Palm has had SSH clients for a while. Why did it take so long to port this to PocketPC? If anything, I would have assumed that PPC, with its more desktop-like APIs, would have had this sort of thing for longer.
Well, Gtk# works well on Windows and Linux and will be available on Macintosh soon (if it's not already included in the beta, I haven't checked yet). Macintosh currently has Gtk/X11, but if Apple keeps being a viable platform at all, you are going to see a Quartz version of Gtk.
Why is MS and everybody else going to a Db version of a file-system? I understand the need to help Suzie Soccermom & Joe Six-pack be able to find the files that they want, because they are idiots, but wouldn't simple organization on the users part do a much better job?
Because companies like Microsoft need to give the impression that they are "innovating". That allows them to ship updates and sell more software. If they left "good enough" alone, they'd go out of business. And their marketing efforts generate enough buzz so that people copy them.
In real life, you don't need a DB file system--it's a bad engineering tradeoff. You need facilities for keeping track of MP3s and documents, but that can be done easily at the application level.
The world also needs some standardization of document formats and document metadata, but that is something the Microsofts of this world don't want because that might result in competition. Better to tie that sort of stuff deeply into the OS because then, whenever anybody wants to use it, they have to use Microsoft software. So another reason for these kinds of design decisions is that they are good for Microsoft's bottom line.
Apple spends more than anyone on UI research and they have abandoned spacial..... are we to believe some hacker, former BeOS lover, is somehow more skilled than Apples UI teams?????? NO.
Have you looked at the Mac OS X Finder recently? It has the original Macintosh finder view, which was copied from Xerox PARC, then it has the hierarchical tree view, which was copied from Emacs, and then it has the NeXT-style file selector, which was taken from, well, NeXT. There is nothing innovative or novel there. And why should there be? Those are pretty much the ways in which people have come to learn to manipulate files.
And what about backing up your claims about Apple spending more than anybody else on UI research? Where are the research papers coming out of that work? What novel UI technologies has Apple actually developed recently, let alone shipped? Come on, back up your claims with some facts.
If spatial is going to pay dividends when "database" filesystems arrive....
"Database" file systems have been here for 40 years. Maybe they'll come back into fashion again, but I wouldn't expect any breakthrough changes in usability or functionality from them.
The biggest argument against spatial navigation, as produced by gnome 2.6, is that it requires the user to learn TWO different styles of navigation: one for their browser and one for their files.
I think it makes little difference, frankly. Windows, Macintosh, Gnome 2.4, Gnome 2.6, and KDE file system browsers each have their strengths and weaknesses. Some are a little more intuitive to novices, some are a little more powerful for experienced users, but the differences are minor.
Most of this desktop stuff is just fashion and different tastes. There is very little real difference between the various systems.
"Open source software, also described as free software, is the neutron bomb of IP" that will destroy 85% of the market value of US companies and drive companies who are currently outsourcing to "draconian measures even worse than outsourcing."
Of course it will. And what's wrong with that? Cheaper manufacturing technologies drive down prices and force inefficient, older companies to close. In the case of software, the prices happen to have been driven down to $0, but there is nothing magic about that. If competition had driven prices down to $1 RDBMS systems, the effect on the industry would be the same. It just happens to be the case that for software, driving the price all the way to zero is both possible and simpler.
And, as with all other industries, if the US doesn't go along with it, the market will simply be taken over by other countries. It still is better for open source and free software to be developed in the US than for everything to move overseas.
Damn. I keep forgetting that we conquered Europe a little while ago.
Yes, try not to forget that next time.
Perhaps you are confusing the US with the EU?
I'm not sure how much clearer I can make this: the EU is implementing biometric identifiers now because the US requires it in order to permit visa-free travel to the US. Furthermore, the US is going to implement biometric passports domestically as well, the US government just hasn't been able to find the money for it yet.
And yes, a totalitarian government is an example of statism. Of course our Constitution prevents that happening in the US.
It's a fatal mistake to think that any law will prevent a totalitarian government from emerging. From the Romans to Nazi Germany, examples of republics and democracies being replaced by totalitarian rule abound.
Too bad you whiny neo-coms don't believe in the 2nd Amendment!
Too bad ignorant fools like you don't believe in democracy and instead cling to idiotic notions that waving a bunch of shotguns around is going to stop a totalitarian government. Afghans and Iraqis had plenty of guns and it didn't help them against government oppression.
The only way to keep the US democratic is through the political process. And a good place to start is by getting people like Bush out of office. I don't care whether he is replaced with a conservative or liberal, but he should be replaced by someone whose cabinet actually respects the Constitution and the democratic process, who is less corrupt, and who respects international law and international treaties.
Before launching into your knee jerk anti-Bush tirade did you happen to notice that the story is about the UK?
Dig a little deeper: the UK is implementing biometric identifiers now because the US requires Europe to do this. Otherwise, Europeans wouldn't be doing this, at least not yet.
Socialists need to be able to ID the subjects just like all statist governments.
As do totalitarian leaders, which is why Bush/Ashcroft plan on implementing biometric passports in the US as well. However, given the $400 billion budget deficit they have created, unlike the Europeans, the US can't pay for it.
Except (s)he was talking about the UK and not the US approach. If not for getting the country wrong, you'd be correct:-)
I actually didn't get the country wrong. The EU is deploying biometric identifiers because the US ordered them to; if the EU didn't do it, the US would refuse visa-free travel to EU citizens.
While certain totalitarian-leaning elements of the British and other European governments may have welcomed this push from the US, most rational politicians in Europe would have preferred to study the matter for a few more years and wait with rolling things out.
In fact, the US itself is planning on implementing biometric passports for US citizens, but since the US sets its own schedule and this sort of thing costs a lot of money, its implementation in the US just gets pushed out further and further.
To both responses: sorry, I don't know of a single reference specific to file systems, nor even of a coherent review or survey comparing the different approaches or philosophies.
Without any claim of completeness, some papers that you may not have thought about reading are the following... You can get quite a bit of information about the UNIX design philosophy out of the early UNIX research papers (the V7 papers collection) and the more recent Plan 9 papers. Krishnamurthy's book "Practical Reusable UNIX Software" talks a lot about what can be done providing advanced file system functionality in user mode. There are the papers on n-DFS, and lots of papers on file versioning, copy-on-write, and version control in file systems. Then there are Korn's papers on UWIN, which also talk about file system issues.
People should probably also look at systems like Pick and AS/400, which have very different views of data storage within the operating system from "traditional" file systems and give you some idea of where more database-inspired system designs lead.
you can't just go around installing computer hardware on trails. While it may be "public" land, it really is no different from someone's back yard: some specific institution (part of the government in this case) ultimately has responsibility for managing it, no different from a home owner or a private land owner. That institution will also have lawyers and administrators whose purpose in life is to figure these things out.
Installing such sensors sounds harmless enough, but even there may be things to watch out for: wildlife impact, liability, pollution, litter laws, fire hazard, etc.
I mean, they are powered devices, right? They can short out? They do contain some heavy metals? They need to be maintained and they need to be removed when they no longer work, etc.
Say what you will, the ability for a clueless end-user to click "accept" on an email and automatically schedule themselves for a meeting is a Big Deal(tm).
You don't need any proprietary protocols or Exchange servers for that--simple HTML E-mail, even without JavaScript, will do.
Ask yourself this: How much do you recon they pay their staff at the passport issuing office? Now ask yourself how much that passport could be worth to someone! The math does itself.
In Bush's mindset, any staff person that would do such a thing should probably be considered a terrorist and can just be shipped off to Guantanamo without a trial, where they can be raped and tortured courtesy of the US government. Given that downside, faking ids for a few bucks probably seems a lot less appealing to the staff.
ID cards are flawed because you can't secure a system that large.
You can't in a freewheeling democracy with normal legal protections. But if you make the state sufficiently totalitarian and the punishments sufficiently severe, as history has shown, that sort of thing does actually work, at least for a while. And that's where Bush and Ashcroft are heading; they just aren't aware of the historical precedents they are following.
Re:Please.. Mr Blunket/Random authority.. Get a cl
on
Cry To Beat Iris Scanners
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What's stopping them getting a *real* passport with the correct Biometerics on a different name?
Well, in the Bush/Ashcroft 1984 utopia, the biometric identifiers are not only stored on your passport, but also in centralized databases. They aren't only used to tie you to your passport, but they are also used to retrieve possibly matching identities from those centralized databases.
Furthermore, the same centralized databases contain assessments of how much of a threat you likely pose, based on detailed information about where you have traveled, what kinds of political views you have stated in public forums (and maybe in private), the results of surveillance, contacts, purchasing history, insurance history, habits, and interests.
Immigration: Anyone who wants to immigrate enough will get the *real* id in a fake name!
That one's even easier. The general idea is that all US citizens would have their biometric identifiers registered in central databases with an indication that they may enter the country. Furthermore, the biometric identifiers of everybody who has ever been denied entry would also be registered. When you appear at the border and your biometric identifiers fall into the first category, you are permitted in. If they fall into the second category, you won't be let in, no matter what your (probably fake) passport says. And if you fall in between--well, prepare for a long wait.
Furthermore, even if the biometric identifiers are not reliable enough to be able to distinguish between hundreds of millions of people in centralized databases, governments are also assuming that they can make id cards that are sufficiently forgery-proof to make "just getting a *real* id in a fake name" rather difficult.
I'm not saying that any of this will work. I'm just saying that, if you assume that biometric identifiers actually work reliably and/or that you can produce ids that are difficult to fake, you can concoct scenarios in which they would be useful for the intended purpose.
I think those are big "ifs", but if you are going to attack these policies, I think you need to dig a little deeper to do so.
Drop the PhD study where right now he would probably be teaching at a college to kids who really couldn't care...
There are plenty of Ph.D. drop-outs that signed up with other companies that looked just as promising as Google and didn't make it. This sort of career choice is basically a lottery ticket with a rather high cost of entry--even if you ever manage to get back to grad school after your failed stint at a startup, it's going to be hard to get back into research.
If you want to make money, a Ph.D. is the wrong choice to begin with--go into business or finance or something like that. If you change your mind about getting a Ph.D. halfway through, again, there are far better career choices than to get involved with some startup.
Sign up with a startup in a technical capacity only if you feel passionate about the product or the work.
There are lots of great or just good enough codecs out there. Having an open source codec would be great, but the biggest problem today is not getting the best/freest codec but instead is making it available from the average browser.
Yes, and why are so few codecs available? Two reasons: (1) most codecs out there are a software engineering mess and hence hard to integrate into anything, and (2) most of them are heavily covered by patents and copyrights so people can't just write a plug-in and distribute it.
Something like Dirac holds the promise of letting people create simple, self-contained, freely distributable players that either play stand-alone or can be easily plugged into browsers. Furthermore, the same is true for encoders, allowing people to create content more easily.
And, unlike MPEG encoders, which have lots of weird parameters and flags, Dirac looks like it is simple enough that making high-quality encodings does not require a Ph.D.
In fact I think a Java based media streaming applet might be a great solution, since Java has pretty good saturation (although *sigh* there is no entirely free software or open source Java implementation at this moment).
Well, even there, a simpler format can help: something like Dirac is probably a whole lot easier to re-implement in Java than something like MPEG4.
Back when the US was still developing and expanding, it didn't give a damn about European copyrights. The land of the free was free because it was in its own economic interest to be so.
It will be interesting to see whether today's developing nations get away with the same attitude and approach...
So, can anyone explain how one might use Dirac? Does it plug into transcode? Mplayer? Any other kind of Linux player, DVD ripper, or streaming server/client?
Access control lists, user-defined metadata, indexing at the file system level, and all that are not new ideas; they go back to the 1960's. Be didn't invent them, and neither did Microsoft (with WinFS).
All that complexity comes at a price. UNIX was a reaction against putting so many features into the kernel, and, in my opinion, the UNIX arguments against putting those kinds of features into the kernel are as valid today as they were 30 years ago.
Unfortunately, the book gives very little historical perspective. It seems to simply assume that "more features" translates into "more advanced". From a quick perusal, division of functionality between kernel and user space seems to be not covered. File versioning at the file system level, another important feature, does not seem to be covered. Historically important file systems and functionality, like those found on VMS, IBM mainframes, and database-based file systems are hardly covered at all.
This book may give you a good idea of what kind of thinking went into the design of the BeOS file system, but it doesn't even come close to a book on file system design in general. And even as a book on the BeOS file system design, it tells you as much about what the creator of the file system didn't think about as what he did think about.
Remember that in a true P2P network everyone is equal - it is nearly impossible to implement schemes that avoid the Sybil attack. You need a central certificate authority to validate the autheticity of users. And, that is a big no-no in P2P systems.
Douceur's paper is irrelevant to this problem (in fact, I would argue that it is irrelevant to any problem, but let's not get into that).
So, forget about trust matrix. You can't trust anyone in a true P2P network.
That doesn't even follow from Douceur's paper. If we have exchanged keys, I have your identity and you have mine. I can determine whether to trust your identity based on your behavior using that identity. If that identity consistently sends me good MP3 files, I trust it, and if it doesn't, I don't. Whether you create other identities that I don't know about makes no difference.
In that case, the inventors of the Cuckoo Egg Project might also file an affidavit alleging possession of the invention priort to that date--they probably also talked about it for a while before implementing it.
If first to invent counts for competing patents, it should also count for unpatented but published prior art.
So there is NO WAY you will get a energy-yielding atomic reaction with hafnium and gamma/xrays.
While I have no opinion on whether the effect is real or not, your argument against it is bogus. They aren't claiing an "atomic reaction", they are claiming a state change of the nucleus. It's clear that that exists. The only question is whether it can be induced artificially. If it can, you have a great energy source and the potential to make a bomb. If not, you still have energy release, but it's too slow to be useful.
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Palm has had SSH clients for a while. Why did it take so long to port this to PocketPC? If anything, I would have assumed that PPC, with its more desktop-like APIs, would have had this sort of thing for longer.
Well, Gtk# works well on Windows and Linux and will be available on Macintosh soon (if it's not already included in the beta, I haven't checked yet). Macintosh currently has Gtk/X11, but if Apple keeps being a viable platform at all, you are going to see a Quartz version of Gtk.
Why is MS and everybody else going to a Db version of a file-system? I understand the need to help Suzie Soccermom & Joe Six-pack be able to find the files that they want, because they are idiots, but wouldn't simple organization on the users part do a much better job?
Because companies like Microsoft need to give the impression that they are "innovating". That allows them to ship updates and sell more software. If they left "good enough" alone, they'd go out of business. And their marketing efforts generate enough buzz so that people copy them.
In real life, you don't need a DB file system--it's a bad engineering tradeoff. You need facilities for keeping track of MP3s and documents, but that can be done easily at the application level.
The world also needs some standardization of document formats and document metadata, but that is something the Microsofts of this world don't want because that might result in competition. Better to tie that sort of stuff deeply into the OS because then, whenever anybody wants to use it, they have to use Microsoft software. So another reason for these kinds of design decisions is that they are good for Microsoft's bottom line.
Apple spends more than anyone on UI research and they have abandoned spacial..... are we to believe some hacker, former BeOS lover, is somehow more skilled than Apples UI teams?????? NO.
Have you looked at the Mac OS X Finder recently? It has the original Macintosh finder view, which was copied from Xerox PARC, then it has the hierarchical tree view, which was copied from Emacs, and then it has the NeXT-style file selector, which was taken from, well, NeXT. There is nothing innovative or novel there. And why should there be? Those are pretty much the ways in which people have come to learn to manipulate files.
And what about backing up your claims about Apple spending more than anybody else on UI research? Where are the research papers coming out of that work? What novel UI technologies has Apple actually developed recently, let alone shipped? Come on, back up your claims with some facts.
If spatial is going to pay dividends when "database" filesystems arrive....
"Database" file systems have been here for 40 years. Maybe they'll come back into fashion again, but I wouldn't expect any breakthrough changes in usability or functionality from them.
The biggest argument against spatial navigation, as produced by gnome 2.6, is that it requires the user to learn TWO different styles of navigation: one for their browser and one for their files.
I think it makes little difference, frankly. Windows, Macintosh, Gnome 2.4, Gnome 2.6, and KDE file system browsers each have their strengths and weaknesses. Some are a little more intuitive to novices, some are a little more powerful for experienced users, but the differences are minor.
Most of this desktop stuff is just fashion and different tastes. There is very little real difference between the various systems.
"Open source software, also described as free software, is the neutron bomb of IP" that will destroy 85% of the market value of US companies and drive companies who are currently outsourcing to "draconian measures even worse than outsourcing."
Of course it will. And what's wrong with that? Cheaper manufacturing technologies drive down prices and force inefficient, older companies to close. In the case of software, the prices happen to have been driven down to $0, but there is nothing magic about that. If competition had driven prices down to $1 RDBMS systems, the effect on the industry would be the same. It just happens to be the case that for software, driving the price all the way to zero is both possible and simpler.
And, as with all other industries, if the US doesn't go along with it, the market will simply be taken over by other countries. It still is better for open source and free software to be developed in the US than for everything to move overseas.
Damn. I keep forgetting that we conquered Europe a little while ago.
Yes, try not to forget that next time.
Perhaps you are confusing the US with the EU?
I'm not sure how much clearer I can make this: the EU is implementing biometric identifiers now because the US requires it in order to permit visa-free travel to the US. Furthermore, the US is going to implement biometric passports domestically as well, the US government just hasn't been able to find the money for it yet.
And yes, a totalitarian government is an example of statism. Of course our Constitution prevents that happening in the US.
It's a fatal mistake to think that any law will prevent a totalitarian government from emerging. From the Romans to Nazi Germany, examples of republics and democracies being replaced by totalitarian rule abound.
Too bad you whiny neo-coms don't believe in the 2nd Amendment!
Too bad ignorant fools like you don't believe in democracy and instead cling to idiotic notions that waving a bunch of shotguns around is going to stop a totalitarian government. Afghans and Iraqis had plenty of guns and it didn't help them against government oppression.
The only way to keep the US democratic is through the political process. And a good place to start is by getting people like Bush out of office. I don't care whether he is replaced with a conservative or liberal, but he should be replaced by someone whose cabinet actually respects the Constitution and the democratic process, who is less corrupt, and who respects international law and international treaties.
Before launching into your knee jerk anti-Bush tirade did you happen to notice that the story is about the UK?
Dig a little deeper: the UK is implementing biometric identifiers now because the US requires Europe to do this. Otherwise, Europeans wouldn't be doing this, at least not yet.
Socialists need to be able to ID the subjects just like all statist governments.
As do totalitarian leaders, which is why Bush/Ashcroft plan on implementing biometric passports in the US as well. However, given the $400 billion budget deficit they have created, unlike the Europeans, the US can't pay for it.
Except (s)he was talking about the UK and not the US approach. If not for getting the country wrong, you'd be correct :-)
I actually didn't get the country wrong. The EU is deploying biometric identifiers because the US ordered them to; if the EU didn't do it, the US would refuse visa-free travel to EU citizens.
While certain totalitarian-leaning elements of the British and other European governments may have welcomed this push from the US, most rational politicians in Europe would have preferred to study the matter for a few more years and wait with rolling things out.
In fact, the US itself is planning on implementing biometric passports for US citizens, but since the US sets its own schedule and this sort of thing costs a lot of money, its implementation in the US just gets pushed out further and further.
Now all we need is Cocoa#
Writing a Cocoa interface isn't hard to do; all it takes is a volunteer.
But do you actually believe you would be programming in Cocoa using Mono?
It's called a "Beta1" release, which should tell you roughly what state it is actually in.
Well, assuming they did write the application, and no one else tries patenting said invention(s), they don't really need to prove much.
They still need to prove they invented it; the "inventors" listed on a patent really are supposed to be the inventors.
To both responses: sorry, I don't know of a single reference specific to file systems, nor even of a coherent review or survey comparing the different approaches or philosophies.
Without any claim of completeness, some papers that you may not have thought about reading are the following... You can get quite a bit of information about the UNIX design philosophy out of the early UNIX research papers (the V7 papers collection) and the more recent Plan 9 papers. Krishnamurthy's book "Practical Reusable UNIX Software" talks a lot about what can be done providing advanced file system functionality in user mode. There are the papers on n-DFS, and lots of papers on file versioning, copy-on-write, and version control in file systems. Then there are Korn's papers on UWIN, which also talk about file system issues.
People should probably also look at systems like Pick and AS/400, which have very different views of data storage within the operating system from "traditional" file systems and give you some idea of where more database-inspired system designs lead.
you can't just go around installing computer hardware on trails. While it may be "public" land, it really is no different from someone's back yard: some specific institution (part of the government in this case) ultimately has responsibility for managing it, no different from a home owner or a private land owner. That institution will also have lawyers and administrators whose purpose in life is to figure these things out.
Installing such sensors sounds harmless enough, but even there may be things to watch out for: wildlife impact, liability, pollution, litter laws, fire hazard, etc.
I mean, they are powered devices, right? They can short out? They do contain some heavy metals? They need to be maintained and they need to be removed when they no longer work, etc.
Say what you will, the ability for a clueless end-user to click "accept" on an email and automatically schedule themselves for a meeting is a Big Deal(tm).
You don't need any proprietary protocols or Exchange servers for that--simple HTML E-mail, even without JavaScript, will do.
Ask yourself this: How much do you recon they pay their staff at the passport issuing office? Now ask yourself how much that passport could be worth to someone! The math does itself.
In Bush's mindset, any staff person that would do such a thing should probably be considered a terrorist and can just be shipped off to Guantanamo without a trial, where they can be raped and tortured courtesy of the US government. Given that downside, faking ids for a few bucks probably seems a lot less appealing to the staff.
ID cards are flawed because you can't secure a system that large.
You can't in a freewheeling democracy with normal legal protections. But if you make the state sufficiently totalitarian and the punishments sufficiently severe, as history has shown, that sort of thing does actually work, at least for a while. And that's where Bush and Ashcroft are heading; they just aren't aware of the historical precedents they are following.
What's stopping them getting a *real* passport with the correct Biometerics on a different name?
Well, in the Bush/Ashcroft 1984 utopia, the biometric identifiers are not only stored on your passport, but also in centralized databases. They aren't only used to tie you to your passport, but they are also used to retrieve possibly matching identities from those centralized databases.
Furthermore, the same centralized databases contain assessments of how much of a threat you likely pose, based on detailed information about where you have traveled, what kinds of political views you have stated in public forums (and maybe in private), the results of surveillance, contacts, purchasing history, insurance history, habits, and interests.
Immigration: Anyone who wants to immigrate enough will get the *real* id in a fake name!
That one's even easier. The general idea is that all US citizens would have their biometric identifiers registered in central databases with an indication that they may enter the country. Furthermore, the biometric identifiers of everybody who has ever been denied entry would also be registered. When you appear at the border and your biometric identifiers fall into the first category, you are permitted in. If they fall into the second category, you won't be let in, no matter what your (probably fake) passport says. And if you fall in between--well, prepare for a long wait.
Furthermore, even if the biometric identifiers are not reliable enough to be able to distinguish between hundreds of millions of people in centralized databases, governments are also assuming that they can make id cards that are sufficiently forgery-proof to make "just getting a *real* id in a fake name" rather difficult.
I'm not saying that any of this will work. I'm just saying that, if you assume that biometric identifiers actually work reliably and/or that you can produce ids that are difficult to fake, you can concoct scenarios in which they would be useful for the intended purpose.
I think those are big "ifs", but if you are going to attack these policies, I think you need to dig a little deeper to do so.
Drop the PhD study where right now he would probably be teaching at a college to kids who really couldn't care...
There are plenty of Ph.D. drop-outs that signed up with other companies that looked just as promising as Google and didn't make it. This sort of career choice is basically a lottery ticket with a rather high cost of entry--even if you ever manage to get back to grad school after your failed stint at a startup, it's going to be hard to get back into research.
If you want to make money, a Ph.D. is the wrong choice to begin with--go into business or finance or something like that. If you change your mind about getting a Ph.D. halfway through, again, there are far better career choices than to get involved with some startup.
Sign up with a startup in a technical capacity only if you feel passionate about the product or the work.
There are lots of great or just good enough codecs out there. Having an open source codec would be great, but the biggest problem today is not getting the best/freest codec but instead is making it available from the average browser.
Yes, and why are so few codecs available? Two reasons: (1) most codecs out there are a software engineering mess and hence hard to integrate into anything, and (2) most of them are heavily covered by patents and copyrights so people can't just write a plug-in and distribute it.
Something like Dirac holds the promise of letting people create simple, self-contained, freely distributable players that either play stand-alone or can be easily plugged into browsers. Furthermore, the same is true for encoders, allowing people to create content more easily.
And, unlike MPEG encoders, which have lots of weird parameters and flags, Dirac looks like it is simple enough that making high-quality encodings does not require a Ph.D.
In fact I think a Java based media streaming applet might be a great solution, since Java has pretty good saturation (although *sigh* there is no entirely free software or open source Java implementation at this moment).
Well, even there, a simpler format can help: something like Dirac is probably a whole lot easier to re-implement in Java than something like MPEG4.
Back when the US was still developing and expanding, it didn't give a damn about European copyrights. The land of the free was free because it was in its own economic interest to be so.
It will be interesting to see whether today's developing nations get away with the same attitude and approach...
So, can anyone explain how one might use Dirac? Does it plug into transcode? Mplayer? Any other kind of Linux player, DVD ripper, or streaming server/client?
Access control lists, user-defined metadata, indexing at the file system level, and all that are not new ideas; they go back to the 1960's. Be didn't invent them, and neither did Microsoft (with WinFS).
All that complexity comes at a price. UNIX was a reaction against putting so many features into the kernel, and, in my opinion, the UNIX arguments against putting those kinds of features into the kernel are as valid today as they were 30 years ago.
Unfortunately, the book gives very little historical perspective. It seems to simply assume that "more features" translates into "more advanced". From a quick perusal, division of functionality between kernel and user space seems to be not covered. File versioning at the file system level, another important feature, does not seem to be covered. Historically important file systems and functionality, like those found on VMS, IBM mainframes, and database-based file systems are hardly covered at all.
This book may give you a good idea of what kind of thinking went into the design of the BeOS file system, but it doesn't even come close to a book on file system design in general. And even as a book on the BeOS file system design, it tells you as much about what the creator of the file system didn't think about as what he did think about.
Remember that in a true P2P network everyone is equal - it is nearly impossible to implement schemes that avoid the Sybil attack. You need a central certificate authority to validate the autheticity of users. And, that is a big no-no in P2P systems.
Douceur's paper is irrelevant to this problem (in fact, I would argue that it is irrelevant to any problem, but let's not get into that).
So, forget about trust matrix. You can't trust anyone in a true P2P network.
That doesn't even follow from Douceur's paper. If we have exchanged keys, I have your identity and you have mine. I can determine whether to trust your identity based on your behavior using that identity. If that identity consistently sends me good MP3 files, I trust it, and if it doesn't, I don't. Whether you create other identities that I don't know about makes no difference.
In that case, the inventors of the Cuckoo Egg Project might also file an affidavit alleging possession of the invention priort to that date--they probably also talked about it for a while before implementing it.
If first to invent counts for competing patents, it should also count for unpatented but published prior art.
So there is NO WAY you will get a energy-yielding atomic reaction with hafnium and gamma/xrays.
While I have no opinion on whether the effect is real or not, your argument against it is bogus. They aren't claiing an "atomic reaction", they are claiming a state change of the nucleus. It's clear that that exists. The only question is whether it can be induced artificially. If it can, you have a great energy source and the potential to make a bomb. If not, you still have energy release, but it's too slow to be useful.