If that's true, then MusicShifter is infringing copyright -- this is exactly what mp3.com got spanked for a few years ago (with mp3.com, you didn't send in your CD, you just put it in your PC to prove that you had it).
When they can actually have the physical CD in their hands, that's slightly stronger evidence that you actually own the CD than your home PC beaming a few bits over the net claiming that the disc is in your drive.
I proposed the same idea to my father when I was in highschool. The thing is internet latency is very, very high compared to the latency involved in hitting your own processor/memory. This ends up severely limiting the type of applications you can run in this sort of setting.
Botnets are an interesting example of this sort of computing, though. In fact, botnets are the closest thing we have to this sort of idea being implemented right now.
Anyway, the point is that real time applications such as gaming wouldn't really see much benefit from this. By the time someone else could execute part of your processing, and send the result back to you, you character is already a foot from where you were when you requested the work, and the old work is now completely irrelevant. Even more, I can't think of a single use for GPUs that *isn't* realtime -- distributed GPU use over the net is almost certainly 100% impractical. It's not uncommon for gamers to play at and above 100 FPS -- that leaves your system 10 milliseconds to render every frame; you can hardly ping someone a block away in that time -- severely limiting the number of computers available to your 'cluster'. Also latency is NOT garanteed on the net, much less successful, in order delivery.
It works for apps like SETI@home because seti just sends you a chunk of work every few minutes or hours, and doesn't particularly care if and when you finish it. There's no 10 ms deadline on SETI -- the project will finish when it finishes.
Internet wide cluster computing is most suitable for applications that are primarily about converting a very large input (years of SETI data, protein folding data, massive mailing lists for bot nets) into very large output (analyzed data, folded proteins, spam) over a long, unpredictable period of time.
Granted, the crosses are white, rather than red, but that probably has more to do with the fact that the atari could only display 3 colors at a time, if I recall correctly.
The asprin trademark got so watered down, that it became a household name, and lost their trademark (Genericized trademark
Would this be a similar case? I can't even begin to count the number of games and television shows I've seen this mark used in, going back to Dandy Dungeon on the atari. Hell, I'm sure a number of boardgames have used it. The mark's been 'misused' for decades -- isn't it a little late in the game to try and enforce it?
Someone actually discussed a similar idea at MUDdev con 2003. Unfortunately the archives at kanga.nu are pretty unreachable, so it's hard to find transcripts and the like at this point.
A tale in the desert lets you perform "Offline tasks", after you've done them sufficiently in game. If you've collected 500 units of grass in your lifetime, you can set your character to collect grass while you're offine. Or, you can accrue "run time", which you can use for instantaneous travel (the idea being that you did that running while offline).
FTA:
"...a wire protocol which transfers a lot of data bidirectionally and consistently looks like line noise with no header is only marginally more difficult to identify then one which uses fixed ports."
Sounds like a call to camoflage the traffic as several pipes between peers. Not just one tcp/ip connection, but several, with a jitter function to pick which pipe is used at the moment so it does not look consistant
Assuming that by "pipes" you mean "seperate TCP/IP connections established over several ports", and that you're assuming that ISPs will only ever monitor, as you call them "IP/port tuples", then your argument holds.
I, however, challenge the premise that ISPs will only ever monitor "IP/port tuples", and not simply by IP. Even if they don't now... Why wouldn't they?
Fact of the matter is that P2P traffic looks very different from normal web browsing on the grandest of scales. A P2P user transfers many gigabytes, both upstream AND downstream to many other low-bandwidth users -- most of which have IPs that are trivially attributed to DSL/cable providers, making it clear that they are users, not businesses (no major websites are hosted by SBC DSL users, comcast cable customers, etc. etc...) You can probably profile a P2P user by raw upload:download ratio alone, with 90% accuracy. The average web user downloads many times more than they send upstream.
Microsoft has something like 50,000 employees. That won't even fill many major sports arenas and concert venues. Unless you live in Wyoming, it really doesn't compare to the population of a "real" city.
50,000 people would actually fill several large concert venues. They tend to seat 10 - 20 thousand.
Zboards have better driver support for large key sequences. Some keyboards don't work properly when holding down 3 or 4 keys at once.
THAT is a valuable feature. There have been several games where I've tried to do things like strafe left while firing, only to hear the PC speaker beep, and see my character stand in place idly.
I've always wondered when someone would start marketing a keyboard with _that_ specific feature. THAT's what a gamer keyboard needs to do. AFAIK, even logitec's "Gamer" keyboards don't handle multiple simultaneous keypresses well at all.
I understand how traditional keyboards work, and why this is usually an issue. It pisses me off that almost every keyboard, be it $60 or $5, has the exact same flaw, though!
Keyboard manufacturers of the world: We want keyboards that can handle having 4+ keys being held down at the same time. We will pay a premium if you advertise this feature in large print! (And this is coming from a guy who's never paid more than $5 for a keyboard)
GParent: So a DJ can play a CD, but if she plays the same track ripped to an MP3, she has to pay an extra 200 pounds for a license?
Parent: If you buy a CD through the normal channels, you have no right to do public performances. So the situation is the same for CDs and MP3s here.
TFA: He said the £200 charge was "reasonable", adding: "You don't actually have to DJ using a laptop. You can use vinyl, you can use CD, so we're saying that if it's not worth your while spending £200 then don't do it."
TFA seems to indicate that a DJ could play a CD, but to play that same CD after ripping it to his laptop, would cost him and extra £200. That seems to side with GP. My knowledge of US copyright falls on parent's side -- thought this is UK.
My question: Does this mean that, in the UK, you can *legally* play all the music you can download, from any source, for only £200? That's not that much more than napster, if you break it down monthly.
I see you've still yet to learn to use a spellchecker.
Hi, Sadly, I'm olny 17, so I have (allas) only ever realy experienced Windoze and OSX at collage, although there are a fiew things that the students use in Windoze to their advantage.... I learnt infinite patents when all our family had as a computer wasa 10 yr old Pentium 2 running XP. You soon learn that there is nothing you can do. no tricks to stop it crashing, just sit and PRAY. Now I have a P4, and it still crashes as often. Shows its not the hardware at least...
Keep in mind a 64 bit processor can address 17 billion gig of ram. You only really need 128 bit processing if you want to address more than that. 64 bit processing is only interesting because we've begun to hit the 4 gig/processor barrier.
The wikipedia article on 128 bit processing points out that it's probably not efficient for a single 128 bit processor to have over 17 billion gig of ram to itself anyway -- it'd probably make far more sense to split the ram up between several 64 bit processors instead.
Instead of comparing a present-day Linux distro on that hardware to Win95, compare a 1995 distro and see how it looks. I'll bet you not only have a GUI, it'll be faster than the GatesWare.
In '98, I installed as many OSes on my PII/333mhz as I could get my hands on, as a sort of experiment. In the end I had windows 98, NT4 workstation and server, DOS, and Redhat 5.1
The out of the box redhat install was slow and clunky, compared to windows. In my experience, linux has only recently become an acceptable windows alternative -- package managers have improved greatly, hardware's improved exponentially (thanks Moore), installation's far easier, and the OSS community has continued to grow.
Now, I managed to install a stripped down version of that same distro (RH 5.1) on a 486/33 with 20 meg of ram, w/o all the gui cruft, and it ran great. The same box had previously run windows 3.11 acceptably, and windows 95 unacceptably (even notepad was slow)
If I want to make use of old hardware in my house, I'll install linux, hands down -- without a window manager.
According to Robert X. Cringely, Google is poised to construct a 120 km diamater orbital battle platform, with a weapon capabale of destroying entire planets.
Seriously, this guy must be making a killing in advertising with all these whacked out theories on what google's gonna do next. Two weeks ago, he claimed google was poised to build an independant internet, powered by cargo-container supercomputers with 8,000 AMD processors.
Have any of his ridiculous claims ever been backed up? Why do/.ers keep giving this guy traffic?
What if one of the kids pokes themselves with a screwdriver, or pinches a finger between the magnets in the drive?...nobody needs to learn such mundane skills as how to work with tools...Screwdrivers in a classroom?
Oh, don't worry, it hasn't gotten that bad yet. In bio, kids still get to disect fetal pigs with real scalpels. And there are still highschool hardware classes in which you get to do real PC maintentence with real screwdrivers.
I'm surprised something like this has never been built before purely for educational purposes. I can see someone making a good amount of money selling a hard drive like this for 5 times the price to schools.
Bah. There are millions of old useless drives out there, in landfills and elsewhere, all across the country. When I was a kid, I found a 40 megabyte harddrive in the garage (with the $400 price sticker still attatched) and disassembled it. The rare earth magnets that were inside (with a pull of over 100 lbs) are still stuck to my parent's fridge.
Why would a school want to spend $350 on a new drive with a window when they can get an old drive for every individual kid to tear appart free? It's a learning experience they'll never forget.
I have the worst memory of anyone I know (or remember;), and I have no trouble remembering if I have any pending applications
There's a goodly number of people out there who will see a subject like that and think: "IDENTITY THEFT! SOMEONE'S APPLYING FOR MORTGAGES WITH MY PERSONAL INFORMATION".
I know this for a fact because a coworker's code, which was supposed to email everyone who'd purchased from us exactly 21 days ago, emailed everyone who'd purchased from us in the last 2 years. We've since received dozens of emails saying "I'VE NEVER ORDERED FROM YOU, CANCEL THE CHARGE OR I'LL CONTACT MY LAWYER" or "I DIDN'T ORDER FROM YOU SOMEONE MUST HAVE STOLEN MY IDENTITY!", when in reality no charge has been made, and they did purchase from us -- a year and a half ago.
So: I can see how someone would OPEN the email, given that subject line, but I can't imagine why they would then PURCHASE any good or service from the spammer!
I still use Yahoo for all of my spam and I love it for that. It hasn't changed much over what it used to be.
You haven't seen their new beta. It's AJAX based, and allows drag and drop --- all in all, it's a lot like using a desktop client (like thunderbird) in your web browser.
Slashdot Mirror
If that's true, then MusicShifter is infringing copyright -- this is exactly what mp3.com got spanked for a few years ago (with mp3.com, you didn't send in your CD, you just put it in your PC to prove that you had it).
When they can actually have the physical CD in their hands, that's slightly stronger evidence that you actually own the CD than your home PC beaming a few bits over the net claiming that the disc is in your drive.
I think it's pretty clear who's made large contributions to Ed Chavez's campaign.
If only I were pulling this outta my ass:
"Chavez top recipient of lobbyists' campaign donations"
I guess ed's the most popular whore in Sacremento.
There's at least as much cop killing in GTA as there is ho slaughtering.
I proposed the same idea to my father when I was in highschool. The thing is internet latency is very, very high compared to the latency involved in hitting your own processor/memory. This ends up severely limiting the type of applications you can run in this sort of setting.
Botnets are an interesting example of this sort of computing, though. In fact, botnets are the closest thing we have to this sort of idea being implemented right now.
Anyway, the point is that real time applications such as gaming wouldn't really see much benefit from this. By the time someone else could execute part of your processing, and send the result back to you, you character is already a foot from where you were when you requested the work, and the old work is now completely irrelevant. Even more, I can't think of a single use for GPUs that *isn't* realtime -- distributed GPU use over the net is almost certainly 100% impractical. It's not uncommon for gamers to play at and above 100 FPS -- that leaves your system 10 milliseconds to render every frame; you can hardly ping someone a block away in that time -- severely limiting the number of computers available to your 'cluster'. Also latency is NOT garanteed on the net, much less successful, in order delivery.
It works for apps like SETI@home because seti just sends you a chunk of work every few minutes or hours, and doesn't particularly care if and when you finish it. There's no 10 ms deadline on SETI -- the project will finish when it finishes.
Internet wide cluster computing is most suitable for applications that are primarily about converting a very large input (years of SETI data, protein folding data, massive mailing lists for bot nets) into very large output (analyzed data, folded proteins, spam) over a long, unpredictable period of time.
You mean they didn't already go bankrupt 5 years ago? I thought they were long gone!
Screenshot of crosses on healthpacks in Dandy dungeon, circa 1983
Granted, the crosses are white, rather than red, but that probably has more to do with the fact that the atari could only display 3 colors at a time, if I recall correctly.
The asprin trademark got so watered down, that it became a household name, and lost their trademark (Genericized trademark
Would this be a similar case? I can't even begin to count the number of games and television shows I've seen this mark used in, going back to Dandy Dungeon on the atari. Hell, I'm sure a number of boardgames have used it. The mark's been 'misused' for decades -- isn't it a little late in the game to try and enforce it?
Someone actually discussed a similar idea at MUDdev con 2003. Unfortunately the archives at kanga.nu are pretty unreachable, so it's hard to find transcripts and the like at this point.
A tale in the desert lets you perform "Offline tasks", after you've done them sufficiently in game. If you've collected 500 units of grass in your lifetime, you can set your character to collect grass while you're offine. Or, you can accrue "run time", which you can use for instantaneous travel (the idea being that you did that running while offline).
FTA: "...a wire protocol which transfers a lot of data bidirectionally and consistently looks like line noise with no header is only marginally more difficult to identify then one which uses fixed ports." Sounds like a call to camoflage the traffic as several pipes between peers. Not just one tcp/ip connection, but several, with a jitter function to pick which pipe is used at the moment so it does not look consistant
Assuming that by "pipes" you mean "seperate TCP/IP connections established over several ports", and that you're assuming that ISPs will only ever monitor, as you call them "IP/port tuples", then your argument holds.
I, however, challenge the premise that ISPs will only ever monitor "IP/port tuples", and not simply by IP. Even if they don't now... Why wouldn't they?
Fact of the matter is that P2P traffic looks very different from normal web browsing on the grandest of scales. A P2P user transfers many gigabytes, both upstream AND downstream to many other low-bandwidth users -- most of which have IPs that are trivially attributed to DSL/cable providers, making it clear that they are users, not businesses (no major websites are hosted by SBC DSL users, comcast cable customers, etc. etc...) You can probably profile a P2P user by raw upload:download ratio alone, with 90% accuracy. The average web user downloads many times more than they send upstream.
That's brahm's point.
Google is a business, with two options to choose from:
If you expect them to pick #2, you're a damn fool.
Microsoft has something like 50,000 employees. That won't even fill many major sports arenas and concert venues. Unless you live in Wyoming, it really doesn't compare to the population of a "real" city.
50,000 people would actually fill several large concert venues. They tend to seat 10 - 20 thousand.
good thing copyright violation and theft are different things entirely.
My father's been designing multiuser apps since the '80s on quantumlink.
He taught me a simple, valuable lesson that programmers ignore every day, often with harsh consequences.
DON'T TRUST THE CLIENT.
There's never a guarentee that the computer your server is communicating with is running client you wrote, be it in 6502 assembly or Javascript.
Zboards have better driver support for large key sequences. Some keyboards don't work properly when holding down 3 or 4 keys at once.
THAT is a valuable feature. There have been several games where I've tried to do things like strafe left while firing, only to hear the PC speaker beep, and see my character stand in place idly.
I've always wondered when someone would start marketing a keyboard with _that_ specific feature. THAT's what a gamer keyboard needs to do. AFAIK, even logitec's "Gamer" keyboards don't handle multiple simultaneous keypresses well at all.
I understand how traditional keyboards work, and why this is usually an issue. It pisses me off that almost every keyboard, be it $60 or $5, has the exact same flaw, though!
Keyboard manufacturers of the world: We want keyboards that can handle having 4+ keys being held down at the same time. We will pay a premium if you advertise this feature in large print! (And this is coming from a guy who's never paid more than $5 for a keyboard)
GParent: So a DJ can play a CD, but if she plays the same track ripped to an MP3, she has to pay an extra 200 pounds for a license?
Parent: If you buy a CD through the normal channels, you have no right to do public performances. So the situation is the same for CDs and MP3s here.
TFA: He said the £200 charge was "reasonable", adding: "You don't actually have to DJ using a laptop. You can use vinyl, you can use CD, so we're saying that if it's not worth your while spending £200 then don't do it."
TFA seems to indicate that a DJ could play a CD, but to play that same CD after ripping it to his laptop, would cost him and extra £200. That seems to side with GP. My knowledge of US copyright falls on parent's side -- thought this is UK.
My question: Does this mean that, in the UK, you can *legally* play all the music you can download, from any source, for only £200? That's not that much more than napster, if you break it down monthly.
I see you've still yet to learn to use a spellchecker.
Hi, Sadly, I'm olny 17, so I have (allas) only ever realy experienced Windoze and OSX at collage, although there are a fiew things that the students use in Windoze to their advantage.... I learnt infinite patents when all our family had as a computer wasa 10 yr old Pentium 2 running XP. You soon learn that there is nothing you can do. no tricks to stop it crashing, just sit and PRAY. Now I have a P4, and it still crashes as often. Shows its not the hardware at least...
Keep in mind a 64 bit processor can address 17 billion gig of ram. You only really need 128 bit processing if you want to address more than that. 64 bit processing is only interesting because we've begun to hit the 4 gig/processor barrier. The wikipedia article on 128 bit processing points out that it's probably not efficient for a single 128 bit processor to have over 17 billion gig of ram to itself anyway -- it'd probably make far more sense to split the ram up between several 64 bit processors instead.
Ironically, the "Let's get the cliches out of the way" post has become a cliche.
Instead of comparing a present-day Linux distro on that hardware to Win95, compare a 1995 distro and see how it looks. I'll bet you not only have a GUI, it'll be faster than the GatesWare.
In '98, I installed as many OSes on my PII/333mhz as I could get my hands on, as a sort of experiment. In the end I had windows 98, NT4 workstation and server, DOS, and Redhat 5.1
The out of the box redhat install was slow and clunky, compared to windows. In my experience, linux has only recently become an acceptable windows alternative -- package managers have improved greatly, hardware's improved exponentially (thanks Moore), installation's far easier, and the OSS community has continued to grow.
Now, I managed to install a stripped down version of that same distro (RH 5.1) on a 486/33 with 20 meg of ram, w/o all the gui cruft, and it ran great. The same box had previously run windows 3.11 acceptably, and windows 95 unacceptably (even notepad was slow)
If I want to make use of old hardware in my house, I'll install linux, hands down -- without a window manager.
According to Robert X. Cringely, Google is poised to construct a 120 km diamater orbital battle platform, with a weapon capabale of destroying entire planets.
/.ers keep giving this guy traffic?
Seriously, this guy must be making a killing in advertising with all these whacked out theories on what google's gonna do next. Two weeks ago, he claimed google was poised to build an independant internet, powered by cargo-container supercomputers with 8,000 AMD processors.
Have any of his ridiculous claims ever been backed up? Why do
What if one of the kids pokes themselves with a screwdriver, or pinches a finger between the magnets in the drive? ...nobody needs to learn such mundane skills as how to work with tools ...Screwdrivers in a classroom?
Oh, don't worry, it hasn't gotten that bad yet. In bio, kids still get to disect fetal pigs with real scalpels. And there are still highschool hardware classes in which you get to do real PC maintentence with real screwdrivers.
I'm surprised something like this has never been built before purely for educational purposes. I can see someone making a good amount of money selling a hard drive like this for 5 times the price to schools.
Bah. There are millions of old useless drives out there, in landfills and elsewhere, all across the country. When I was a kid, I found a 40 megabyte harddrive in the garage (with the $400 price sticker still attatched) and disassembled it. The rare earth magnets that were inside (with a pull of over 100 lbs) are still stuck to my parent's fridge.
Why would a school want to spend $350 on a new drive with a window when they can get an old drive for every individual kid to tear appart free? It's a learning experience they'll never forget.
I have the worst memory of anyone I know (or remember ;), and I have no trouble remembering if I have any pending applications
There's a goodly number of people out there who will see a subject like that and think: "IDENTITY THEFT! SOMEONE'S APPLYING FOR MORTGAGES WITH MY PERSONAL INFORMATION".
I know this for a fact because a coworker's code, which was supposed to email everyone who'd purchased from us exactly 21 days ago, emailed everyone who'd purchased from us in the last 2 years. We've since received dozens of emails saying "I'VE NEVER ORDERED FROM YOU, CANCEL THE CHARGE OR I'LL CONTACT MY LAWYER" or "I DIDN'T ORDER FROM YOU SOMEONE MUST HAVE STOLEN MY IDENTITY!", when in reality no charge has been made, and they did purchase from us -- a year and a half ago.
So: I can see how someone would OPEN the email, given that subject line, but I can't imagine why they would then PURCHASE any good or service from the spammer!
I still use Yahoo for all of my spam and I love it for that. It hasn't changed much over what it used to be.
You haven't seen their new beta. It's AJAX based, and allows drag and drop --- all in all, it's a lot like using a desktop client (like thunderbird) in your web browser.