Haven't we already got free VoIP? The last thing we need is another protocol cold war. Didn't Yahoo! do enough damage with Yahoo IM?
The only way this could be a good thing is:
If it didn't rely on super peers (bad Skype... no!)
If it was good.
If it was open source.
If it worked with Skype, Vonage et al OOTB
But of course it doesn't do that. All that will happen is that MSN will release a VoIP system, as will AIM, Apple will then piggy back on AOL service, and we'll all be left with 20 IM clients and 10 VoIP clients on our PCs wandering how we ever let it get this far out of control.
As an aside. Dear Mr. Jobs, If you are reading this, please, for the love of God/money whatever floats your boat: open up iChat. Its really, really good, but its not a killer app. No one will ever switch to a Mac for iChat. And I'll tell you why: only 3% of computers are Macs. See what happened with iTunes? That can happen again... just let windows users download iChat, for free, and watch iSights fly off shelf. Drop the price point to $50-75, let it work with USB 2, and you will have a winner. Why? Because like the iPod they are better designed, and do the job better than the competition. Logitec do not sell video calling, they sell cameras. MS/AOL sell software, but don't sell cameras. Which means that nobody is using cameras, because its too damn hard (for Joe Sixpack) to set the buggers up.
You ask the Australians if they think its a good idea... bullfrogs, rabbits etc...
Introducing alien animals into the wild will cause native animals to die out. American zoologists arn't stupid. I smell a big corporation thinking it can make a quick buck, whilst appearing to be environmentally friendly.
Mac Zoo "Drive Thru": Order your gun at window number one. Pay at window two. Pick Gun up at window number three - lets go shoot me a MacElephant burger!
when gaming became an industry. Microsoft, and this pains me to say this, were REALLY on the ball when they started to develop DirectX. OK, the first few versions were baaaad, but it proved to developers that windows wanted to concidered a serious contender when it came to games.
I know 3D graphics don't automagically make games better, but it does mean that people are prepared to pay more money because they are buying an experience, not a game. I bought a Voodoo 2 in 1997. Everyone thought I was mad, even I didn't fully understand what it would do for the game, all I thought it did was give me more FPS (this was important as I was only getting 16 FPS in Quake 2). It was like see the difference between a paint by numbers Mona Lisa and the real thing - I was hooked. Now thats not a great example, as Quake 2 used glide, but if I hadn't bought that card for Quake, I would never have bought Half-life, Deus-Ex or probably my X-Box.
The real point was that all of a sudden my PC became my console. Even though I used my PC for coursework etc, that was just something it did, what I needed it for was games. It was the other way around with Macs, and still is.
I gave up on PCs two years ago - mainly because I got bored of FPS not progressing, and the 6 monthly upgrade cycle was killing my pocket - and getting me into trouble. All I really needed was a computer to work on, and a console to play on.
Clearly there will always be a market for PC games, but I would expect it to shrink. If your spending $1500 on a new computer, then your spending $1100 on a games machine, and $400 on a work computer. That wasn't the case 5 years ago, it was far more like $1500 for a new computer, and you need every ounce of power just to get Office working properly. This means the even if windows continues to dominate, the percentage of high-end PC games is going start to shrink very quickly - and the PC games market with it. For that reason I don't think Macs will ever be a serious game platform.
My understanding from the article was the 'the last mile' used fiber and that the long haul was done over power cables.
A better plan would be to get the power companies to install fiber whenever they have to fix the power lines. Or to offer them a tax break if they'd start to install fiber on the overhead lines so that they could rent this dark fiber to the telcos, who could then put ISPs in place.
BPL with actual power lines just isn't going to work - at least not without treading on A LOT of toes.
Provided they take down the exisiting powerlines and replace them with high tension co-ax. It's not just Ham radios that this will irritate, its everyone. The FCC and its international counterparts have restrictions on EM waves not just because they interfere with communications, but because they interfere with everything from aeroplane and medical electronics to cell division.
I'm aware that there are tools, but my post was about popular tools. If I send any kind of encrypted mail to friends / family / coworkers they are not going to read it, because the run Mail.app, Outlook, Thunderbird. Even then, its not that these applications don't offer encryption services, its that they either involve handing over a cheque to Verisign, or the other clients can't read it.
I tried out one of the free certificates from one of the trusted companies. What it proved is that even the paid for solutions are rubbish. Its not that the system isn't secure, its that its unusable.It is complicated to get the certificate. Its easy to install the certifcate, but you then get all your friends and relatives asking you to resend the message because there is a "whole lotta garbage" at the bottom of it (public key).
GPG is all fine and good, but with a LGPL Microsoft, Apple, Sun et al will implement it when hell freezes over. If it was BSD, they'd just claim they invented it and be done with it. Which is a real shame.
I'm sorry to pick on your reply, but it seemed to be the one the aggravated me the most.
I understand the point of a trusted third party. What I also understand is that, as you proved to yourself, you just don't need one. As long as you generated the keys yourself, for a large enough key space, the chances of anyone having, or calculating your key pair approaches 0. This is about the same as someone intercepting the transmission of my private key to a trusted third party, but much, much lower than the chance of some black hat breaking into the single point of failure that is a trusted third party.
If at any point I suspect that a nefarious third party has intercepted my emails, asking my girlfriend if she's fed the cat, or if she'll please TiVo Smallville for me, I simply generate a new key set, and tell my contacts. I'll take my chances. PGP does exactly what it says on the tin.
As for the MIME encoded attachment, I'm confusing nothing. The processes are very, very similar.And yes, I understand, that the application is greatly different, but the point was this: we can agree on a standard to encode attachments, why can't we agree on a standard for encryption?
If M$ had wanted to balls up email they could have decided to use they're own algorythm to do attachements. Why can't they centre on an encryption technology that is free and open source, just like MIME? It makes my inner conspiracy theorists blood boil, but the truth is probably that Verisign saw an opportunity to get into bed with Microsoft. They took it, and took free, easy email encryption with them.
It can't be that nobody else thinks it as important as attachements. Every company I've spoken to has, at some point, asked how they can encrypt their emails. What do I tell them? Yes, you can buy a key pair from verisign, but that will mean that only a selected number of your clients can actually read that email, or they have to buy Outlook and a versign key pair. Yes, you can encrypt your email, but you have to abandon the training and money you have invested in Outlook... oh and btw, the replacement won't have half the functionality, and won't work - but it will be free, and it doesn't work with Outlook! Or do I say: No. We've got the technology, but for some unknown reason, we just don't use it, even though it could massively reduce the need for spam filters, virus checkers and provides at the very least, a small amount of authentication. Its a sad situation to be in, don't you think?
how useless popular comms software is. Why should I have to register with Verisign to send an encrypted email to my girlfriend, co-workers etc. Why can't I just click a button and generate a random 128 bit key set and use PGP?
Why isn't this standard? A better question is, why can I send a MIME encoded attachement anywhere, but not a PGP encoded plain text email? Imagine the spam you could filter if you had a list of the PGP keys of all your friends and family. Imgaine if they moved email address, but there PGP key stayed the same.
If this is because Zimmerman want his 2 cents (which I can't blame him for) can't it be included in the cost of Windows and Macs, and let the rest of us download it for free? We need authenticatable (if there is such a word) emails, IMs etc yesterday. We have the technology!
Especially as DB-9 and DB-25 were so homebrew hardware friendly. USB cost a hell of a lot more to develope for than RS-232. OK it sucks for data transfer, but its great for sending control signals. Great projects like an automatic coffee machine etc would be very expensive if there was no RS-232. OK, they're not going to set the world alight, but its one more avenue of computer science that is made less accessible.
...you could do it without an iPod or Flashdrive! Imagine if you could just point a web browser at your box at home and you could use it as if you were there!
..oh... yeah. SSH, X11, VNC. Surely these are better solutions than having to takeover someones whole computer just because you can't stand to loose your session data or use WinXP? I guess its neat that someone has put a LiveCD on RAM, but it seems to make life harder than it really needs to be - still each to there own.
Definately. One of the first things you realise when you start concurrent programming is that 100% CPU usage is not possible. There are too many other bottlenecks. This really hurts the C/Assembler programmers mind set, but opens up spare cycles for a runtime based language like Java and.Net - although these are terrible languages for game prgramming.
Could this be the age of LISP or Haskel? Everytime I sit down and think about a language that could easily be handled by multicores I start designing LISP. (Those who don't know LISP are doomed to reinvent it). Clearly, the current runtime isn't there, but the language itself probably is - a few OpenGL modules?
You are right of course... I'm not as bright as Carmack, and I'm sure he's spent ALOT longer thinking about this than me.
The most obvious problem with my solution is to think of it like a Games Workshop game. There has to be some sort of turn basis, otherwise the winner is the one who can role the dice fastest.
But taking that metaphire further, there are no idle cycles in a games workshop style game. Even though only one player can update the universe at a time, everybody else is crunching numbers, trying to figure out a stratergy. A succesful player is one whos stratergy can adapt to the changing games state, rather than having to constantly have to rethink their stratergy with every move. In that sense we could update my AI thread thus:
This removes a lot of the race conditions, as only one NPC can update the universe at a time, the rest are just reading. If the changes to the universe between each pass of the token are small (this should be a fair assumption as you would expect one cycle of token passing per frame) then a little inaccuracy between the universe read and 'reality' should be expected - we all blink don't we?
This doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Wireless and DECT phones have had a warning that they can't be used for calls if teh power is out, why can't WiFi phones can't have that AND a warning about 911 location problems.
Or you could stop thinking of it like that and start thinking of it as:
Thread 1: Wait for input
Add to unprocessed que
Grep for coded expressions
add symbol to character action queue
Thread 2: Charactor Thread
read action queue
publish action
recieve reaction
update state
Thread 3-100: AI Threads
Read viewable universe state
Process against goals
publish action
recieve reaction
update state
Please don't read this too literally, it only a slashdot post, but this is meta-outline of how I'd start thinking about the game universe in a multi cpu system. Of course it would run like shit on a single CPU (all those context switches (ugh)), but it would really utilize a multicore system.
... a new definition of the term 'Open' spectrum. "You can use this spectrum for whatever you like, provided you keep the emissions down to x and we can listen in to anything you say"
Say they do this, what is to stop the terrorists from using ham frequencies and using an encrypted signal? Yet again this is the problem with the FCC at the moment, they don't seem to understand the problem.
Say they block the ham frequencies, whats stopping the terrorists from sticking up UHF transmitter and broadcasting an encrypted channel over that? I know Americans have pretty much filled the UHF spectrum, but there is still noise between bands.
How will they be able to tell a terroist signal from noise on 2.4GHz? The whole point of a good encryption algorythm is that the signal looks like noise.
The list goes on. This whole plan is stupid. You can not use laws to stop law breakers.
which is fine as long as all you want to do is send plain text. I used to use Fire to talk to my girlfriend on MSN. The contact lists and text messaging worked fine, but I kept getting things like (ip) ({) etc and unless you know the codes, that means nothing to you.
It gets worse when you start to look at the advanced features: whiteboards, games, video and voice. You've got to have the genuine product and have it all working on the same architecture to stand a chance. Yahoo almost works for video PC-to-Mac (terrible quality), AIM to iChat kinda works. Its about as stable as Win95 and the video quality is rubbish when compared to iChat to iChat - YMMV, but I doubt it.
They're not exactly doing business in the US, so much as letting US citizens import their software freely. If the US can figure out a way of imposing an import restriction on internet traffic for a particular item of software, they wouldn't need to have the wire tapping restriction, they could just block all the packets marked "terrorist".
Now clearly IANAL, but the only thing the FCC can do is prevent the wholesale of phone minutes and numbers to foreign companies, forcing companies like Skype to set up US holdings, bringing them under FCC control. But what would that prove? The only thing that the FCC could possibly hope to control are calls that use the existing US POTS system (Skype In / Out) in that case they can monitor those as soon as the call hits the copper wire, which they can do already.
There is nothing the FCC or Feds can do about PC-2-PC comunication. Nothing. If thats voice data, video, bomb designs, or plain text they are helpless. What can they do? They could put a packet sniffer on a suspects DSL line, and guess at the software they're using and try and decrypt the messages. If they want to do that they can go after the DSL and cable providers who they already have by the balls. Even if they put a backdoor in the software, whats to stop Joe Terrorist from using a firewall or similar to block the backdoor, or to modify the inevitable OpenSkype so that it avoids the wiretaps and closes the backdoor?
Clearly the Feds have the right to do whatever they like to protect their citizens - in their country. This is a stupid action that shows a complete missunderstanding of both the internet and software.
I agree, its a stupid metaphore, very un-intuitive. But dragging things is fun! Howeverm until I think of a better metaphore for ejecting an icon I'll keep using Apples.
I personally prefer highlighting the icon and pressing cmd-e.
Dear Skype,
We, the FCC, require you, a British company, to comply with American laws. If you don't we'll... say Ni! in your general direction.
Your Friends
The FCC
Seriously, they're already giving away free phone calls, and free software from a foriegn country, using foreign servers. The best the FCC can hope for is that they put a line on their download page:
Dear American, please don't download our software cause it will upset the FCC and the Feds. Failure to comply will mean that those in charge will think you are a terrorist. You don't want people to think your a terrosit do you?
Vonage... well they're pretending to be a phone company, so they might have some luck.
I'm not saying your wrong, in fact I completely agree with you. I'm reminded of:
'When all you've got is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail'
The current mentality seems to be, everybodys got a hammer, so make nails - we understand that some people like the idea of screws, but that will upset the people that make hammers. If your nails don't work use more nails, or make bigger nails. If that doesn't work we'll make a bigger hammer. No screws allowed.
I figured... and I expect I'm wrong one of the reasons push technologies fail is because you have to work through NAT, firewalls and dynamic IP addresses all work against having a listeners on end users machines.
Maybe it could be done if it was handled by a system similar to Skype. With the data transmitted via HTTP with you machine acting like a web server, updating a distributed registry every time your IP is updated?
Subscribing to an RSS stream has always struck me as a misnoma. You're still using HTTP, so you're still having to request the data, rather than sit back and let the data come to you. Why can't the site tell me that the content is ready and ship it to me? If thats to bandwidth intensive, why can't there be a RSS protocol that using P2P to roundrobin the info amoungst the subscribers?
Couldn't this technology then be used to allow software updates etc as well as podcasts and news feeds?
In terms of a security risk, its only as bad as bittorrent. Sure somebody could modify their client to suck up the IPs of everyone that is interested in that information. Worse, somebody will probably figure out a way of adding a payload (although again, with proper hashing, and encryption that becomes increasingly difficult).
Could this be the killer app that gets us all hooked on IPv6?
This is exactly why I'll be buying the next Nintendo. Sony and Micorsofts licences are so expensive that publishers are risk averse, which can only be bad for gamers.
Loss leader consoles are becoming an evil to the gaming comunity. Remember the old days when games could, and were published by individuals? It would be great to see the big three open up APIs for their consoles so that some inovation can be injected back into modern gaming. We have the technology!
If EA et al were forced to compete with small software houses run by people who were allowed to sleep and see their families, I wonder whether we'd see more Katamari Damacy, Pickmin, Nintendo Dogs, Sims and less John Madden 30s.
Slashdot Mirror
Haven't we already got free VoIP? The last thing we need is another protocol cold war. Didn't Yahoo! do enough damage with Yahoo IM?
The only way this could be a good thing is:
But of course it doesn't do that. All that will happen is that MSN will release a VoIP system, as will AIM, Apple will then piggy back on AOL service, and we'll all be left with 20 IM clients and 10 VoIP clients on our PCs wandering how we ever let it get this far out of control.
As an aside. Dear Mr. Jobs, If you are reading this, please, for the love of God/money whatever floats your boat: open up iChat. Its really, really good, but its not a killer app. No one will ever switch to a Mac for iChat. And I'll tell you why: only 3% of computers are Macs. See what happened with iTunes? That can happen again... just let windows users download iChat, for free, and watch iSights fly off shelf. Drop the price point to $50-75, let it work with USB 2, and you will have a winner. Why? Because like the iPod they are better designed, and do the job better than the competition. Logitec do not sell video calling, they sell cameras. MS/AOL sell software, but don't sell cameras. Which means that nobody is using cameras, because its too damn hard (for Joe Sixpack) to set the buggers up.
...I've already got VoIP! I want a pony!
It may be the thousandth time, but it was the first time I've seen it. Cheers!
You ask the Australians if they think its a good idea... bullfrogs, rabbits etc...
Introducing alien animals into the wild will cause native animals to die out. American zoologists arn't stupid. I smell a big corporation thinking it can make a quick buck, whilst appearing to be environmentally friendly.
Mac Zoo "Drive Thru": Order your gun at window number one. Pay at window two. Pick Gun up at window number three - lets go shoot me a MacElephant burger!
when gaming became an industry. Microsoft, and this pains me to say this, were REALLY on the ball when they started to develop DirectX. OK, the first few versions were baaaad, but it proved to developers that windows wanted to concidered a serious contender when it came to games.
I know 3D graphics don't automagically make games better, but it does mean that people are prepared to pay more money because they are buying an experience, not a game. I bought a Voodoo 2 in 1997. Everyone thought I was mad, even I didn't fully understand what it would do for the game, all I thought it did was give me more FPS (this was important as I was only getting 16 FPS in Quake 2). It was like see the difference between a paint by numbers Mona Lisa and the real thing - I was hooked. Now thats not a great example, as Quake 2 used glide, but if I hadn't bought that card for Quake, I would never have bought Half-life, Deus-Ex or probably my X-Box.
The real point was that all of a sudden my PC became my console. Even though I used my PC for coursework etc, that was just something it did, what I needed it for was games. It was the other way around with Macs, and still is.
I gave up on PCs two years ago - mainly because I got bored of FPS not progressing, and the 6 monthly upgrade cycle was killing my pocket - and getting me into trouble. All I really needed was a computer to work on, and a console to play on.
Clearly there will always be a market for PC games, but I would expect it to shrink. If your spending $1500 on a new computer, then your spending $1100 on a games machine, and $400 on a work computer. That wasn't the case 5 years ago, it was far more like $1500 for a new computer, and you need every ounce of power just to get Office working properly. This means the even if windows continues to dominate, the percentage of high-end PC games is going start to shrink very quickly - and the PC games market with it. For that reason I don't think Macs will ever be a serious game platform.
My understanding from the article was the 'the last mile' used fiber and that the long haul was done over power cables.
A better plan would be to get the power companies to install fiber whenever they have to fix the power lines. Or to offer them a tax break if they'd start to install fiber on the overhead lines so that they could rent this dark fiber to the telcos, who could then put ISPs in place.
BPL with actual power lines just isn't going to work - at least not without treading on A LOT of toes.
Provided they take down the exisiting powerlines and replace them with high tension co-ax. It's not just Ham radios that this will irritate, its everyone. The FCC and its international counterparts have restrictions on EM waves not just because they interfere with communications, but because they interfere with everything from aeroplane and medical electronics to cell division.
I'm aware that there are tools, but my post was about popular tools. If I send any kind of encrypted mail to friends / family / coworkers they are not going to read it, because the run Mail.app, Outlook, Thunderbird. Even then, its not that these applications don't offer encryption services, its that they either involve handing over a cheque to Verisign, or the other clients can't read it.
I tried out one of the free certificates from one of the trusted companies. What it proved is that even the paid for solutions are rubbish. Its not that the system isn't secure, its that its unusable.It is complicated to get the certificate. Its easy to install the certifcate, but you then get all your friends and relatives asking you to resend the message because there is a "whole lotta garbage" at the bottom of it (public key).
GPG is all fine and good, but with a LGPL Microsoft, Apple, Sun et al will implement it when hell freezes over. If it was BSD, they'd just claim they invented it and be done with it. Which is a real shame.
Why can't encrypted email be as easy as SSH?
I'm sorry to pick on your reply, but it seemed to be the one the aggravated me the most.
I understand the point of a trusted third party. What I also understand is that, as you proved to yourself, you just don't need one. As long as you generated the keys yourself, for a large enough key space, the chances of anyone having, or calculating your key pair approaches 0. This is about the same as someone intercepting the transmission of my private key to a trusted third party, but much, much lower than the chance of some black hat breaking into the single point of failure that is a trusted third party.
If at any point I suspect that a nefarious third party has intercepted my emails, asking my girlfriend if she's fed the cat, or if she'll please TiVo Smallville for me, I simply generate a new key set, and tell my contacts. I'll take my chances. PGP does exactly what it says on the tin.
As for the MIME encoded attachment, I'm confusing nothing. The processes are very, very similar.And yes, I understand, that the application is greatly different, but the point was this: we can agree on a standard to encode attachments, why can't we agree on a standard for encryption?
If M$ had wanted to balls up email they could have decided to use they're own algorythm to do attachements. Why can't they centre on an encryption technology that is free and open source, just like MIME? It makes my inner conspiracy theorists blood boil, but the truth is probably that Verisign saw an opportunity to get into bed with Microsoft. They took it, and took free, easy email encryption with them.
It can't be that nobody else thinks it as important as attachements. Every company I've spoken to has, at some point, asked how they can encrypt their emails. What do I tell them? Yes, you can buy a key pair from verisign, but that will mean that only a selected number of your clients can actually read that email, or they have to buy Outlook and a versign key pair. Yes, you can encrypt your email, but you have to abandon the training and money you have invested in Outlook... oh and btw, the replacement won't have half the functionality, and won't work - but it will be free, and it doesn't work with Outlook! Or do I say: No. We've got the technology, but for some unknown reason, we just don't use it, even though it could massively reduce the need for spam filters, virus checkers and provides at the very least, a small amount of authentication. Its a sad situation to be in, don't you think?
how useless popular comms software is. Why should I have to register with Verisign to send an encrypted email to my girlfriend, co-workers etc. Why can't I just click a button and generate a random 128 bit key set and use PGP?
Why isn't this standard? A better question is, why can I send a MIME encoded attachement anywhere, but not a PGP encoded plain text email? Imagine the spam you could filter if you had a list of the PGP keys of all your friends and family. Imgaine if they moved email address, but there PGP key stayed the same.
If this is because Zimmerman want his 2 cents (which I can't blame him for) can't it be included in the cost of Windows and Macs, and let the rest of us download it for free? We need authenticatable (if there is such a word) emails, IMs etc yesterday. We have the technology!
Especially as DB-9 and DB-25 were so homebrew hardware friendly. USB cost a hell of a lot more to develope for than RS-232. OK it sucks for data transfer, but its great for sending control signals. Great projects like an automatic coffee machine etc would be very expensive if there was no RS-232. OK, they're not going to set the world alight, but its one more avenue of computer science that is made less accessible.
...you could do it without an iPod or Flashdrive! Imagine if you could just point a web browser at your box at home and you could use it as if you were there!
..oh... yeah. SSH, X11, VNC. Surely these are better solutions than having to takeover someones whole computer just because you can't stand to loose your session data or use WinXP? I guess its neat that someone has put a LiveCD on RAM, but it seems to make life harder than it really needs to be - still each to there own.
Definately. One of the first things you realise when you start concurrent programming is that 100% CPU usage is not possible. There are too many other bottlenecks. This really hurts the C/Assembler programmers mind set, but opens up spare cycles for a runtime based language like Java and .Net - although these are terrible languages for game prgramming.
Could this be the age of LISP or Haskel? Everytime I sit down and think about a language that could easily be handled by multicores I start designing LISP. (Those who don't know LISP are doomed to reinvent it). Clearly, the current runtime isn't there, but the language itself probably is - a few OpenGL modules?
You are right of course... I'm not as bright as Carmack, and I'm sure he's spent ALOT longer thinking about this than me.
//token represents recieveing dice
The most obvious problem with my solution is to think of it like a Games Workshop game. There has to be some sort of turn basis, otherwise the winner is the one who can role the dice fastest.
But taking that metaphire further, there are no idle cycles in a games workshop style game. Even though only one player can update the universe at a time, everybody else is crunching numbers, trying to figure out a stratergy. A succesful player is one whos stratergy can adapt to the changing games state, rather than having to constantly have to rethink their stratergy with every move. In that sense we could update my AI thread thus:
Thread 3-100:
do{
do{
if(universe.updated)
{get viewable universe}
refine statergy;
}while(hasToken == false);
publish action;
recieve reaction;
update state;
pass token;
}while(true);
This removes a lot of the race conditions, as only one NPC can update the universe at a time, the rest are just reading. If the changes to the universe between each pass of the token are small (this should be a fair assumption as you would expect one cycle of token passing per frame) then a little inaccuracy between the universe read and 'reality' should be expected - we all blink don't we?
This doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Wireless and DECT phones have had a warning that they can't be used for calls if teh power is out, why can't WiFi phones can't have that AND a warning about 911 location problems.
- Add to unprocessed que
- Grep for coded expressions
- add symbol to character action queue
Thread 2: Charactor Thread- read action queue
- publish action
- recieve reaction
- update state
Thread 3-100: AI Threads- Read viewable universe state
- Process against goals
- publish action
- recieve reaction
- update state
Please don't read this too literally, it only a slashdot post, but this is meta-outline of how I'd start thinking about the game universe in a multi cpu system. Of course it would run like shit on a single CPU (all those context switches (ugh)), but it would really utilize a multicore system.... a new definition of the term 'Open' spectrum.
"You can use this spectrum for whatever you like, provided you keep the emissions down to x and we can listen in to anything you say"
Say they do this, what is to stop the terrorists from using ham frequencies and using an encrypted signal? Yet again this is the problem with the FCC at the moment, they don't seem to understand the problem.
Say they block the ham frequencies, whats stopping the terrorists from sticking up UHF transmitter and broadcasting an encrypted channel over that? I know Americans have pretty much filled the UHF spectrum, but there is still noise between bands.
How will they be able to tell a terroist signal from noise on 2.4GHz? The whole point of a good encryption algorythm is that the signal looks like noise.
The list goes on. This whole plan is stupid. You can not use laws to stop law breakers.
which is fine as long as all you want to do is send plain text. I used to use Fire to talk to my girlfriend on MSN. The contact lists and text messaging worked fine, but I kept getting things like (ip) ({) etc and unless you know the codes, that means nothing to you.
It gets worse when you start to look at the advanced features: whiteboards, games, video and voice. You've got to have the genuine product and have it all working on the same architecture to stand a chance. Yahoo almost works for video PC-to-Mac (terrible quality), AIM to iChat kinda works. Its about as stable as Win95 and the video quality is rubbish when compared to iChat to iChat - YMMV, but I doubt it.
They're not exactly doing business in the US, so much as letting US citizens import their software freely. If the US can figure out a way of imposing an import restriction on internet traffic for a particular item of software, they wouldn't need to have the wire tapping restriction, they could just block all the packets marked "terrorist".
Now clearly IANAL, but the only thing the FCC can do is prevent the wholesale of phone minutes and numbers to foreign companies, forcing companies like Skype to set up US holdings, bringing them under FCC control. But what would that prove? The only thing that the FCC could possibly hope to control are calls that use the existing US POTS system (Skype In / Out) in that case they can monitor those as soon as the call hits the copper wire, which they can do already.
There is nothing the FCC or Feds can do about PC-2-PC comunication. Nothing. If thats voice data, video, bomb designs, or plain text they are helpless. What can they do? They could put a packet sniffer on a suspects DSL line, and guess at the software they're using and try and decrypt the messages. If they want to do that they can go after the DSL and cable providers who they already have by the balls. Even if they put a backdoor in the software, whats to stop Joe Terrorist from using a firewall or similar to block the backdoor, or to modify the inevitable OpenSkype so that it avoids the wiretaps and closes the backdoor?
Clearly the Feds have the right to do whatever they like to protect their citizens - in their country. This is a stupid action that shows a complete missunderstanding of both the internet and software.
I agree, its a stupid metaphore, very un-intuitive. But dragging things is fun! Howeverm until I think of a better metaphore for ejecting an icon I'll keep using Apples.
I personally prefer highlighting the icon and pressing cmd-e.
Dear Skype, We, the FCC, require you, a British company, to comply with American laws. If you don't we'll... say Ni! in your general direction. Your Friends The FCC Seriously, they're already giving away free phone calls, and free software from a foriegn country, using foreign servers. The best the FCC can hope for is that they put a line on their download page: Dear American, please don't download our software cause it will upset the FCC and the Feds. Failure to comply will mean that those in charge will think you are a terrorist. You don't want people to think your a terrosit do you? Vonage... well they're pretending to be a phone company, so they might have some luck.
What does this say about our industry?
I'm not saying your wrong, in fact I completely agree with you. I'm reminded of:
'When all you've got is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail'
The current mentality seems to be, everybodys got a hammer, so make nails - we understand that some people like the idea of screws, but that will upset the people that make hammers. If your nails don't work use more nails, or make bigger nails. If that doesn't work we'll make a bigger hammer. No screws allowed.
I figured... and I expect I'm wrong one of the reasons push technologies fail is because you have to work through NAT, firewalls and dynamic IP addresses all work against having a listeners on end users machines.
Maybe it could be done if it was handled by a system similar to Skype. With the data transmitted via HTTP with you machine acting like a web server, updating a distributed registry every time your IP is updated?
Subscribing to an RSS stream has always struck me as a misnoma. You're still using HTTP, so you're still having to request the data, rather than sit back and let the data come to you. Why can't the site tell me that the content is ready and ship it to me? If thats to bandwidth intensive, why can't there be a RSS protocol that using P2P to roundrobin the info amoungst the subscribers?
Couldn't this technology then be used to allow software updates etc as well as podcasts and news feeds?
In terms of a security risk, its only as bad as bittorrent. Sure somebody could modify their client to suck up the IPs of everyone that is interested in that information. Worse, somebody will probably figure out a way of adding a payload (although again, with proper hashing, and encryption that becomes increasingly difficult).
Could this be the killer app that gets us all hooked on IPv6?
This is exactly why I'll be buying the next Nintendo. Sony and Micorsofts licences are so expensive that publishers are risk averse, which can only be bad for gamers. Loss leader consoles are becoming an evil to the gaming comunity. Remember the old days when games could, and were published by individuals? It would be great to see the big three open up APIs for their consoles so that some inovation can be injected back into modern gaming. We have the technology! If EA et al were forced to compete with small software houses run by people who were allowed to sleep and see their families, I wonder whether we'd see more Katamari Damacy, Pickmin, Nintendo Dogs, Sims and less John Madden 30s.