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After the story ran, Ars was contacted by a Vonage spokesperson that claimed that the agreement with VoIP, Inc. has "nothing to do with the patent situation." She described the deal as another termination deal similar to those Vonage has signed with other carriers, reiterating that the agreement was unrelated to the Verizon agreement.

My name is not Alex, but from what I read here and did verify by looking at the url's that were posted, It appears to be a valid comparison of yourself and your arstechnica colleagues methods and doings online. I found it very similar in how you and Jay Little and Jeremy Reimer operate also. Especially considering you are also an arstechnica member and upon searching http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve (your forums), I see you in particular, while posting as starkruzr, have done more than your share of attempted putdowns and such of apk along with many arstechnica people. I find it funny that you are able to do so, because you must be blind to the fact he has run circles around 99% of you in terms of actual accomplishment in this field. You acted here and on arstechnica, just like your colleagues Jeremy 'no degree, no certification, and no pro experience in the field of computer science on all 3 accounts' Reimer (good name for him, it does fit the bill), and Jay Little. Like them it also appears you have been caught lying about yourself as well as others here from what I have read thus far. I am a slashdot reader who came upon this when it was discussed on forums I attend online and decided to investigate instead of listening to the opinions of others for or against you or apk. I must say that was I you, that from now on, I would pick your battles more wisely. You are trying to cut down somebody who is far in advance of yourself, and your fellow arstechnica forums board members, judging by how much he has done in the arena of computer science vs you arstechnica forums board people, including yourself. apk or his friends have asked you, each of you in the windowsitpro.com forums url, and yoursel here the same question he asked you. Each of you avoids answering at any cost, every time. Since you try to put him down and fail in the light of evidences he put up which are valid, it seems apk is correct on that much, that you all talk and criticize he and others rampantly, but only perhaps 1% of arstechnica forums people have actually done something worthwhile. I don't find that too impressive, considering your friend Jeremy Reimer basically called your pack 'the best and brightest' online. I must admit after reading this, I found you all quite otherwise, as well apk having caught all of whom were named here in this thread exchange in lies and other misdoings online. Interesting discussion. A pity he had you on the ropes the whole time I felt and that all you are left with is name calling and other dispersions on his character with no actual proofs. He on the other hand, had much of that in well ordered fashion, perhaps too much of it, because I nearly died laughing reading it all.

Only if they continue to use Verizon's IP.

Vonage found guilty of infringing three Verizon patents

My understanding is that modern processors don't run x86 natively either, but are doing highly optimized translations of x86 instructions on the fly. The path for this way of doing things was blazed by the likes of Transmeta and HP. Read Ars Technica's CPU theory and praxis articles for more information.

"There's no reason why they couldn't ditch 60 percent of the transistors on the chip, most of which are for legacy modes."

I think 50% of the transistors on a modern cpu are cache, you could call that legacy stuff. But the 60% figure makes no sense. For the real, seldom used, legacy instructions, less time is spend on optimizing them in Microcode. And the microcode does not take THAT much space on a cpu.

Some sources:
Cpu die picture, est 50% = cache
P6 takes ~ 40% for compatibility reasons. And as the total grows, the percentage should DECREASE, not INCREASE. If the amount grows it is for performance reasons, not compatibility reasons.

However when you count the source "XenSource Chief Technology officler" it is not surprising that backwards compatibility gets that much attention. A main reason virtualization exists is to run older platforms so they are compatible.

Verified problem with PS3 Bluray playback which is NOT the same as game playback, and at NO time did I conflate the two. I don't know what your problem is, why the facts are so annoying to you, but no matter how much you pose and posture, you can't change the facts. Read the links - READ them, don't skim them. You are wrong, you've been wrong since your first post, and that's not going to change until you change your position.

What are you talking about? When have you ever seen a 720p native display refuse 1080i input?

About 2 minutes ago, in my Rec room. Infocus 5000, Firmware 753-0363-10, Brandware 753-0363-02, Bootcode 002-1082-00. That's what I'm talking about. You feed this thing 1080i and you get 1/2 vertical screen of bright green squish.

What does this mean? Well, that your complaint about being unable to watch a Blu-Ray movie on the PS3 due to lack of display support is completely bogus.

No, what it actually means is that you don't know what you're talking about, that there are 720-only capable displays out there, and that you didn't do any research before you shot off your ignorant mouth. For instance, one quick Google search turned up the problem at IGN, avforums, arstechnica, joystiq and many more, both user forums and more technical forums. So lets just drop the "it's not a problem" nonsense right now. It is a problem.

See this arstechnica article from Jan 17 2007.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070117-8639 .html

Check out this article on Ars for the word from the horse's mouth, as it were.

He must work for the BSA. That would explain both his LSD induced view of the facts and his counting Linux use as piracy. See
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050614-4993 .html and http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/07/20/10268 98931824.html for more info. (Note the date: this has been going on for a /very/ long time)

I think ShapeGSX says it best in the following Arstechnica thread: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f /174096756/m/823008258731/p/3

It's just the way it is. Until compilers manage to write code with no dependencies and sprinkle the correct percentage of each instruction type in the in-flight window to keep every execution unit filled on every clock cycle, there will be free slots in the execution units. There is no way around it. You might as well take advantage of the free slots.

There was a lot of good discussion about SMT in that thread. You should read it.

By far the dominant CPU activity in most code these days is waiting for load/stores to be fulfilled. And processors like Sun's Niagara address this by allowing up to 4 threads to be scheduled in a single core at the same time, so that it can batch memory requests from all four threads at once. The SPARC cores in Niagara though, really have only one execution pipeline, so only one thread is actually executing per clock cycle. But the throughput of the CPU as a whole is still increased, since the core will switch the executing thread out when one hits a stall in memory access. Simultaneous multithreading is even better in that it actually lets instructions from more than one thread execute within the same clock cycle, utilizing wide CPU architectures better.

There are implementation caveats, sure. The Pentium 4 had certain microarchitectural features (load address speculation and replay) that caused some threads to greatly decrease in efficiency. But this is not a problem inherent to multithreading, and indeed processors like IBM's Power6 and Intel's Itanium2 have decided to implement it, to great success. Pretty much every high-performance CPU company these days makes a chip that implements core-level multithreading in one form or another. AMD is the only one that doesn't.

And the reason why Alpha does not currently have multithreading, was that EV8 (what would have been the 21464) was cancelled when Compaq/HP's Alpha Design Group was transferred to Intel. EV8 (nicknamed Arana, from the Spanish for "spider") would have implemented 4-way simultaneous multithreading in a high-performance, short pipeline, wide architecture.

Anyway, sorry if I come off as high-handed, but I couldn't let a ridiculously naive statement like "The core2 and AMD64 don't have enough bubbles to warrant it." stand.

There's a ton of Java developers out there. Their code does not run on MS OSes in general in production. Their tools are generally OS agnostic as well. In fact, in general, their tools run better on non-MS OSes. (Something about case-sensitive file systems)

There's the additional advantage that it's a *nix subsystem, which happens to mesh nicely with our targeted deploy environments.

I'd love to see a 16 or 32 core Mac Pro in the near future - imagine the processing ability of such a system. :)

C'mon, at least cite your source.

However, as a pretty damn safe rule of thumb, no system is going to run faster on equivalent hardware after being virtualized.

Oddly enough, that's not as true as you'd think. I know that HP and IBM both had projects to virtual hardware (not in exactly VMWare style virtualization, more like a JIT optimization) where software ran faster after being virtualized. By about 20% if I remember correctly. HP's project was Dynamo and IBM's was DAISY.

Virtualizing a CPU at runtime in a JIT-optimization fashion can actually lead to a significant speed up. Some of this might have been pulled into CPU's by now, but I'm always surprised that more technology isn't moving this direction. Ultimately optimization at runtime has more information then at compile-time, and thus can apply optimizations not otherwise available.

Kirby

As a long-time PC gamer, I can't bring myself to buy an XBox 360 at all. Every time I look at one, I'm reminded that under the fancy plastic casing, it's just a rather non-upgradeable PC inside. There's *never* going to be a single piece of software developed for XBox 360 that can't run identically on a modern PC, because they're using the same architecture

Nice sentiments, but there are some questions that arise...

It is important to note that though Speakeasy will now be a wholly owned subsidiary of Best Buy, we will continue to operate as a standalone, independent operating division with headquarters in Seattle.

Ok, but for how long? More often than not, mergers or acquisitions end up with the old management getting replaced over a period of time by new management, who often want to make their mark... often to the detriment of customers and/or employees.

A product offering such as VoIP, which has immediate compelling appeal to most SBs based on cost savings and simplicity, is an attractive value proposition that allows Best Buy to round out its solutions menu for small businesses.

In light of the recent enjoinder against Vonage, will BestBuy find itself in a similar situation with SpeakEasy's VOIP tech? If so, will this dilute SpeakEasy's value to BestBuy? And what could the consequences be?

I just hope this turns out well for the SpeakEasy employees, and customers who decide to stick with them (for the near-term anyway).

p2pnet.net
Ars Technica
The Inquirer

If there is no indication that providers are even looking down a non-neutral path

Actually, the whole thing started when SBC/AT&T specifically said they desire to tier the Internet. It is not difficult to understand the motivation of the telecoms if you look at how SBC/AT&T and Verizon/MCI managed to end up on top of the telecom reconsolidation frenzy.

In a point-to-point bus topology, a shared switch replaces the shared bus as the single shared resource by means of which all of the devices communicate. Unlike in a shared bus topology, where the devices must collectively arbitrate among themselves for use of the bus, each device in the system has direct and exclusive access to the switch. In other words, each device sits on its own dedicated bus, which in PCIe lingo is called a link.

What is currently happening that needs to be fixed by this law? Forcing websites to cough up to be given a high bandwidth access to end users would be bad, but (AFAIK) that's not happening.

I see no reason to make a law to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

When I heard this story on the morning news here in Boston, my first reaction was, "why are they suing over losing a measly $9 million contract?" My guess is their legal bill if they were to pursue this to the end would easily run to seven figures. According to the article, Diebold's attorney stated that "the company is not alleging any improprieties by the secretary of state's office. Instead, it is saying the office acted in good faith but made a mistake in the selection." MA Secretary of State Galvin doesn't think there's any reason to re-open this matter; I doubt the courts will either.

What's especially surprising is that this move comes after a recent Diebold SEC filing suggested that Diebold is considering leaving the voting machine business because the bad PR the company has received is starting to affect its much more important ATM business. Banks don't want to put a machine in front of its customers whose manufacturer gets accused of building shoddy voting equipment every time an election is held.

The federal judge overseeing the e360insight v. Spamhaus case has ruled against a motion to yank Spamhaus' domain name out from under it.

Had Spamhaus made the "no jurisdiction" argument at the onset, it may very well have gotten the case dismissed. Instead, it finds itself in the undesirable and difficult position of having to appeal a summary judgment. Spamhaus is "working with lawyers to find a way to both appeal the ruling and stop further nonsense by the spammer," Linford told Ars Technica.

The fact that the judge was a total moron who was unable to see through a pathetic tissue of lies shows how dangerous it would have been to have allowed any person from Spamhaus to become a literal captive hostage in the US while this was being sorted out.

The judge, Charles Kocoras, is chief judge of the District Court in Northern Illinois and was last month awarded the Chicago Bar Association's highest honor, the Justice John Paul Stevens Award. This is not a guy who hands out his verdicts like candy.

This is old anyway.

Take the NFL's copyrighted copyright statement before their games. "This broadcast blahblahblah may not be reproduced without our permission".

There's currently a fiasco regarding whether or not a Ms Wendy Seltzer could put that video up on YouTube. A lot of people say that she it is a fair use to do so, since she is doing it for the educational purposes.

But, I wonder, what about everyone ELSE who views the video, outside the educational context?

The greater implication is that, given your statement about creating a larger work, when I create the larger work and I use YouTube as the platform for a piece of this work, what happens to everyone else who can look at YouTube...minus the larger work?

...the percentage of Mac desktops can only go up.

Really? Because their notebooks aren't doing so hot. I'm pretty sure the same principle could apply to Apple's line of desktops as well.

Digital album sales are strong

"Last year the industry saw about $2 billion in revenues from online music sales, and nearly $800 million of that stemmed from single-track sales, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's report. That leads me to estimate that at least 40 percent of sales are singles, which means that this quarter we could see something in the range of 70 million "singles" sold digitally.

The question is: how often does a consumer opt to buy just one or two songs off an album rather than buy the whole thing? This phenomenon must affect the top of the music charts quite viciously. I know I'm reluctant to buy an album, especially anything approaching a "hit album," unless I know that there's more than 2 to 3 songs on it that I like. Otherwise, I don't want to take the "risk."

But to answer the question of how often, let's just estimate based on what limited information we have. Given the estimate of 70 million digital singles, we could say that the ratio between consumers buying digital songs and entire CDs is approximately 1:1.22. That's quite a leveling. If my estimates have been conservative, the balance may be tipped even more in favor of digital singles."

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070321-acco unting-for-the-big-plunge-in-music-sales-the-digit al-singles-effect.html

so maybe it wasn't on the PS3 but valve seems to take a more practical apoach.
This Article has some good info on what Valve is doing to bring threads into gaming.
Personaly I'd rather use their model because it's more utilitarian and less 'Because I can'.

I think this would set a precedent, i.e. every person who is sued by the RIAA has just to prove that they are not guilty and reclaim the attorney's fees. Which means their model would be screwed, for every person they sue, they would have to prove that the person was responsible for sharing and/or inciting to share copyrighted contents. If they would fail to prove one or the other, the precedent would force the RIAA to pay back the attorney's fees, which would be a big change. I do not know if the precedent could cause past plaintiffs to reclaim past attorney's fees. But without trolling, I can say that arguments and proofs from the RIAA are such bulls... From the link at the bottom: According to RIAA filings, Michelle Santangelo, 20, has admitted to illegal downloading at the age of 16. Robert Santangelo, 16, was implicated by his best friend, who said that the two traded copyrighted songs online. Robert would be accused of sharing copyrighted contents at 11, 5 years ago ! How can this be considered as 'fair'. If I was sued by the RIAA over such stupid claims I would reclaim my hourly salary for not being able to work and a compensation. What next ? "RIAA sues a taxi driver for sharing hand drawn picutres of Superman(c) when he was 10" ? Read also this related story: - http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061103-8150 .html

Not only is it doing fine, but that cycle is a vital part of the industry. Every time the hottest new style is stolen by the lesser companies, the big fancy companies use it as an opportunity to come out with the next style.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061124-8283 .html/

I tried to think of how this could be a plausible business model for the music industry, but either it's already happening, or it doesn't seem to fit. Unfortunately, I doubt there is a record exec that actually appreciates musical "style". If they did, they'd understand the derivative nature of music, and wouldn't be having DJ's arrested for copyright infringement. Hopefully one day they'll behave just like how the all-grown-up fashion industry behaves; you don't see Prada suing the pants off of high school girls who bought knockoff handbags. Hell, you don't even see them sue the makes of the knockoff's. They just ditch their old stuff, and make new stuff for the people to buy.

On a side note, if someone does buy Take-Two for double the price, doesn't that just kinda fit their name?

Meanwhile, AT&T/Cingular is blocking its cellular customers from calling into free conferencing services that use VoIP for competing with AT&T/Cingular.

Network Neutrality: it's not just for the Internet. It's just one way we need to protect ourselves from the AT&T monopoly (or its duopoly with Verizon) that America worked so long and hard to obtain 20 years ago. Which AT&T has worked so long and hard since then to endrun, nearly back to its original market control, in a much larger market. A market that expanded only because of the divestiture.

IPsec encrypts each individual packet, so it can be applied to all IP traffic, unlike the widely used SSL, which only works on top of TCP.

On the BSD/Linux side, a good choice in this regard is the pf firewalling package, because unlike iptables, ipfw, or ipf, it supports both IPv4 and IPv6 and allows rules that apply to both.

IPsec encrypts each individual packet, so it can be applied to all IP traffic, unlike the widely used SSL, which only works on top of TCP.

On the BSD/Linux side, a good choice in this regard is the pf firewalling package, because unlike iptables, ipfw, or ipf, it supports both IPv4 and IPv6 and allows rules that apply to both.

i wont sweat it. people can drink the kool-aid all they want, facts are facts. i've owned every playstation and xbox console. if i am not allowed to criticize the xbox BC, who is?

we cant bury our heads in the sand. a promise was made, and now they are backing away from it and telling us that we dont know what we are talking about. i just want what was promised to me as an investor into the xbox brand. i dont want to hear criticism of a company that [even at their worst] has provided BC for 2300 more titles than MS has been capable of.

instead, how about more proof? these from MS itself.

--

"Our goal remains to get every game to be backward compatible. The only things influencing what games we're working on are how popular the title is, and how easy it is to make backward compatible. Several original Xbox games on the list already have Xbox 360 counterparts."
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/backwardcompatibil ityfaq.htm

"Xbox.com: What criteria do you use in choosing which Xbox games will be backward compatible on Xbox 360? How far back into the Xbox game library are you going to go?
Todd: When we say Xbox library, we mean the entire Xbox library. This ranges all the way from our launch in 2001 up to games that haven't even shipped yet.

Xbox.com: By what date do you plan to have all original Xbox games backward compatible?
Todd: We're continuing to work hard to certify as many original Xbox games to work on Xbox 360 as possible; we'll be adding to the list regularly."
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/backwardcompatibil ityqa.htm

"...the company eventually plans to support the entire catalog for the original Xbox on the Xbox 360."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051112-5558 .html

According to this it was Alabama not Florida.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051122-5613 .html

In Florida they are still working on it. Though, I don't think his status is still good standing.
http://gamepolitics.com/2007/02/03/jack-thompson-f aces-florida-bar-disciplinary-hearing/

Are you sure about that?

Seriously, MS still envies google in that area. For all the hot air Ballmer spews about googles' "cute" apps, and how their hire rate is "insane".... MS has lost this round of the search match, they're not able to compete. Look at the emphasis they've put on it. Why pay people to use windows live if you don't care? Microsoft is becoming the one thing that Bill Gates hoped he'd never see.... a lumbering behemoth not dissimilar to the old IBM. They are having diffifulty keeping up with the present, just look at vista for connfirmation. (Disclaimer: I don't mind vista).

But vista brings forth features that I've had in linux for years. gkrellm does a great job as a sidebar, without the resource usage. The latter part of... scratch that.... MOST OF XP's cycle was spent chasing holes and vulnerabilities.

I like vista, and see it being fairly well adoped in a few years time. But it's not a forward looking technology, just as Live Search isn't forward looking. They care, but there isn't much they can do about it besides pay people to use it.

Given that his stories do tend to be fairly interesting, does it really matter if he's making money by submitting them here?

Of course! Making money off of someone else is evil! Just ask ultrasocialists like SBC/AT&T and Rogers cable, who think that people who make money from them are evil!

To answer my own question: This reviewer says he tested the device in 802.11n/5 GHz mode: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/airport-n. ars

So I guess the answer is yes, you can get 802.11n, 5 GHz devices now. (At least one, anyway.) What sucks is that it can't run on both 2.4 and 5 GHz at once, so unless you have all 5 GHz devices, you'll have to run on 2.4 GHz or you'll have to get another base station for the older devices.

...it's roughly 5.67137278 × 10^28 IP's per person

Or, as a recent Ars article put it (much better than I ever could):

To put this into perspective: there are currently 130 million people born each year. If this number of births remains the same until the sun goes dark in 5 billion years, and all of these people live to be 72 years old, they can all have 53 times the address space of the IPv4 Internet for every second of their lives. Let nobody accuse the IETF of being frugal this time around.

As of the end of 2006, only 695,000 consumers owned either a Blu-ray or HD DVD player. 270,000 of those were HD DVD players; the other 425,000 were Blu-ray. The overwhelming majority of Blu-ray players are PS3s--only 25,000 standalone Blu-ray players had been sold at year-end. Just over half of the HD DVD players sold were Xbox 360 add-ons.

Yes it does. The DVD recordable standards didn't support burning CSS protected data on discs until very recently, and there is no hardware/media that supports the new spec out yet, so yes, making a backup requires circumventing the CSS. If making a backup was just a simple matter of copying the DVD, then what would be the point in using the CSS in the first place?

The review doesn't mention this, so I thought I would since I know many Slashdot readers also read Ars, but may have missed this.

If you buy the book from Ars, shipping is free almost anywhere on earth (if the USPS ships there, so can we). Yes, we charge more than Amazon, but it's a good deal if you want to support Ars. We also include a free year of access to the Ars PDF Library, and we'll also be giving our customers a free copy of the digital edition when it's available later this year.

And lo and behold, there is movement:

VMWare Fusion Beta 2 comes with "Experimental 3D Acceleration"

OK, so it's only for Macs so far. But that's a step in the right direction...

VMGL -- this one won't work for Windows guests, but can be used for Linux guests. A similar approach could definitely work for Windows guests, but you'd need to write a DirectX-compatible driver that translates the DX API calls into paravirtualized OpenGL API calls. Tricky, but I imagine possible.

On the other hand, when it sucks, it can suck bad. See this crazy story.

You're not the only one -- see this crazy story.