Good point; I suppose, then, there'd have to be some better form of collision resolution in place. This might not be easy to do, but there are certainly ways of solving it, and tossing the entire idea out the window on the grounds that the current vastly corrupted and outdated system is "good enough" is even more shortsighted.
I hardly believe in first come, first serve--which, incidentally, is closer to the current centralized domain registration system than to a well-implemented decentralized one. The domain will resolve to whichever address is most appropriate based on the answers given and the trust ratings of the answering computers; this way, rather than having a single centralized mish-mash of domains like foobarbaz123.com, communities can form around sets of domains pertinent to themselves.
This would not function at all like Usenet or Kazaa; trust would play a very important role, preventing junk-flooding, and the relevant domain names to any trust web would be a relatively small subset of the entire set of names. The system would not be a direct replacement for the current DNS registry; rather, it would be a different way of thinking about names in the Internet.
Amongst the feudal corps its in more of a "trustworthy" hand than in just anybody/everybodys.
So you're saying you'd rather have a group of complete strangers whose only motivation to protect your rights is to avoid getting in trouble control what websites go where than a group of your own self-selected, trusted friends (a la PGP)?
when i hear "the only way to do that is to decentralize the process" i think of p2p.. sure its nice, it will live long & prosper. but its easy to taint.
You're thinking of projects like Kazaa, I presume; those quite obviously are easy to manipulate and break, because they were designed with (poor|no) trust management system; any jackass can put whatever he wants on the network and it's given equal priority to everybody else's stuff (much, I might add, like the current domain registration scheme: you can register a domain, then completely ignore it, and it will still be held just as important as, say, slashdot.org in the system). In this hypothetical decentralized system, domains that are accessed regularly will propagate more through peoples' address books and be more reliable. One possible flaw that might be noticed here is that this would seem to suggest that only big sites would have stable domains; with a web of trust scheme in place, though, a site with a very small userbase who all trust each other can exist among that userbase indefinitely.
"allow anybody to register a domain name, and it'll propagate as it's accessed." sorta reminds me of irc channels, sure you can reg it, but guess what. who the hell do you complain to when there are no IRCops to complain TO.
I have no clue what you're asking here--probably because you never used a single question mark, but that's beside the point. Rephrase this in a way that makes some semblance of sense and I'll try to respond to it.
what happenes when it all becomes a big mess? where is the DIFINITIVE, AUTHORITIVE source for the "RIGHT" answer? and do you think that a 10, 5, 1 day old backup is enough to restore order to the chaos that would amass?
You're looking at it the wrong way; there will be no definitive, authoritative source, nor will there be a single "right" answer. The net will exist as a group of communities of trusted friends, meshing and interacting with each other dynamically; if a collision is produced between domain names, the one that is offered by the source you trust more will be used. In this way, community A, a group of gun nuts, can maintain that foo.com points to a site about the evils of gun control, while community B maintains that foo.com points to a site promoting gun regulation. Both communities can happily use the foo.com domain independently and both can achieve the results that they desire.
I honestly find it hard to believe that a single entity can maintain control over such a large part of the Internet for so long a time; in the net's early days, a centralized domain registry might have been acceptable, being that it was a small thing and the overhead to implement anything more advanced would've outweighed the benefits. Now, though, with the Internet the size it is, I honestly think that something better needs to be in place: get rid of this central-domain-registry crap. Whoever's in charge of it--Verisign, Microsoft, even Google--is going to profiteer to some extent, simply because that is what companies do.
If you ask my opinion, a decentralized system would make much more sense here. Store addresses in a Kademlia network or something; allow anybody to register a domain name, and it'll propagate as it's accessed. With a PGP-like trust system implemented, there need not be a central registry anywhere. The only way to prevent abuse of such a large monopoly is to prevent any single entity from controlling it, and the only way to do that is to decentralize the process.
You have to recognize, though, that it can be difficult for hardware producers to write drivers that run on every conceivable version of *n*x; there are so many different combinations of hardware and kernel options that it quickly gets messy. It's much better for hardware manufacturers to release specifications for their hardware--publish what the chip does when it receives signal x on pins 20-25, and what the significance of the output of pins 30-39 is. Then, let the driver writers for the various operating systems take care of the work so that the hardware manufacturer can stick to what it does best: manufacturing hardware.
Open drivers would be nice, but without any standard interface to different operating systems, it's a lofty goal at best and a severe distraction from real hardware development work at worst; open specifications are what really count.
I'm actually kind of disappointed by this; the new terms seem more misleading to me than the old. It's important to keep in mind on IM services--and on the Internet in general--that anything you transmit unencrypted can be accessed and read by the general public. Now that AOL has stated that it won't read peoples' IMs, the uninformed masses have had their false sense of privacy restored. What, however, happens when the information stored (but not read) is requested of AOL by subpoena? What if the information is cracked out of the company by a malicious user? What of the several computers that have access to your messages in plain text as they are routed through the Internet?
The only way to keep your sensitive data and conversations private on the web is to encrypt them; any statement of privacy over plain-text media is at best erroneous, and at worst dangerously misleading.
The only thing I use it for is to go to the M$ site and grab security updates, I can't be bothered to look for a new way to do that and also don't see any reason why it would be worth it.
There's actually a solution for that, too. One relatively painless Firefox extension install, and you no longer have any need to keep IE on your computer. Now, granted, you might say that you don't trust WindizUpdate; on the other hand, though, do you trust Microsoft?
NOTHING else is as cheap. No pro sports, concerts, operas, plays, ballets, movies, dinners, truck shows, car races, or comedy clubs give you anywhere near that many hours of entertainment, for anywhere close that such a low price. Nor can you get any of your money back when you're finished "enjoying" anything I just listed, except for CDs.
Well, it won't be "your" music; if there's copy protection on it, then clearly, the company distributing it doesn't want to give up ownership of it to the public domain.
On the other hand, you can decide to boycott music that you can't copy, and buy only music released by studios that don't place copy protection on their CDs. In the long run, the collective action of millions of consumers behaving this way--rather than indiscriminately ripping and spreading all of their music--will cause copy protection to fade into history, as it should be. As I see it, this law is a wonderful thing for free music.
Look at it this way: I, a company, places protection on a work that prevents it from ever being released into the public domain. You are not allowed to copy it, so you, being mindful of the law, don't. It then never appears on any of the major file-sharing networks, and the work never spreads.
Meanwhile, you, another company, release your work on CD without any copy protection. It enters into the public domain as people copy the music and share it online, it spreads, and a good portion of the people who listen to it like it enough to buy it.
I like this law, personally; it will discourage copy protection, as in the long run those who embrace it fade into obscurity while those who publicly release their work gain widespread fan bases.
The parent will probably be modded troll--or +5 Insightful, who can tell--but he's got a point:
I think it'll come to a point, that if you don't want government in your life, you'll need to live in a country where the government has little technology.
It seems increasingly as though any institution will limit the rights of those it serves as far as possible and for whatever reason it deems acceptable, so long as it has the capability to do so. Take that capability away, and peoples' rights can't be infringed on. One way of doing that is to live in an underdeveloped nation, perhaps, but I think a better way is to place physical barriers on the reach and capability of technology by developing it with security and privacy in mind. If onion skin encryption were the de facto standard on the Internet today, the debate over whether or not to let the government sniff web traffic wouldn't even exist.
Of course, on the other hand, if the government is limited as such, we might all be wading in a web of kiddie porn and snuff films online, but I give people as a group more credit than that, and I think that there comes a point where you have to decide whether you value your privacy and personal liberty more than you value keeping the web--or the air waves, or the streets--free from things that you find morally repugnant or even downright evil. It might be that a balance has to be struck, but in any case where liberty is conceded for any reason, you're essentially placing said liberty in the hands of an outside body; you'd better be damn sure that it will not at any point use its position of power to infringe on your own rights, and I can't think of any way of being certain of that right now.
imagine if you were using KDE, openoffice, firefox, abiword, gimp, gnumeric all on a windows box? there isn't much windows left. And that takes away from their monopoly and it makes migration to Linux/BSD/Darwin very easy.
In theory, sure; I'm using Firefox, Blackbox, GIMP, et al. on my Windows box right now, but switching to *nix is highly impractical for me. Why? I have a Radeon 9800XT and an Audigy 2; support for these sorts of things is piss-poor in *nix at the moment. If GNU/Linux wants to attract the high-performance geek crowd, it's going to need to work on its hardware support.
On the other hand, the cooperation of hardware manufacturers is needed for that sort of thing, and they're not going to cooperate until they see GNU/Linux as a widely used platform... it's something of a vicious cycle, really.
People don't like to deal with proprietary architecture; I would be using Mac OS X right now--I personally find it far superior to Windows as an operating system--except that it only runs on Apple's hardware. As much as a monopoly on the operating system has inflated the cost of Windows, the inflation in a market where there is only a single manufacturer of computer hardware is even worse. If OS X could run on x86, I'd switch in an instant.
As for Linux, it's just got too many rough edges to be looked at seriously as a desktop operating system for any except those who take the time to learn its idiosyncrasies; it has two completely separate GUI toolkits with different looks and feels, and important programs written in both of these. It has so many different distributions with different ways of installing software and managing settings that an inexperienced user or developer will be left spinning; it lacks the focus for the time being to be considered as a solution by typical desktop users. Windows, for all else that can be said about it, has a strong, consistent look and feel; to Joe Blow and Grandma Ethel, that is absolutely crucial.
When you walk around in public, do you bring out your kiddie porn collection, break into shops, try to abduct little girls/boys, expose yourself to random men/women, [...]
I've spent the weekend writing up some CSS layouts, and I'd previously come upon the same thought as you have--CSS would be a lot better off with definable constants. It wouldn't take an unreasonable expansion to the language, either; heck, there's already a similar (albeit not very well-supported) functionality built in for other purposes, in the form of the @font-face rule. Extending that a bit, as I see it, it would be almost trivial to standardize something like @constant { name: "light-text"; value: "#3fc" }. That would definitely make stylesheets more maintainable and expandable--I could produce entirely new color schemes in a static CSS file just by editing some values at the beginning. A variable system like that seems much more in line with the overall spirit of CSS than the current method of repeatedly referencing the exact color or relying on other means to work out the layout.
A typical layperson hears "Netscape", and they immediately think of that browser that was real popular a while ago; it's familiar. They can trust it. Firefox, though, seems unfortunately to have been stigmatized as an "underground" or "hacker" project among the unwashed masses. You and I might not bother with Netscape, but Joe and Susy Blow will definitely pay some attention to it, and that's what really counts in this browser battle, since the Blows happen to be a very large family.
Every time you butcher the engine's name, God shoots a hippie. Seriously, that made me cry.
Anyway, I think that the general strategy is to run Gecko whenever possible, and then switch to the IE engine on certain "blacklisted" pages; ideally, a notice would be displayed saying that x page must be displayed in "legacy" mode when IE's engine is pulled out, to give site designers some incentive to write clean code.
What are you, nuts? A phone that just happens to have a 3GB hard drive and the ability to play music as competition with a full-fledged music player? I'd look more towards things like the Rio Karma for iPod competition, myself.
Ogg doesn't equate to quality loss; in fact, it performs better than mp3 in most cases. You're right, though, as far as converting mp3 to ogg; converting mp3 to anything (indeed, converting any lossy format to anything) is a bad idea, and will result in quality loss. That's why it's so important to be able to play both; you're invariably going to have some music in legacy formats on your computer, but at the same time, you'll want to take advantage of the higher quality and smaller file sizes afforded by Ogg files encoded from lossless sources (WAVs or CD audio).
How about "Vorbis"? I've always thought that was a really cool name. Maybe the format would have more support if it was referred to based on the name of the codec rather than the audio container?
Slashdot Mirror
Good point; I suppose, then, there'd have to be some better form of collision resolution in place. This might not be easy to do, but there are certainly ways of solving it, and tossing the entire idea out the window on the grounds that the current vastly corrupted and outdated system is "good enough" is even more shortsighted.
I hardly believe in first come, first serve--which, incidentally, is closer to the current centralized domain registration system than to a well-implemented decentralized one. The domain will resolve to whichever address is most appropriate based on the answers given and the trust ratings of the answering computers; this way, rather than having a single centralized mish-mash of domains like foobarbaz123.com, communities can form around sets of domains pertinent to themselves.
This would not function at all like Usenet or Kazaa; trust would play a very important role, preventing junk-flooding, and the relevant domain names to any trust web would be a relatively small subset of the entire set of names. The system would not be a direct replacement for the current DNS registry; rather, it would be a different way of thinking about names in the Internet.
So you're saying you'd rather have a group of complete strangers whose only motivation to protect your rights is to avoid getting in trouble control what websites go where than a group of your own self-selected, trusted friends (a la PGP)?
You're thinking of projects like Kazaa, I presume; those quite obviously are easy to manipulate and break, because they were designed with (poor|no) trust management system; any jackass can put whatever he wants on the network and it's given equal priority to everybody else's stuff (much, I might add, like the current domain registration scheme: you can register a domain, then completely ignore it, and it will still be held just as important as, say, slashdot.org in the system). In this hypothetical decentralized system, domains that are accessed regularly will propagate more through peoples' address books and be more reliable. One possible flaw that might be noticed here is that this would seem to suggest that only big sites would have stable domains; with a web of trust scheme in place, though, a site with a very small userbase who all trust each other can exist among that userbase indefinitely.
I have no clue what you're asking here--probably because you never used a single question mark, but that's beside the point. Rephrase this in a way that makes some semblance of sense and I'll try to respond to it.
You're looking at it the wrong way; there will be no definitive, authoritative source, nor will there be a single "right" answer. The net will exist as a group of communities of trusted friends, meshing and interacting with each other dynamically; if a collision is produced between domain names, the one that is offered by the source you trust more will be used. In this way, community A, a group of gun nuts, can maintain that foo.com points to a site about the evils of gun control, while community B maintains that foo.com points to a site promoting gun regulation. Both communities can happily use the foo.com domain independently and both can achieve the results that they desire.
I honestly find it hard to believe that a single entity can maintain control over such a large part of the Internet for so long a time; in the net's early days, a centralized domain registry might have been acceptable, being that it was a small thing and the overhead to implement anything more advanced would've outweighed the benefits. Now, though, with the Internet the size it is, I honestly think that something better needs to be in place: get rid of this central-domain-registry crap. Whoever's in charge of it--Verisign, Microsoft, even Google--is going to profiteer to some extent, simply because that is what companies do.
If you ask my opinion, a decentralized system would make much more sense here. Store addresses in a Kademlia network or something; allow anybody to register a domain name, and it'll propagate as it's accessed. With a PGP-like trust system implemented, there need not be a central registry anywhere. The only way to prevent abuse of such a large monopoly is to prevent any single entity from controlling it, and the only way to do that is to decentralize the process.
At least don't blow money on it as well.
You have to recognize, though, that it can be difficult for hardware producers to write drivers that run on every conceivable version of *n*x; there are so many different combinations of hardware and kernel options that it quickly gets messy. It's much better for hardware manufacturers to release specifications for their hardware--publish what the chip does when it receives signal x on pins 20-25, and what the significance of the output of pins 30-39 is. Then, let the driver writers for the various operating systems take care of the work so that the hardware manufacturer can stick to what it does best: manufacturing hardware.
Open drivers would be nice, but without any standard interface to different operating systems, it's a lofty goal at best and a severe distraction from real hardware development work at worst; open specifications are what really count.
I'm actually kind of disappointed by this; the new terms seem more misleading to me than the old. It's important to keep in mind on IM services--and on the Internet in general--that anything you transmit unencrypted can be accessed and read by the general public. Now that AOL has stated that it won't read peoples' IMs, the uninformed masses have had their false sense of privacy restored. What, however, happens when the information stored (but not read) is requested of AOL by subpoena? What if the information is cracked out of the company by a malicious user? What of the several computers that have access to your messages in plain text as they are routed through the Internet?
The only way to keep your sensitive data and conversations private on the web is to encrypt them; any statement of privacy over plain-text media is at best erroneous, and at worst dangerously misleading.
There's actually a solution for that, too. One relatively painless Firefox extension install, and you no longer have any need to keep IE on your computer. Now, granted, you might say that you don't trust WindizUpdate; on the other hand, though, do you trust Microsoft?
Actually, it's possible. It's not particularly easy, but it can be done.
Books.
Well, it won't be "your" music; if there's copy protection on it, then clearly, the company distributing it doesn't want to give up ownership of it to the public domain.
On the other hand, you can decide to boycott music that you can't copy, and buy only music released by studios that don't place copy protection on their CDs. In the long run, the collective action of millions of consumers behaving this way--rather than indiscriminately ripping and spreading all of their music--will cause copy protection to fade into history, as it should be. As I see it, this law is a wonderful thing for free music.
Look at it this way: I, a company, places protection on a work that prevents it from ever being released into the public domain. You are not allowed to copy it, so you, being mindful of the law, don't. It then never appears on any of the major file-sharing networks, and the work never spreads.
Meanwhile, you, another company, release your work on CD without any copy protection. It enters into the public domain as people copy the music and share it online, it spreads, and a good portion of the people who listen to it like it enough to buy it.
I like this law, personally; it will discourage copy protection, as in the long run those who embrace it fade into obscurity while those who publicly release their work gain widespread fan bases.
Drugs are a "real problem"?
The parent will probably be modded troll--or +5 Insightful, who can tell--but he's got a point:
It seems increasingly as though any institution will limit the rights of those it serves as far as possible and for whatever reason it deems acceptable, so long as it has the capability to do so. Take that capability away, and peoples' rights can't be infringed on. One way of doing that is to live in an underdeveloped nation, perhaps, but I think a better way is to place physical barriers on the reach and capability of technology by developing it with security and privacy in mind. If onion skin encryption were the de facto standard on the Internet today, the debate over whether or not to let the government sniff web traffic wouldn't even exist.
Of course, on the other hand, if the government is limited as such, we might all be wading in a web of kiddie porn and snuff films online, but I give people as a group more credit than that, and I think that there comes a point where you have to decide whether you value your privacy and personal liberty more than you value keeping the web--or the air waves, or the streets--free from things that you find morally repugnant or even downright evil. It might be that a balance has to be struck, but in any case where liberty is conceded for any reason, you're essentially placing said liberty in the hands of an outside body; you'd better be damn sure that it will not at any point use its position of power to infringe on your own rights, and I can't think of any way of being certain of that right now.
On the other hand, the cooperation of hardware manufacturers is needed for that sort of thing, and they're not going to cooperate until they see GNU/Linux as a widely used platform... it's something of a vicious cycle, really.
People don't like to deal with proprietary architecture; I would be using Mac OS X right now--I personally find it far superior to Windows as an operating system--except that it only runs on Apple's hardware. As much as a monopoly on the operating system has inflated the cost of Windows, the inflation in a market where there is only a single manufacturer of computer hardware is even worse. If OS X could run on x86, I'd switch in an instant.
As for Linux, it's just got too many rough edges to be looked at seriously as a desktop operating system for any except those who take the time to learn its idiosyncrasies; it has two completely separate GUI toolkits with different looks and feels, and important programs written in both of these. It has so many different distributions with different ways of installing software and managing settings that an inexperienced user or developer will be left spinning; it lacks the focus for the time being to be considered as a solution by typical desktop users. Windows, for all else that can be said about it, has a strong, consistent look and feel; to Joe Blow and Grandma Ethel, that is absolutely crucial.
I've spent the weekend writing up some CSS layouts, and I'd previously come upon the same thought as you have--CSS would be a lot better off with definable constants. It wouldn't take an unreasonable expansion to the language, either; heck, there's already a similar (albeit not very well-supported) functionality built in for other purposes, in the form of the @font-face rule. Extending that a bit, as I see it, it would be almost trivial to standardize something like @constant { name: "light-text"; value: "#3fc" }. That would definitely make stylesheets more maintainable and expandable--I could produce entirely new color schemes in a static CSS file just by editing some values at the beginning. A variable system like that seems much more in line with the overall spirit of CSS than the current method of repeatedly referencing the exact color or relying on other means to work out the layout.
A typical layperson hears "Netscape", and they immediately think of that browser that was real popular a while ago; it's familiar. They can trust it. Firefox, though, seems unfortunately to have been stigmatized as an "underground" or "hacker" project among the unwashed masses. You and I might not bother with Netscape, but Joe and Susy Blow will definitely pay some attention to it, and that's what really counts in this browser battle, since the Blows happen to be a very large family.
Every time you butcher the engine's name, God shoots a hippie. Seriously, that made me cry.
Anyway, I think that the general strategy is to run Gecko whenever possible, and then switch to the IE engine on certain "blacklisted" pages; ideally, a notice would be displayed saying that x page must be displayed in "legacy" mode when IE's engine is pulled out, to give site designers some incentive to write clean code.
So you'd sacrifice sound quality, storage space, and functionality in exchange for a phone that plays music and does your laundry for you?
What are you, nuts? A phone that just happens to have a 3GB hard drive and the ability to play music as competition with a full-fledged music player? I'd look more towards things like the Rio Karma for iPod competition, myself.
Ogg doesn't equate to quality loss; in fact, it performs better than mp3 in most cases. You're right, though, as far as converting mp3 to ogg; converting mp3 to anything (indeed, converting any lossy format to anything) is a bad idea, and will result in quality loss. That's why it's so important to be able to play both; you're invariably going to have some music in legacy formats on your computer, but at the same time, you'll want to take advantage of the higher quality and smaller file sizes afforded by Ogg files encoded from lossless sources (WAVs or CD audio).
How about "Vorbis"? I've always thought that was a really cool name. Maybe the format would have more support if it was referred to based on the name of the codec rather than the audio container?
How in the hell did the parent get modded Insightful?!