_Buy_ BorlandC++ 3.1. It costs just about $20 or something when you buy a book C++ for 21days I think, this is very good and I think the best thing for DOS (and also Windows). I am still using their IDE sometimes.
Hi-fi equipment now is cheap. More than that , the trend is towards cheap (ok not expensive or in other words affordable) digital based players, whereby you can capture all de-crypted (for DVD) stuff going right to your super=duper speakers, which would give you exactly the same quality, all you need is to compress it back.
Now, there is no doubt that big time pirates had very expensive equipment to copy ANYTHING for ages, and they are the real trouble for software/music industry, because people who are BUYING pirated music/software indeed could have bought the authentic ones, and thus really do hurt sales, unlike little guys who make a copy or two of a music CD to listen not only at home but also on their way to work/school.
Thus, all these copy protection measures are just a hassle and extra problems for end users. Almost anyone can make a very high quality copy of an audio=cd and this will only be more common in the future.
It is not human error that is challenged here, but the way d.net does stuff using closed-source code for "security" reasons, ie they should have open their code long ago. Why they think that a good attacker would not be able to reverse engineer their code? It's written in pretty tight C, and main crypto routines are in Asm, which make the program extremely easy to analyze (provided no special efforts were made to thwart disassebly/debugger, which is highly platform dependable and thus unlikely to be well done).
This is the call to d.net, stop fooling around and open your client! Even if it will take to shutdown all submission for a month or any time, we need TRUST in what we are doing. Who shall we blame when no key will be found at the end of RC5-64? Not nugget, but the closed source approach they use.
I love MODs, S3Ms myself and was listening to them since 1992. However, as you know they are very limited and there is no way you can have a decent song (with words) without making them big. It is possible to probably have any song in them, but they store samples in a very poorly compressed state, and thus make this format not feasible for music. Now, there are some great MODs around, and I still listen to them, but would not you prefer listening to all new music too? And also would not you like to listen to music YOU LIKE, not waiting for someone to make up a poorly cloned MOD? Obviously not, thus the format is basically dead, and soon few people would still remember it. No wonder that MOD4WIN (www.mod4win.com) canned their development a while ago. Luckily we still got a few players around so we can listen to that great music in MODs.
I mean, either you carry around the watch or you carry around the Palm...but never both
In short you are wrong. I don't know how about you but I carry my watches ALWAYS with me, and I believe most people do. At least when comparing to any gadget, your watches are always with you. Do you check your time on Palm? Now, given that, it actually makes sense to built-in as many gadgets as possible in watches, that you carry always with you, which is good for Casio, they are in watches business, not Palm-pilots. The other issue is that because watches are so small, you will probably won't be able to write a perl program (at least till voice-dictation become feasible for these devices), but you can do some stuff and later sync with your palm.
Problem is that this was supposed to be a consumer device. I don't remember who did the research but to my knowledge, the research has shown that in order for a consumer device to be popular it has to be in $200 range. Just because some crap player costs $200 for 32Mb, doesnt mean a 4Gb version based on completely different technology should cost linearly more.
For $1000 they can listen to that thing themselves. I would be better off buying a laptop with more HDD space for my car usage. I would also be able to do something useful when being in a road jam. I believe this is a very bad judgement on this company's part. Obviously they want to capitalize on being the first, but this may cost them their advantage. If I were them I would sell as much units as possible for whatever price they can afford to be profitable. It will go down soon anyway.
Why not do what Intel did with naming their CPU's. 286.. 386.. 486.. Pentium.. Pentium II, Pentium III, Itanium. *shrug* Switching over to names instead of numbers is just fine..
Intel started using names mainly because of trademark laws. It is not possible to trademark a number (486 or 586) but name is (Pentium). As you may recall AMD and Cyrix were cloning 486s like crazy and Intel wanted to protect their property at least somehow. Since i486, they use names, that also improved public perception of their processors. Apparently it is much easier for John Smith to remember word Pentium, than i586.
These are line drawing and bezier curve drawing routines that are already tricked out to begin with. I was programming these things quite sometime ago. They are pretty tide algos and the only reason why "full-opts" make it 3 times faster is that it uses registers more optimally (less reloads vars from memory to registers). However, these algorithms are so easy to write in Asm, that it's a crime not to! I would like to hear a coherent argument on how Visual C++ will generate faster code than pure Asm. Obviously I do agree with most of your points,however it would interesting to find out why a non-expert will actually try to code low level primitives instead of using Win32API, and if he really needs to code them (not for educational purposes where speed doesn't matter), why he can't optimize them using Asm. The bottom line is, unless performance is the real issue, you would not like to mess with Asm. However, if you do need cutting edge performance, there is nothing else left but Asm to help you out.
ASM wizardry John Carmack done for Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake Correction! With all big due respect to JohnC, the real neat asm ops for Quake were actually done by Mike Abrash, the guy in optimazations for Gfx. No wonder he was employed by Microsoft for optimizing video stuff for Windows3.0+ (and below?) at time when hardware video accelerators were a rare and expensive thing, and 386 was considered to be a cutting edge stuff to have at home. However, I do believe John could code all asm himself, he just wanted to off-load himself and concentrate on Quake engine, while having someone good hacking up the asm routines, and Mike Abrash was the guy to go with.
BorlandC++ 3.1 supports templates, STL and exceptions. In either case you don't need them if you make a small project (10k lines) or even larger one. Compile times are fast and given the compatibility (with proper programming) with Unix, you can do a quick hacks on Win32 machines.
TC2.0 won't fit 360k but you can use it on a computer with just one 360k disk drive by using few disks. IDE is smart enough to ask you to insert the disk with lib's to compile stuff. I used this approach back in 1991/92. Even today I use BorlandC++ 3.1 for DOS.
Cyrix rep there 6x86s cost about $80/unit to manufacture.
One of the reason why Cyrix failed is that they were fabless. That's it they had to make their stuff on IBMs fabs. Obviously they had to pay IBM for that service and given that they didn't have much choice 6x86 cost them $80, while it possibly cost $5 to IBM (speculation).
they're just out to gain market share. Intel isn't about making quality products, they're a marketing company.
Intel has more than 90% of the market. They simply don't need to "gain" it to be accused of being a monopoly (ok, they are monopoly now, but with 100% market share no legal guy prove it's not), their strategy is to RETAIN the market share.
Now, concerning your accusation that they are "marketing company", they actually do marketing bit well, something I can't say for AMD (do they actually hire marketing guys at all?). Thing is that in R&D lots of time and money goes to develop actual operations and profiling to find out which one should be optmized more. Cloning it (something AMD does well) is much easier, obviously that what pisses off Intel mostly, they spend damn a lot of effots to fine grane, say MMX, and then some guy comes later and copy their stuff. I don't accuse AMD of copying, it's ok for them to compete, but saying that AMD is everything and Intel must die is dumb. I would think that current situation where Intel has the main share and thereby has money to invest into deep R&D is good, while AMD later clones whole reserach thus limiting Intel's ability to capitalize and exploit their research. It's good for consumers, good for me and you.
Everyone is rightfully screaming about non-realistic nature of these benchmarks. I am sure my idea is by no means new, but right now I see no big disadvantages why it should not be used as a true benchmark: given that all sight *log* all attempts, why not take these big logs from some highly used sites and then *replay* the log on actual servers. This would simulate what actually has happened in real life for say month or two.
The only trouble I see so far is that the benchmark site should *not* have fully used it's bandswidth during the period, because in this case we won't add up those users who failed to fetch a webpage. Although given simple math we can see that GNU/Linux+Apache can saturate any line with static pages, we could get some real world results using this approach. Comments are welcome.
to record everything you see and feel. Wouldn't you like to feel again your first date (unless it was not blown up completely!)
However, I think it's not possible to record all that stuff though non-brain integrated device. We need somehow to listen to our brain-waves, something not possible with even bulkier devices these days. Playback is of course through either some sort of virtual reality directly to our brain. In current implementation (as an external device) it will work only and only if there will be more such devices around, so they will be able to communicate with each other (nice thing to trace people!), and who is gonna pay to put all this bugs on the streets?
I think it's really cool, but I am afraid I will be too old by the time we have such toys on sale to record anything!
500,000 simultanious connections as extreme as 150,000. I am not sure they actually tested it against the latter number. In fact, given that fact that they claimed to have 35Gb a day of work-units (and 350kb per unit send), we have 35,000,000/350 = 100,000 users per day. So, given the fact that they expected at least 150,000 they would max out rather soon. Bad planning.
Now, pardon my mood, but I am completely pissed off the fact, they released extremely slow Win client, while according to their own statistics Pentium/Windows platform leads by at least 5-8 times. Excuse me, but if they had a bit of brains they would optimise first WINDOWS client, no matter how they hate it. Could they at least provide an simple option NOT to draw pretty pictures, making it v1.01 in the next day? It is shame that Berkeley has got associated with such a poor programming. You might hate windows, but you should not be a fool and ignore thousands of people who dedicated their Win boxes, we feel like being treated as 3rd class users!
Nevermind that stupid URL at their site, why on Earth they needed SSL in it? seti.berkeley.edu could do fine.
BG said that the only man he hated (as of sometime before 1993) was Philipp Kann (spell is wrong), founder of Borland. While Philipp departed long time ago to head still unknown Starfish, Bill must have had few nice feeling buying out his old rival. Although he didn't buy 51% (yet), it still significant. What is 100mln for him anyway? I bet MS paid with it's stock (not cash).
It is funny to see a bit of history back, Borland died anyway long time ago. It's Inprise *yucks* now.
Real-time strategy games are way too special for me as I have sunken years of my time (nevermind study!) programming RTS, making clones (full re-code with gfx ripped off of course) of Dune2 and C&C series in 1994-97. You can have all source (buggy not finished as I quit games programming once and forever) at my site.
Point here is that DirectX for RTS is irrelevant. In fact most RTS use only fraction of it to just initialize screen and gain direct assess to video memory. There is NO need in it at all. My old DOS based code could be easily ported to it. I think the author uses DX as a buzz-word only. Besides, in my experience no generalized drivers are fast enough (unless hardware accelerated as 3D are)
Although in my view book is worthless (for me) I wish I had it back in 1994, when I had to do all these things on my own!
However, as a humble person who was interviewed there and talked to some guys, I would caution those wannabes who think to make big $$$ in the Games industry. Those wonderful games such as DungeonKeeper, MagicCarpet et al, are not making much money! Problem is that it takes lots of time and enegry to produce a game, while sales are not high (piracy)! Cash-cows for such companies are sports-games, boring to program, but people buy them. So, if you think to make your life as a games progammer -- think twice. I personally changed my mind and going for an MBA. Although games programming (w/o books, when YOU do design things) is a good teacher.
Projects I have been into are outdated now, some of the source was lots (stable one:( ) and all I have now is open for any crazy guy to lurk in. Don't think it's on much value though (except fast ASM). Peace, don't flame me too much, I am just a very tired games programmer who gave up his love.
A significant amount of the development effort will be released as Open Source code under the Artistic License, Perl's Open Source license.
This makes me wonder of to whom it will be significant: Microsoft or OSS community? For the latter I think 100% open source is the only significant amount, otherwise someone will yet again have control over features dooming portability. This reminds me cool language called Java.
Those who code for free won't be affected (their projects will die automaticly if of poor quality), those who make money unfairly by exploiting powers of monopoly or just sell plainly crap product will rightfully suffer.
The situation where all products and services have warranty (which ensures quality) except software is not acceptable. Legally it should not be allowed to sell DISCLAIMED software (again unless it's free). Have you seen a car without warranty? And software is responsible for safe flights and running nuclear plants.
Problem is that while it's possible to provide high-bandswidth for home countries, how would it help with misery trans-atlantic link? What if your super-duper VideoPhone works for US/Canada and you can't call your friend in the UK?
However, we need cheap high speeds anyway and this is a viable option. Problem is that telco's don't really want this happen as it would ruin their business where they charge people for (previously) limited resource (bandswidth). They should face that in 21st century (which is right behind the corner) bandswidth will be right and not priviledge. The only major difference between humans and other's repsesentative of the Mother Nature is ability to COMMUNICATE EFFECTIVELY.
Can anyone give any good reason, why for example in the UK, films show up 2 months later???? There is no technical reason for that, I see no marketing reasons as well (only that people get extra anxious and book trans-atlantic tour -- airlines conspiracy?).
Granted lack of the film, people will be more tempted to use MPGs floating all over the net. Effectively, they are pushed to pirate.
This doesn't cover the case, where a lamer could fake that he didn't find anything (thus no double check untill after long time) and thus get credit for processing lots of work units. Given that some people have few minutes per work unit (bug?) one may think a lot about "security". If they had their source open, I would at least be able to fix their stupid bugs (like turning off all visual stuff) and maybe even optimization. My guts tell me that, their asm (C?) routines are somewhat far from being optimized for Intel x86.
Slashdot Mirror
_Buy_ BorlandC++ 3.1. It costs just about $20 or something when you buy a book C++ for 21days I think, this is very good and I think the best thing for DOS (and also Windows). I am still using their IDE sometimes.
Yes, it is not free, but $20 is nothing.
Hi-fi equipment now is cheap. More than that , the trend is towards cheap (ok not expensive or in other words affordable) digital based players, whereby you can capture all de-crypted (for DVD) stuff going right to your super=duper speakers, which would give you exactly the same quality, all you need is to compress it back.
Now, there is no doubt that big time pirates had very expensive equipment to copy ANYTHING for ages, and they are the real trouble for software/music industry, because people who are BUYING pirated music/software indeed could have bought the authentic ones, and thus really do hurt sales, unlike little guys who make a copy or two of a music CD to listen not only at home but also on their way to work/school.
Thus, all these copy protection measures are just a hassle and extra problems for end users. Almost anyone can make a very high quality copy of an audio=cd and this will only be more common in the future.
It is not human error that is challenged here, but the way d.net does stuff using closed-source code for "security" reasons, ie they should have open their code long ago. Why they think that a good attacker would not be able to reverse engineer their code? It's written in pretty tight C, and main crypto routines are in Asm, which make the program extremely easy to analyze (provided no special efforts were made to thwart disassebly/debugger, which is highly platform dependable and thus unlikely to be well done).
This is the call to d.net, stop fooling around and open your client! Even if it will take to shutdown all submission for a month or any time, we need TRUST in what we are doing. Who shall we blame when no key will be found at the end of RC5-64? Not nugget, but the closed source approach they use.
I love MODs, S3Ms myself and was listening to them since 1992. However, as you know they are very limited and there is no way you can have a decent song (with words) without making them big. It is possible to probably have any song in them, but they store samples in a very poorly compressed state, and thus make this format not feasible for music. Now, there are some great MODs around, and I still listen to them, but would not you prefer listening to all new music too? And also would not you like to listen to music YOU LIKE, not waiting for someone to make up a poorly cloned MOD? Obviously not, thus the format is basically dead, and soon few people would still remember it. No wonder that MOD4WIN (www.mod4win.com) canned their development a while ago. Luckily we still got a few players around so we can listen to that great music in MODs.
I mean, either you carry around the watch or you carry around the Palm...but never both
In short you are wrong. I don't know how about you but I carry my watches ALWAYS with me, and I believe most people do. At least when comparing to any gadget, your watches are always with you. Do you check your time on Palm? Now, given that, it actually makes sense to built-in as many gadgets as possible in watches, that you carry always with you, which is good for Casio, they are in watches business, not Palm-pilots. The other issue is that because watches are so small, you will probably won't be able to write a perl program (at least till voice-dictation become feasible for these devices), but you can do some stuff and later sync with your palm.
Problem is that this was supposed to be a consumer device. I don't remember who did the research but to my knowledge, the research has shown that in order for a consumer device to be popular it has to be in $200 range. Just because some crap player costs $200 for 32Mb, doesnt mean a 4Gb version based on completely different technology should cost linearly more.
For $1000 they can listen to that thing themselves. I would be better off buying a laptop with more HDD space for my car usage. I would also be able to do something useful when being in a road jam. I believe this is a very bad judgement on this company's part. Obviously they want to capitalize on being the first, but this may cost them their advantage. If I were them I would sell as much units as possible for whatever price they can afford to be profitable. It will go down soon anyway.
Why not do what Intel did with naming their CPU's. 286.. 386.. 486.. Pentium.. Pentium II, Pentium III, Itanium. *shrug* Switching over to names instead of numbers is just fine..
Intel started using names mainly because of trademark laws. It is not possible to trademark a number (486 or 586) but name is (Pentium). As you may recall AMD and Cyrix were cloning 486s like crazy and Intel wanted to protect their property at least somehow. Since i486, they use names, that also improved public perception of their processors. Apparently it is much easier for John Smith to remember word Pentium, than i586.
These are line drawing and bezier curve drawing routines that are already tricked out to begin with. I was programming these things quite sometime ago. They are pretty tide algos and the only reason why "full-opts" make it 3 times faster is that it uses registers more optimally (less reloads vars from memory to registers). However, these algorithms are so easy to write in Asm, that it's a crime not to! I would like to hear a coherent argument on how Visual C++ will generate faster code than pure Asm. Obviously I do agree with most of your points,however it would interesting to find out why a non-expert will actually try to code low level primitives instead of using Win32API, and if he really needs to code them (not for educational purposes where speed doesn't matter), why he can't optimize them using Asm. The bottom line is, unless performance is the real issue, you would not like to mess with Asm. However, if you do need cutting edge performance, there is nothing else left but Asm to help you out.
ASM wizardry John Carmack done for Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake Correction! With all big due respect to JohnC, the real neat asm ops for Quake were actually done by Mike Abrash, the guy in optimazations for Gfx. No wonder he was employed by Microsoft for optimizing video stuff for Windows3.0+ (and below?) at time when hardware video accelerators were a rare and expensive thing, and 386 was considered to be a cutting edge stuff to have at home. However, I do believe John could code all asm himself, he just wanted to off-load himself and concentrate on Quake engine, while having someone good hacking up the asm routines, and Mike Abrash was the guy to go with.
BorlandC++ 3.1 supports templates, STL and exceptions. In either case you don't need them if you make a small project (10k lines) or even larger one. Compile times are fast and given the compatibility (with proper programming) with Unix, you can do a quick hacks on Win32 machines.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
BorlandC++ 3.1 supports templates, STL,
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
TC2.0 won't fit 360k but you can use it on a computer with just one 360k disk drive by using few disks. IDE is smart enough to ask you to insert the disk with lib's to compile stuff. I used this approach back in 1991/92. Even today I use BorlandC++ 3.1 for DOS.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
Cyrix rep there 6x86s cost about $80/unit to manufacture.
One of the reason why Cyrix failed is that they were fabless. That's it they had to make their stuff on IBMs fabs. Obviously they had to pay IBM for that service and given that they didn't have much choice 6x86 cost them $80, while it possibly cost $5 to IBM (speculation).
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
they're just out to gain market share. Intel isn't about making quality products, they're a marketing company.
Intel has more than 90% of the market. They simply don't need to "gain" it to be accused of being a monopoly (ok, they are monopoly now, but with 100% market share no legal guy prove it's not), their strategy is to RETAIN the market share.
Now, concerning your accusation that they are "marketing company", they actually do marketing bit well, something I can't say for AMD (do they actually hire marketing guys at all?). Thing is that in R&D lots of time and money goes to develop actual operations and profiling to find out which one should be optmized more. Cloning it (something AMD does well) is much easier, obviously that what pisses off Intel mostly, they spend damn a lot of effots to fine grane, say MMX, and then some guy comes later and copy their stuff. I don't accuse AMD of copying, it's ok for them to compete, but saying that AMD is everything and Intel must die is dumb. I would think that current situation where Intel has the main share and thereby has money to invest into deep R&D is good, while AMD later clones whole reserach thus limiting Intel's ability to capitalize and exploit their research. It's good for consumers, good for me and you.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
Everyone is rightfully screaming about non-realistic nature of these benchmarks. I am sure my idea is by no means new, but right now I see no big disadvantages why it should not be used as a true benchmark: given that all sight *log* all attempts, why not take these big logs from some highly used sites and then *replay* the log on actual servers. This would simulate what actually has happened in real life for say month or two.
The only trouble I see so far is that the benchmark site should *not* have fully used it's bandswidth during the period, because in this case we won't add up those users who failed to fetch a webpage. Although given simple math we can see that GNU/Linux+Apache can saturate any line with static pages, we could get some real world results using this approach. Comments are welcome.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
to record everything you see and feel. Wouldn't you like to feel again your first date (unless it was not blown up completely!)
However, I think it's not possible to record all that stuff though non-brain integrated device. We need somehow to listen to our brain-waves, something not possible with even bulkier devices these days. Playback is of course through either some sort of virtual reality directly to our brain. In current implementation (as an external device) it will work only and only if there will be more such devices around, so they will be able to communicate with each other (nice thing to trace people!), and who is gonna pay to put all this bugs on the streets?
I think it's really cool, but I am afraid I will be too old by the time we have such toys on sale to record anything!
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
500,000 simultanious connections as extreme as 150,000. I am not sure they actually tested it against the latter number. In fact, given that fact that they claimed to have 35Gb a day of work-units (and 350kb per unit send), we have
35,000,000/350 = 100,000 users per day. So, given the fact that they expected at least 150,000 they would max out rather soon. Bad planning.
Now, pardon my mood, but I am completely pissed off the fact, they released extremely slow Win client, while according to their own statistics Pentium/Windows platform leads by at least 5-8 times. Excuse me, but if they had a bit of brains they would optimise first WINDOWS client, no matter how they hate it. Could they at least provide an simple option NOT to draw pretty pictures, making it v1.01 in the next day? It is shame that Berkeley has got associated with such a poor programming. You might hate windows, but you should not be a fool and ignore thousands of people who dedicated their Win boxes, we feel like being treated as 3rd class users!
Nevermind that stupid URL at their site, why on Earth they needed SSL in it? seti.berkeley.edu could do fine.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
BG said that the only man he hated (as of sometime before 1993) was Philipp Kann (spell is wrong), founder of Borland. While Philipp departed long time ago to head still unknown Starfish, Bill must have had few nice feeling buying out his old rival. Although he didn't buy 51% (yet), it still significant. What is 100mln for him anyway? I bet MS paid with it's stock (not cash).
It is funny to see a bit of history back, Borland died anyway long time ago. It's Inprise *yucks* now.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
Real-time strategy games are way too special for me as I have sunken years of my time (nevermind study!) programming RTS, making clones (full re-code with gfx ripped off of course) of Dune2 and C&C series in 1994-97. You can have all source (buggy not finished as I quit games programming once and forever) at my site.
:( ) and all I have now is open for any crazy guy to lurk in. Don't think it's on much value though (except fast ASM). Peace, don't flame me too much, I am just a very tired games programmer who gave up his love.
Point here is that DirectX for RTS is irrelevant. In fact most RTS use only fraction of it to just initialize screen and gain direct assess to video memory. There is NO need in it at all. My old DOS based code could be easily ported to it. I think the author uses DX as a buzz-word only. Besides, in my experience no generalized drivers are fast enough (unless hardware accelerated as 3D are)
Dune32 shots/source
Although in my view book is worthless (for me) I wish I had it back in 1994, when I had to do all these things on my own!
However, as a humble person who was interviewed there and talked to some guys, I would caution those wannabes who think to make big $$$ in the Games industry. Those wonderful games such as DungeonKeeper, MagicCarpet et al, are not making much money! Problem is that it takes lots of time and enegry to produce a game, while sales are not high (piracy)! Cash-cows for such companies are sports-games, boring to program, but people buy them. So, if you think to make your life as a games progammer -- think twice. I personally changed my mind and going for an MBA. Although games programming (w/o books, when YOU do design things) is a good teacher.
Projects I have been into are outdated now, some of the source was lots (stable one
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
A significant amount of the development effort will be released as Open Source code under the Artistic License, Perl's Open Source license.
This makes me wonder of to whom it will be significant: Microsoft or OSS community? For the latter I think 100% open source is the only significant amount, otherwise someone will yet again have control over features dooming portability. This reminds me cool language called Java.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
All we need is a simple principle:
You can't sell software without warranty period.
Those who code for free won't be affected (their projects will die automaticly if of poor quality), those who make money unfairly by exploiting powers of monopoly or just sell plainly crap product will rightfully suffer.
The situation where all products and services have warranty (which ensures quality) except software is not acceptable. Legally it should not be allowed to sell DISCLAIMED software (again unless it's free). Have you seen a car without warranty? And software is responsible for safe flights and running nuclear plants.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
Problem is that while it's possible to provide high-bandswidth for home countries, how would it help with misery trans-atlantic link? What if your super-duper VideoPhone works for US/Canada and you can't call your friend in the UK?
However, we need cheap high speeds anyway and this is a viable option. Problem is that telco's don't really want this happen as it would ruin their business where they charge people for (previously) limited resource (bandswidth). They should face that in 21st century (which is right behind the corner) bandswidth will be right and not priviledge. The only major difference between humans and other's repsesentative of the Mother Nature is ability to COMMUNICATE EFFECTIVELY.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
Can anyone give any good reason, why for example in the UK, films show up 2 months later????
There is no technical reason for that, I see no marketing reasons as well (only that people get extra anxious and book trans-atlantic tour -- airlines conspiracy?).
Granted lack of the film, people will be more tempted to use MPGs floating all over the net. Effectively, they are pushed to pirate.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
Same login, different machines BUT different block units too. You can't process same unit in "parallel" on X machines.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
This doesn't cover the case, where a lamer could fake that he didn't find anything (thus no double check untill after long time) and thus get credit for processing lots of work units. Given that some people have few minutes per work unit (bug?) one may think a lot about "security". If they had their source open, I would at least be able to fix their stupid bugs (like turning off all visual stuff) and maybe even optimization. My guts tell me that, their asm (C?) routines are somewhat far from being optimized for Intel x86.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com