed debate, the subtle use of logic, the marshalling of facts and stats to substantiate assertions or denials. Do you actually know anything about how farming works in the US? Do you know how much energy input every kernal of corn requires? I think not... http://www.cedar.at/mailarchives/infoterra/2003/m
a forecast from you is as good as gold
The history of empires in the full flush of youth expanding because of population pressure and an excess of capital into marginal lands through extensive irrigation projects that eventually fail is as old as urbanism. Look up Sumeria or the Maya sometime. Or check this:
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
Rainfall rate is one small element in the hydrological cycle. The most critical part of fresh water supply is storage, and we have been draining the best storage reserves of all, aquifers, at an alarming rate. Obviously, you have not looked at the situation in India or Africa recently. Many aquifers there are drained almost past the point of possible extraction. In the US, the Olgalla aquifer is nearing the end of its usefulness. I forecast a radical drop in property prices within many of the parched interior states over the next generation or so. Now, as for Israel & the West Bank, they don't get a whole lot of rainfall..mostly because it's a DESERT.
While it's true that they receive quite low levels of rainfall, those regions are better described as "arid mediterranean", rather similar to mid-south California. Given their high population densities, the decision by Israel to grab two-thirds of the scarce, available fresh water in the occupied territories for their colonies is bound to cause friction. But possibly more boneheaded is inducing Intel to operate enormous fabs there, consuming billions of gallons of water annually. And New Mexico! rant on nuclear reactors for all the good it'll do ya
Also a non-renewable resource. Even assuming we move to lithium-catalysed fusion energy sources, there is only approximately as much lithium in the lithosphere as uranium.
The 1.5 metric tons of water doesn't disappear. It gets recycled in one way or another.
And how do you recycle that water? You need more inputs to do it properly, or you spend less and discharge it, soiling the water table or the ocean. You *do* know there is a fresh water shortage that will become chronic within a couple of decades. You want to know how people compete when there is not enough water? Take a look at Palestine and Israel - most of their disagreements are about the skewed rationing of the scarce water supply.
Producing advanced CMOS technology is an awfully dirty business, and much of our advanced technological base relies on the easy availability of stored solar energy as fossil fuels. As other posters have pointed out, every year even simple things like Agriculture burn several dozens or tens of dozens of years of stored solar energy. Annually I believe the total is around 400 years worth of solar input consumed per year. Obviously, things will have to change one day because the bank of solar energy is not infinite - as much as classical economists might like to think it is. Eventually your inputs disappear, or the cost to extract them is greater than potential energy yield so they are effectively worthless.
Fair use is law
I'm reading what you posted and, unless you're a member of one of the classes here enumerated, then your defence is not explicit. Once again, it's an affirmative defence, not a right.
As for the "doctrine of first sale," I'm as interested as you are but that's not the topic of this discussion
Maybe you've forgot how this started, but I haven't. I stated that people who "bought" iTMS Product did not really "own" the Product, insofar as we usually establish ownership. One of those attributes being the doctrine of first sale. It was painful to establish this for OEM software, and you will probably still get your ass sued if you go around selling after-market OEM software. For iTMS Product, no such process has yet extended any meaningful ownership rights to this.
I don't like DRM, but it's a necessary evil. And Apple's DRM Fairplay has the best balance of consumer rights so far.
This is like being faced with a choice of death by the chair, or by guillotine. "Well at least the guillotine is painless!". Or being faced with two muggers - one will pummel you with a stick about the face until you die, while the other wants to kick you death while wearing soft slippers. Your choice.
Steve would be proud of you.
You need to go re-learn about Fair Use rights.
Thanks for that tip, really. There is one thing you need to realize about the fair use doctrine as practiced in the US:
It is not a right, but in fact a defence. You do not enjoy a right to make copies, but if sued you can try to pleade "fair use" as an affirmative defence. It's up to you to prove that you were not infringing. This should be compared with the British-derived "fair dealing" enumerated rights of specific quantities of mechanical reproduction. US laws are far less strongly in favour of the defendant than most other countries.
Finally, I'd love to see the doctrine of "first sale" extended to iTMS Product and similar licensed electronic music files, but I think it will take a case similar to Softman v Adobe in scope to establish this, and I wouldn't want to be in the hotseat for this one.
what makes you think that Apple is artificially degrading sound quality when you convert from AAC to AIFF
/. is surprising. But then Apple has always been good at co-opting enthusiasm.
Read carefully, I did not state that this is currently the case, but I did state that it could become the case at some point in the future. That's really up to Apple. If I was an Evil Genius with a Monpoloy Share, then at some point in the future I might allow lo-fi backups, but build in a charge for hi-fi backups. Or disallow completely, at the behest of my licensing masters.
And on the subject of burning CDDA - the error correction on CDDA discs is far from satisfactory. In fact, burning a CDDA disc has more in common with a very fine analog copying process, especially with marginal blanks or high-speeds. BLERs baby, BLERs.
The same rights you have of the AAC file you have of the CD
That is where you are wrong. The license attaches to the Product, the backup enjoys no grandfathered rights.
Again I say that personally, finding such willing advocates of DRM on
Backups. They call them backups. Backup Backup Backup. That CD you burn is a backup. A backup of what? Of the real iTMS "Product". The distinction between backup and Product is enunciated.
I also don't see how my CDs would somehow become unlicensed because I'm not using iTunes any more.
If you lose possession of or access to the iTMS Product, then the license status of your CD backups becomes questionable. I would compare them to VHS tapes of cable broadcasts, except that it took lots of lawsuits to establish the legality of such VHS "backups" and as yet nobody has established the limits of iTMS "backups". Only the Product is the licensed entity. More info here.
Just because Apple lets you do that conversion with minimal lossage now does not necessarily mean that it will remain high-quality.
You shall be entitled to burn and export Products solely for personal, non-commercial use.
You neglected to bold this bit: The key is "accommodation". The iTMS Product remains the licensed, singular entity - the "burn" is a derivative work. As Apple repeatedly states, it is for "backup" purposes. Apple is not granting you any specific mechanical reproduction rights.
You also left out the usual get-out-jail-free clause: It says nothing about losing the right to the music if their service disappears.
Apple doesn't have to say this explicitly. Instead, it states that your use of the Product must remain in accordance with the State of California, which has civil regulations against the production or use of unlicensed derivative works:
Your use of a DVD analogy is flawed. A DVD is a physical product that you have purchased. Because it is owned, you have resale and modification rights concerning that physical medium on which a licensed reproduction of a copyrighted work has been engraved. You enjoy no such rights of ownership over an iTMS Product.
I have to hand it to Apple - they are quite clever. A few years ago I honestly would never have thought I'd find so many people on
I can keep listening to my music just as legally, and continue to burn said files onto CD's as much as I want.
.Mac. Things change.
The CDs you burn are derivative works, and you have no legal right to listen to them as seperate entities non-counterminious with your license to listen to the AAC-FairPlay file.
You say you have not bought any Apple product, but you are using iTunes. Currently freeware, yes. Let's try a thought experiment - in 10 years Apple has a 90% monopoly in licensed downloaded music. It announces it's going to charge for the next upgrade to iTunes. $10 annually, say. What to do? You've spent several thousand dollars on iTMS downloads...
Now, you can say, what the hell? I won't pay and your right to listen to your AAC-FairPlay files expires. I will listen to my CDs. But those CDs are now unlicensed. You can listen to them, but you would be equally legally justified listening to CDs of tunes you downloaded from Soulseek. I know you say "what is the difference"? I say, "not much", except in copyright terms. You are breaching copyright in both cases, except in the former, Apple has your money and you are not getting it back.
You say Apple will never charge for iTunes. That may be true. Then again, iLife was "free" once upon a time. And
A FLAC rip of a CD burnt from an AAC file sounds exactly like the AAC file. I see no problem here.
It's still an unlicensed derivative work. You might as well have downloaded the song from Soulseek - both that action and your suggested action are equivalent. Except that Apple has your dollar and you're not going to get that back, either through refund or resale.
Your current ability to create derivative copies of the iTMS product and record them onto other media does not give you the right to listen to those derivative works when and if your right to the original source material has passed. Consider also that a future revision by Apple of the licensing terms may invoke technological barriers to your ability to create derivative copies of the iTMS product. Or try this: currently there is a small but definite quality loss through the transcoding process. Apple may decide in future to increase the quality loss for the AAC->CDDA process. Where are your "rights" to listen to your music on a wide range of players then?
Your current ability to create derivative copies of the iTMS product and record them onto other media does not give you the right to listen to those derivative works when and if your right to the original source material has passed. Consider also that a future revision by Apple of the licensing terms may invoke technological barriers to your ability to create derivative copies of the iTMS product. Or try this: currently there is a small but definite quality loss through the transcoding process. Apple may decide in future to increase the quality loss for the AAC->CDDA process. Where are your "rights" to listen to your music on a wide range of players then?
You need to think about what a "subscription" means. Think different! Just because you pay up-front (instead of amortizing the cost over a periodic interval of payments) doesn't change its nature. If I paid a sum of money up-front for a Rhapsody subscription, and my license term was for the length of time the software player remained on a specific PC, would I be buying a "subscription" or a "license"?
Subscription: an arrangement for providing, receiving, or making use of something of a continuing or periodic nature on a prepayment plan.
Reselling CDs might be a pain for you, but consider someone else who might have "purchased" several thousand dollars of iTMS product. Afert several years she wants to sell the iPod with attached product to someone else. If she had CDs she could enjoy right of resale and obtain a fair market value. Because she does not own the iTMS products, but only owns a non-transferrable license, she can resell the iPod but cannot, legally, assign any value to the contents of that iPod with respect to the iTMS product.
Finally, you use rude words a lot. And a rather pathetic ad hominem insinuation about illegal narcotics, framed within a class-specific drug format denigration. Are you always this angry?
Unsubscribe, you lose all 'rights' to play?
Apple features lock in as well. You stop buying iPods or Apple technology, you lose all defacto rights to play what you "bought" - which you have really just rented from Apple for a long-duration-subscription once-off license fee.
You RENT an apartment, you BUY music... I'm now over 250 song purchased from the itunes music store and still think its the closest thing to digital music nirvana there is.
You don't own that music. What you get from iTMS is a long license to play that music on a narrow range of hardware device. You are buying a subscription, only instead of a monthly fee you pay a one-off license fee.
Don't believe me? Try reselling what you have "bought".
I suggest you look at the history and publications relating to SIMNET, an old MMOG military simulation project from the 1980s DARPA funded. The classic paper is from 1993: "The SIMNET Virtual World Architecture", Calvin & Dicken, Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium 1993, pp: 450-455.
I think you're talking about what is now known as the SCE-RT. This is the patent.
I can't give you specifics because you have not signed an NDA. I can talk in generalities, but I can tell you that TZ's load balancing is not random. Much of the information about how to load-balance such systems can be obtained from reading "Distributing Object State" which ran in GamaSutra a while back. The key is dynamic ownership, not static ownership. As you rightly fear, static ownership leads to slowdown and player hangs.
The best way to maintain ownership would be dynamically, using some sticky heuristics to predictively anticipate where a player will "be" following a move, and alert Servers within some defined "neighborhood" or "ZOC" to update their state. This is non-trivial, because you may be dealing with non-Euclidean geometries, distance metrics, or set/guild membership. Therefore, each distributed Server can update its affected Clients on-demand, without those annoying lags you get with some systems when you can "feel" the Client loading the data from a new Server.
Alerting Servers that currently "own" those possible Regions to prepare to update relevent Entities with info is also required. If no Server owns that Region, then you should have a whole other set of heuristics to determine which game server should own that Region. It may, or it may not, be the Server that "owns" the Entity that is moving into that Region. You probably need to do cost-benefit calculations for assigning/re-assigning Region ownership. You can run Monte Carlo simulations to see how best to describe possible Entity "walks" within the topology.
Similarly, because of the expense of instantiation, you need some pretty tricky finagling to figure out when to relinquish ownership and purge any "ghost" copies of the Entity State that have been following the main Entity "around" within the topology. Of course, the nice thing is that Server-Server entity state exchanges will take place along a fat pipe backbone.
Interestingly, such systems end up looking a little like a Kohonen n-tier feedforward neural network.
A 20 person UT match requires a surprising amount of bandwidth alone to make it as "realtime" as it can get
The large quantity of bandwidth exchanged in a UT (or similar peer-based FPS game) is an artifact of a design as single object view game with no distributed Server-side processing. Instead of waiting for bandwidth and CPU nirvana, there are smarter ways to maximize Server-side entity state updates while optimizing Server-Client bandwidth and delivering only environmentally-relevent data. Also, using multiple, distributed Servers enables you to multiplex Server-Client entity state updates using multiple pipes so you don't get a blocks or racing on a single message broker.
Korea being the largest in the bunch
China (PRC) is now the largest MMOG market. Also, China is now the largest installed base of DSL in the world.
You lost me at the "java-based" though
And oh yeah, only the Servers run Java only. The Client-side API is language-agnostic and platform-agnostic. So you can write Clients in C++ or Java and compile them to Win32, XBox, PS2, GameCube. The Servers don't care which Client belongs to which platform.
The analogy I like to use is NTSC. In the early days of TV without NTSC you had no guarantee that your GE TVs would be able to pick up Motorola format broadcasts. TVs competed within closed markets and featured lock-in. Creating a common broadcast standard enabled all TVs to pick up all broadcasts. TVs could compete on quality anf fucntionality, and broadcasters could compete using content. Using a platform-agnostic MMOG Middleware lets you enjoy economies of scale because your Servers communicate with all kinds of Clients. Client experiences vary, of course, according to display resolution and frame rate ability.
how does the game world map get distributed amongst the grid servers
/. angle - we support MySQL for persistence, among others. In fact, any RDBMS with JDBC should work. We also support Entity creation, modification, bandwidth optimization using an XML-based schema editor (written in Java, of course). So game programmers don't have to fiddle forever making lots of structs and trying to optimize dirty bitmasks for message delta optimization. This lets you get past the tedious stuff quickly and get to the game logic.
Dynamic ownership, distributed object-view model. Very similar to the system described in Queue. You would never maintain a complete unitary in-memory representation of a world - that sucks up too server juice.
I come from a CORBA background as well - what you see with all this kind of MMOG Middleware (Butterfly, Quazal, There.com, BigWorld) is a classic example of evolutionary convergent adaptation.
I forgot to add a standard
one's control over one's character is not real-time.
If you've attended GDC then you may have played ZonaBattle, a real-time mechanized battlecar demo game for the Terazona MMOG system. Disclaimer: I work for Shanda Zona, the developer of this MMOG architecture, and my views may not represent those of the company, etcetera.
The purpose of the ZonaBattle technology demo is to illustrate that MMOGs do not have rely on sluggish, pseudo-turn-based gameplay. Using the right architecture produces excellent results.
ZonaBattle is not as fluid as some FPS games, but it is peppy and, unlike peer-based FPS games with~64-138 players, Terazona's client-server design enables you to scale the playfield to several tens of thousands of players and those players will experience no increased lag or message bottleneck.
Of course, you can also use Terazona to build "classic" seamless MMOGs. Terazona games do not have to have zones or "shards" and feature a heuristic, autoconfiguring grid system for game servers with dynamic region ownership, environmental simulation, and load balancing. You want more performance to support more players or more complex environment? Just slap in a few more commodity servers, or racks. The game will integrate them automatically and immediately begin dispersing Players and Entities among them.
Players can also exchange state with other local or non-local Entities using various bandwidth- and set-based configurable channels. This is not as easy as it might first appear.
Finally, the entire Server-side system is Java-based, for maximum flexibility and cross-platform support.