How do people get into a career of document forgery or document forgery analysis? And what about cartography? Is this a major at State U?
Note: This is both a question to the blogosphere and a reminder for me to look into these things.
The File Solution
Imagine a situation where you want to share large amounts of data among people who are located around the universe. All are sufficiently wired so no worries about connections and probably no worries about bandwidth (but we can always want more). How to go about this?
Among the slightly inconvenient methods I currently use are FTP (via traditional clients, IM), e-mail, and, for when I am connecting to my other machines, remote connections (e.g., Remote Desktop Connection and VNC). There are others, yes; the point of this post is not to methodically go through every way to remedy the hypothetical situation but to highlight two relevant applications about which I just learned.
The first new method is through a Firefox plugin called AllPeers. It works within Firefox and establishes a p2p network among a defined set of users. You can do the basic nifty things with it (for a quick but comprehensive run down, watch the demo). For sharing large amounts of data and in situations where you want users to pull or push the data (i.e., copy to and from), it does not seem to be an ideal solution.
A better solution might be Hamachi, which I just learned about from BH. It creates a VPN’ed LAN. I went through the site’s primary pages and it looks solid, providing a basic solution with some nice frills. Support for Windows is decent–I am talking about the GUI and features, not necessarily stability or completion of the software; it’s in beta–and Linux and OS X progress is, well, progressing. Check it out.
PS3 to PSSuck
It was unimaginable that Sony could lose its video game console lead over Microsoft and Nintendo, but it appears this is exactly what is happening. I won’t bore you with a rehash of the many mistakes and foibles Sony has committed, but the latest story out is that the PlayStation3 will be 10 percent less powerful than anticipated. With none of the grace of the Wii and only moderately more power than the 360, I am left wondering who on earth will buy this machine–and that’s before you even see the $600 price tag!
Last week or so, the big PS3 story was that because Sony had not started producing the machines yet, there would be a massive shortage at launch. I doubt there will be a shortage, and that’s not good for Sony.
Regardless, Nintendo, and to some extent Microsoft, is making it difficult for a responsible young man like myself–and one who recently gave away most of his classic video game console collection–to not buy one of the new consoles.
Oh, and expect Sony’s stock to get rocked more than the 3 percent or so it has this week. About half of Sony’s revenue is PS-related.