As someone who has extensively built and repaired all manner of cellular(GSM, UMTS, PCN/DCS) base station antennas for a living, let me tell you straight off that this thing is not revolutionary. Perhaps they've figured out a way of doing what is already possible (small antennas everywhere) at a lower cost in terms of manufacturing and energy-consumption. But, if I understand it correctly, the antennas consume far more energy than the electronics used to process the signal. I was also led to believe that grouping dipoles into large, concentrated arrays is a more efficient way of getting a strong signal over a wide area. But don't listen to me; I'm not an RF engineer. I'm just a soldering genius who happened to work with RF engineers for a few years.
but you still have to have the disk in the drive while you play. The OP wants to use the disk once and then, presumably, keep it in a locked glass cabinet for the rest of time. If any console manufacturer allowed users to do this, piracy would kill any incentive for developers to make games on that platform.
"But most of all, I want to see a law being passed against ever adapting VALIS to the big screen. Or, alternatively, the powers need to legalize drugs in the quantity needed to sit through and get an experience out of it."
This. VALIS would never make it to the big screen while retaining the themes and beauty of the book. However, if someone made a film of the film VALIS from the book VALIS, that might be a little bit awesome. I want to see Mother Goose's head explode.
Sure it has flaws, but that's the price you pay for bleeding edge technology.
I imagine by the time the device is in it's third generation it'll be a much more robust and functional product. Unless they decide to keep right on pushing the envelope, cramming in every little piece of cool they possibly can.
I bought a 10k rpm 36gb Western Digital Raptor drive for £80ish (very steep, if you ask me), but when i installed a new windows partition, the bootup speed was incredible. About 20-25 seconds from the moment i hit the power button(provided i spend less than a second deciding which OS to use in GRUB). it's gone up a bit since then, what with all the applications and shit, so i might have to start again soon. It's just a hassle to deal with windows erasing the MBR.
I have Ubuntu dapper on the same disk and it takes about 3x as long, even though it's at the start of the disk!
Wouldn't it be nice to hear an artist like cliff richard say something along the lines of "oh, i'm wealthy enough as it is. Who cares if my music will soon gradually make it's way into the public domain, as i'll never have to work another day in my life!" ?
Or perhaps something more like, "I look forward to people having a chance to make some cash from my material that stopped generating me any significant amount of money forty five years ago! It'll make me feel slightly better about this vast fortune i've accumulated over the course of my career."
You'd get all these wealthy twenty-somethings paying through the nose for a games console just so they can tell their equally wealthy friends that they're better than other gamers because they only play for the sake of irony.
"have you seen this new iGame? It's like a playstation, but better, because it costs $1024 and only has three games. Tetris, Solitaire, and Breakout. They might release more, but i only just have time to play these three inbetween writing my column and going to art exhibitions. The best part is that it's the size of a pea and can be controlled wirelessly with my third-gen iPod nano."
For starters, when was the last time you saw illegal bittorrent downloads advertised? That's right, never. You have to go searching yourself. The legal BitTorrent service will probably have advertisements though, so there is no contest here.
Secondly, look at iTunes. Music is still very easy to download for free, and lots of people do. But the ones who use iTunes or similar sevices don't care about getting it for free, because they either have lots of money and enjoy the convenience, or they want to stay on the right side of the law.
Big business knows it can't stop illegal bittorrent downloads, so they are simply trying their hardest to put a dent in the number of people who do so. It will work, too. It can't possibly not work. the question is: how well will it work?
My guess is that they will first tap into the large market of people who actually want to pay for downloaded movies and such. Then after a year or two, you'll get non-techie people just assuming it's the norm to pay when downloading movies with bittorrent, because that's all they've heard of and unless they go searching or inadvertantly hear something, they won't know that bittorrent can be used for illegal filesharing. And so bittorrent(as we know it today)'s userbase will shrink to some degree.
It's like when the catholic church moved christmas to overshadow the pagan celebration of the winter solstice. Except i doubt they'll go around killing people who use azureus etc.
Are you kidding? The only reason the content providers are giving Bram the time of day is because of the Bittorrent name. They intend to associate the word Bittorrent with a legal source of content to shift people over to paying for their media. The problem for them is that there is this uncontrollable protocol that makes mass distribution of large files easy. They cant make the protocol itself illegal, so they have to obfuscate it's function in the mind of your average joe.
It's essentially propaganda.
"Windshare" isn't propoganda. It's just another content distribution system that will probably be ignored by people who intend to download stuff with this BitTorrent thing their friends are talking about.
Suspicion of wrong doing isn't good enough for you? 'Cause it's good enough for the good ol' american police!
I suspect you are a terrorist, what with all the anti-american bullcrap you're posting. I hope someone who is allowed to pretext sees this and knocks on your door pretending to be a pizza delivery guy, but when you open the door and calmly explain you didn't order any pizza they snatch your ass and take you to guantanamo bay. Or at least kill you and make sure the body is never found. Either is fine with me, you despicable terror-monger!
I'm no software developer, but i took computing A-Level so i have a vague understanding of how this stuff works.
Torrented files are split up into pieces of identical size which are transmitted between peers, a piece at a time. One way i can see of transmitting these pieces securely is to give each one it's own encryption key which can be derived from some master key kept on the service's web servers.
Peer 1 requests a piece from peer 2, sending them a public key at the same time. Peer 2 decrypts the requested piece and re-encrypts it with the public key it just received. It then sends the newly encrypted piece to peer 1 which decrypts it with its private key and then re-encrypts it with whatever key the software derives from the master key stored on the web server. This way, no keys that have any relevance to the final state of the file are seen on the p2p network.
magic. I'm not sure how practical this would be. It would certainly put more strain on the processor. It would also increase bandwidth usage. There are probably much simpler ways of sharing DRMd files securely over a bittorrent-derived protocol, but as i stated, i'm no software developer.
If you get payed for seeding, it might be possible to get all the movies and TV you want for free.
If you average out all the share ratios of everyone who uses any particular torrent, you'll always get exactly 1. From my experience, the large majority of people won't bother sharing too much, meaning they pay the standard price for their file. The people who share above and beyond the call of duty pay less, some of whom might even get the file for free and have more credit to spend on other content.
for example:
You buy a Mission Impossible 3.torrent file for $5. $0.50 of that goes to the people who seed the file to you, the rest to the various people responsible for making the movie. You accumulate a share ration of 1, meaning that the movie actually only cost you $4.50.
Some other guy gets the same file for the same price, but after he's finished downloading continues to seed. He gets an impressive share ratio of 10. The movie ends up costing him nothing, but the people who made the movie still make money from his purchase.
Obviously i just used arbitrary numbers and the reality probably won't be quite that sweet. However, it's still a win-win situation if you forget about DRM and proprietary software.
Those who want free content get free content, those who couldn't care less and are happy with relatively cheap content get just that.
Those who still want to get everything for free without seeding forever can just visit the old pirate bay.
No love for this amazing series of racing games? The dual analogue stick control gave the most alarmingly engaging simutated racing experience i've ever come across. Especially on xbox live! No game is perfect, but in my eyes this one came close. I've never felt such a strong desire to get that flawless lap.
You seem to be forgetting the magnificent powers of wordplay that lawyers posess. You see, DRM isn't restricting access to data... It's securing access to data.
The fact that it's such a trivial sum of money means that people will just pay it to save hassle, even if they've never wathced TV or listened to radio streams over the internet.
And if you do decide to go through with the hassle of saying, "no i won't pay this, my computer can't stream tv/radio"... What will they do? Come 'round to your house and thoroughly inspect your windows installation?
For starters, yes, i would be fine with it if MS had the same feature enabled by default in IE. But it all depends on how the data is handled. I think you're assuming all the data will be logged somewhere. The URL, IP addess, time stamp etc would surely prove to be useful information for someone like the DOJ, but it wouldn't exactly be useful for preventing users from visiting black-listed sites.
Having the user download their own list every so often would be fine with me too. But there's already software that can do this, such as Privoxy.
At the end of the day, I think it's a bit of a pointless endavour and i'd prefer if Opera didn't have it. But i'm not going to complain if i can turn it off.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who has extensively built and repaired all manner of cellular(GSM, UMTS, PCN/DCS) base station antennas for a living, let me tell you straight off that this thing is not revolutionary. Perhaps they've figured out a way of doing what is already possible (small antennas everywhere) at a lower cost in terms of manufacturing and energy-consumption. But, if I understand it correctly, the antennas consume far more energy than the electronics used to process the signal. I was also led to believe that grouping dipoles into large, concentrated arrays is a more efficient way of getting a strong signal over a wide area. But don't listen to me; I'm not an RF engineer. I'm just a soldering genius who happened to work with RF engineers for a few years.
but you still have to have the disk in the drive while you play. The OP wants to use the disk once and then, presumably, keep it in a locked glass cabinet for the rest of time. If any console manufacturer allowed users to do this, piracy would kill any incentive for developers to make games on that platform.
"But most of all, I want to see a law being passed against ever adapting VALIS to the big screen. Or, alternatively, the powers need to legalize drugs in the quantity needed to sit through and get an experience out of it."
This. VALIS would never make it to the big screen while retaining the themes and beauty of the book. However, if someone made a film of the film VALIS from the book VALIS, that might be a little bit awesome. I want to see Mother Goose's head explode.
Jesus christ, that's like me complaining that I can't see the slashdot logo because I'm browsing the web in lynx. Get VLC and stop being a dick.
Then it might be wise to learn how to use it, you dozy prannock.
couple of months? a friend told me about the site in question way back in april and they were linking to movies then too.
Sure it has flaws, but that's the price you pay for bleeding edge technology.
I imagine by the time the device is in it's third generation it'll be a much more robust and functional product. Unless they decide to keep right on pushing the envelope, cramming in every little piece of cool they possibly can.
I bought a 10k rpm 36gb Western Digital Raptor drive for £80ish (very steep, if you ask me), but when i installed a new windows partition, the bootup speed was incredible. About 20-25 seconds from the moment i hit the power button(provided i spend less than a second deciding which OS to use in GRUB). it's gone up a bit since then, what with all the applications and shit, so i might have to start again soon. It's just a hassle to deal with windows erasing the MBR.
I have Ubuntu dapper on the same disk and it takes about 3x as long, even though it's at the start of the disk!
this is why god created alt.binaries.erotica.voyeurism
long live usenet
yeah, because women will blow any guy if his wang is large enough. You sure understand females, buddy.
Wouldn't it be nice to hear an artist like cliff richard say something along the lines of "oh, i'm wealthy enough as it is. Who cares if my music will soon gradually make it's way into the public domain, as i'll never have to work another day in my life!" ? Or perhaps something more like, "I look forward to people having a chance to make some cash from my material that stopped generating me any significant amount of money forty five years ago! It'll make me feel slightly better about this vast fortune i've accumulated over the course of my career."
You'd get all these wealthy twenty-somethings paying through the nose for a games console just so they can tell their equally wealthy friends that they're better than other gamers because they only play for the sake of irony.
"have you seen this new iGame? It's like a playstation, but better, because it costs $1024 and only has three games. Tetris, Solitaire, and Breakout. They might release more, but i only just have time to play these three inbetween writing my column and going to art exhibitions. The best part is that it's the size of a pea and can be controlled wirelessly with my third-gen iPod nano."
For starters, when was the last time you saw illegal bittorrent downloads advertised? That's right, never. You have to go searching yourself. The legal BitTorrent service will probably have advertisements though, so there is no contest here.
Secondly, look at iTunes. Music is still very easy to download for free, and lots of people do. But the ones who use iTunes or similar sevices don't care about getting it for free, because they either have lots of money and enjoy the convenience, or they want to stay on the right side of the law.
Big business knows it can't stop illegal bittorrent downloads, so they are simply trying their hardest to put a dent in the number of people who do so. It will work, too. It can't possibly not work. the question is: how well will it work?
My guess is that they will first tap into the large market of people who actually want to pay for downloaded movies and such. Then after a year or two, you'll get non-techie people just assuming it's the norm to pay when downloading movies with bittorrent, because that's all they've heard of and unless they go searching or inadvertantly hear something, they won't know that bittorrent can be used for illegal filesharing. And so bittorrent(as we know it today)'s userbase will shrink to some degree.
It's like when the catholic church moved christmas to overshadow the pagan celebration of the winter solstice. Except i doubt they'll go around killing people who use azureus etc.
Are you kidding? The only reason the content providers are giving Bram the time of day is because of the Bittorrent name. They intend to associate the word Bittorrent with a legal source of content to shift people over to paying for their media. The problem for them is that there is this uncontrollable protocol that makes mass distribution of large files easy. They cant make the protocol itself illegal, so they have to obfuscate it's function in the mind of your average joe.
It's essentially propaganda.
"Windshare" isn't propoganda. It's just another content distribution system that will probably be ignored by people who intend to download stuff with this BitTorrent thing their friends are talking about.
Suspicion of wrong doing isn't good enough for you? 'Cause it's good enough for the good ol' american police!
I suspect you are a terrorist, what with all the anti-american bullcrap you're posting. I hope someone who is allowed to pretext sees this and knocks on your door pretending to be a pizza delivery guy, but when you open the door and calmly explain you didn't order any pizza they snatch your ass and take you to guantanamo bay. Or at least kill you and make sure the body is never found. Either is fine with me, you despicable terror-monger!
Actually, i think he may be onto something.
I'm no software developer, but i took computing A-Level so i have a vague understanding of how this stuff works.
Torrented files are split up into pieces of identical size which are transmitted between peers, a piece at a time. One way i can see of transmitting these pieces securely is to give each one it's own encryption key which can be derived from some master key kept on the service's web servers.
Peer 1 requests a piece from peer 2, sending them a public key at the same time. Peer 2 decrypts the requested piece and re-encrypts it with the public key it just received. It then sends the newly encrypted piece to peer 1 which decrypts it with its private key and then re-encrypts it with whatever key the software derives from the master key stored on the web server. This way, no keys that have any relevance to the final state of the file are seen on the p2p network.
magic. I'm not sure how practical this would be. It would certainly put more strain on the processor. It would also increase bandwidth usage. There are probably much simpler ways of sharing DRMd files securely over a bittorrent-derived protocol, but as i stated, i'm no software developer.
Well that proves me wrong. There's no way this bittorrent deal could ever be good if they adopt a similar business model to Peer Impact.
What a shame.
If you get payed for seeding, it might be possible to get all the movies and TV you want for free. If you average out all the share ratios of everyone who uses any particular torrent, you'll always get exactly 1. From my experience, the large majority of people won't bother sharing too much, meaning they pay the standard price for their file. The people who share above and beyond the call of duty pay less, some of whom might even get the file for free and have more credit to spend on other content. for example: You buy a Mission Impossible 3 .torrent file for $5. $0.50 of that goes to the people who seed the file to you, the rest to the various people responsible for making the movie. You accumulate a share ration of 1, meaning that the movie actually only cost you $4.50.
Some other guy gets the same file for the same price, but after he's finished downloading continues to seed. He gets an impressive share ratio of 10. The movie ends up costing him nothing, but the people who made the movie still make money from his purchase.
Obviously i just used arbitrary numbers and the reality probably won't be quite that sweet. However, it's still a win-win situation if you forget about DRM and proprietary software.
Those who want free content get free content, those who couldn't care less and are happy with relatively cheap content get just that.
Those who still want to get everything for free without seeding forever can just visit the old pirate bay.
duh, because if you kill someone in the name of god, you're obviously satanic.
Oh my, hold on a minute... george bush is satanic! There's a turn up for the books.
No love for this amazing series of racing games? The dual analogue stick control gave the most alarmingly engaging simutated racing experience i've ever come across. Especially on xbox live! No game is perfect, but in my eyes this one came close. I've never felt such a strong desire to get that flawless lap.
Whoever modded this insightful obviously wears magnetic immortality rings.
You seem to be forgetting the magnificent powers of wordplay that lawyers posess. You see, DRM isn't restricting access to data... It's securing access to data.
The fact that it's such a trivial sum of money means that people will just pay it to save hassle, even if they've never wathced TV or listened to radio streams over the internet.
And if you do decide to go through with the hassle of saying, "no i won't pay this, my computer can't stream tv/radio"... What will they do? Come 'round to your house and thoroughly inspect your windows installation?
Again... Lame.
For starters, yes, i would be fine with it if MS had the same feature enabled by default in IE. But it all depends on how the data is handled. I think you're assuming all the data will be logged somewhere. The URL, IP addess, time stamp etc would surely prove to be useful information for someone like the DOJ, but it wouldn't exactly be useful for preventing users from visiting black-listed sites. Having the user download their own list every so often would be fine with me too. But there's already software that can do this, such as Privoxy. At the end of the day, I think it's a bit of a pointless endavour and i'd prefer if Opera didn't have it. But i'm not going to complain if i can turn it off.
As a devout Opera user, I'm fine with this as long as it's possible to turn the feature off.