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If you play wow do you have time for other games good or bad? No you do not it is designed, like all MMOs, to suck your entire life up. People play so much they let their neglected child die while playing WOW http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2005/6/ 21/547. Many people that play WOW are addicts and can no longer make rational judgements about their habbit.

One life, you're Nate Anderson, writer for a respectable hardware website. You have a social security number, pay your taxes, and you... help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in breaking DRM, where you go by the hacker alias "Nater" and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not.

I take it you missed this?

Meanwhile, Paris may put their deployment on hold because the French Ministry of Defense says it falls short in the area of security. Specifically they can get malicious macro code to execute with no user warning. Microsoft Office, on the other hand, annoys you at every chance that a macro will run. Fortunately the lab is actually working with OpenOffice.org to have the issues resolved.

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f /8300945231/m/332004739731

Does it even bother you to think for a minute that you might have chosen a slow algorithm to begin with?

Consider djbfft, which is written in C, and yet outruns many FFT implementations that are written in assembly, some of which were written by experts.

Don't modern compilers take care of instruction scheduling?
Sure, if you don't care about speed.

do properly scheduled Pentium/PMMX asm
pass parameters in registers
organize asm to fall through function entry when possible
organize asm to reduce i-cache pressure

I just bought a new PC, and i have no viruses yet.

How do you know?

How could he know?

Conroe (Duo-tech) based Xeon chips will be coming out in September.

The NDAs have lifted on the Core 2 Duo reviews, and you can surf on over to your review site of choice for a boatload of benchmarks and bar graphs. The Tech Report's Core 2 Duo review was the only one that didn't make me want to jab my own eyes out with my mechanical pencil after reading it, so it's the only one I'm actually going to link up here. In fact, I was so frustrated after reading a few of these reviews, that I surfed over to CNN and read up on the latest developments in the Middle East to lighten my mood.

Inflation-adjusted console pricing; 1976-present.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060516-6843 .html

The absolute best commentary on this horde of Conroe reviews was from Hannibal:

The Tech Report's Core 2 Duo review was the only one that didn't make me want to jab my own eyes out with my mechanical pencil after reading it

As parent post notes, most of the "reviews" focused on high-end 3D gameplay, which is 99% GPU benchmarking and only slightly affected by the CPU. On the bright side, this is an excellent way to make a list of incompetent overhyped bloggers whose articles should be ignored from now on.

Compare that to MS who while not great did show a wide variety of games and had some good announcements (GTA no longer exclusive to PlayStation for one).

Then there was the "little guy", Nintendo. A fantastic showing of tons of games that got tons of press. People were interested in much of it. Wii Sports, Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Red Steel, Wario Ware: Smooth Moves, Super Smash Brothers Brawl, and more. Name 7 big upcoming games off the top of your head for either other system.

I've gotta say, I thought the PS3 would be a scarce but big hit with great graphics. Now I'm starting to get much more interested as it seems the PS3 will be overpriced with great graphics and a fair helping of "what are they doing now."

Here's what I know of and/or could find for the ones I didn't.

• Aaron Hillegas
• Adam & Tonya Engst
• Amit Singh
• Andrina Kelly
• Andy Ihnatko
• Ben Wilson
• Brent Simmons
• Dan Frakes
• Danny Goodman
• David Pogue
• Drunkenbatman
• John Gruber
• John Siracusa
• Jonathan "Wolf" Rentzsch
• Josh Wisenbaker
• Michael Bartosh
• Mike Breeden
• Nigel Kersten
• Ray Barber
• Ric Ford
• Rich Siegel (Bare Bones SW)
• Rob Griffiths
• Rosyna Keller
• Scott Knaster
• Wil Shipley (Delicious Monster)

Unfortunately, it seems that Slashdot has a limitation on the minimum number of characters per line. So I can't just create a nice, simple list, but instead need a significant amount of text to pad out the list, so that I can make it past the filters being used. But I'm still not there yet... sooner or later I will (20.4 is still too few). I'm probably going to have to type a whole lot of crap in here just to deal with the 25 names that are only a few characters each. (and I tried removing returns from the message, but it didn't seem to help at all)

Having a separate boot disk dramatically increases costs because current OS licensing requirements means that the boot disk needs a separate OS license.

The first idea that pops into my head, is that users should use Windows under copyright (which allows Fair Use) instead of licensing it. Then they can legally make a clean boot disk.

But I guess the idea of using software under copyright is controversial, and some people still want to license Windows. Ok, whatever. One thing these users could maybe do, is run Windows under virtualization (which MS has recently started to license for "free") and then scan the guest system from a well-protected host OS.

Ars Review

They basically say it runs Firefox and Solitaire, but that's it. "Lots of promise, but needs work".

Subject: VMware Workstation v5.5.1 vs. Virtual PC 2004?

On Windows XP host machines, which virtual client software is better? Are there any reviews that compare both products in terms of performance, compatbility, features, etc.? Can VPC do OpenGL unlike VMware to play old 3D games?

Subject: VMware Workstation v5.5.1 vs. Virtual PC 2004?

On Windows XP host machines, which virtual client software is better? Are there any reviews that compare both products in terms of performance, compatbility, features, etc.? Can VPC do OpenGL unlike VMware to play old 3D games?

I don't know if developers are taking advantage of it, or to what extent it supports it, but I'm fairly sure the Xbox 360 already has Procedural Synthesis capabilities.

Everyone has an agenda. The difference is that Wikipedia gives a voice to the masses while official history usually gives voice to the fascist state.

Is there anyone left on the planet who thinks that "official" history isn't propaganda? I don't think I have to enumerate the lies that you were told in school or are told everyday by FOX, CBS, NBC, Disney, and CNN. The real problem that these people have with the internet is that it threatens the disinformation structure that major corporations and governments have been honing for hundreds of years.

FACT (something that is verifiable):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precisio n
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/1 5/1352207&from=rss
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060323-6442 .html

The only group of people dumber than the people who believe what they see on TV is the qroup of people who believe what they read.

Any sane person knows that anything that is a matter of history is a matter of probability. Anyone who makes statements about "objective history" or even just "impartial history" is a raving lunatic.

Tell that to HP. Their Project Dynamo showed that in many cases running PA-RISC instructions emulated on on PA-RISC machine improved the performance of the program without changing how it was compiled. The emulated version can start to re-order code, change branching behavoir, etc as needed based on how the program is actually running (things like a JIT does on Java or .NET). So there is a place for Native to Native emulation; even if it seems silly.

Has your friend who is blind tried the Shuffle? If you do not install iTunes, it just looks like a thumb drive to a PC. Perfectly accessible, except for the low battery indicator. Yes, many of us are hoping Apple keeps improving accessibility, and iPods and iTunes are high on the wish list. That said, I think this patent is just about the shoes and there is no good reason to be optimistic. I hope I am wrong about that. Anyway, isn't this old news?

The article is about the iPod talking, not talking to your iPod. Really, you should be modded off-topic. And you meant to write you're not your. Mixing up voice recognition with speech synthesis is one of my pet peeves. The story is old news and my personal theory is that the speculation is overly optimistic. I think it is just about the shoes.

Apple have already implemented this technology! This so called news is two months old. Those snipping about patent abuse are way off target. I initially thought: Great, something for the Blind! That was naive. It is all about the shoes. Nothing to see here, please move along. Disappointing on several levels.

You forgot Universal. And between them, we have what's known as The Big Six - the six biggest movie studo parent corporations, making up the majority of mass-marketed films in the country. One of the few other potentially major players-to-be in the market, the Weinstein Company, has a distribution deal with MGM, subsidiary of Sony. So when you say "a few movie studios", you mean the ones that make almost all the movies that will make it to an HD format, and the ones who people are most worried about using DRM schemes.

You know, bombastic articles like this only make the problem worse, by trying to cast the situation as democracy vs. copyright. It is easy to blame the content industry for clamping down on these technologies. However, one could also ask why the viewing public is so quick to misuse any technology they are given access to in order to get around paying for content? Of course that is not the easy place to point the finger.

Copyright is an agreement between the artist and society. There is no argument that as of late that agreement has been strained in various ways, and needs to be reexamined. However, to pretend that the agreement is no longer needed, ignores the whole reason the agreement was made in the first place. The whole reason cheap and simple reproduction has worked out well for almost everyone, is because a system was enacted where the artist could be assured incentive to produce work, even in the face of cheap and simple reproduction. If you move to a system where cheap and simple reproduction is given more priority than the protection of the artist from that cheap and simple reproduction, then you will quickly find yourself in a situation where there is very little art worth reproducing, no matter how cheap or simple it is to do [Emphasis mine].

Note he doesn't say that art will disappear, just art worth having will be diminished.

And how do you expect this glorious revolution to take place, if the second an artist publishes their work, anyone can reproduce it and distribute it without the consent of the artist, and without giving any compensation to the artist?

You seem to be forgetting that unless the artist can monetize their work, then they will either have to devote their time to working a job to feed themselves, or will quickly stop producing art when they starve to death. It is a fantastic technoutopian vision, but one that requires very stringent copyright law and DRM to occur.

That is a valid point, but not one I think is shared by most anti-copyright advocates. I think most people take it for granted that the entertainment will just keep coming no matter whether they pay for it or not.

For example, do you think that garage punk band is just doing it because they want to be cool, or do you think they are also hoping they are going to get rich and famous? We already had a good long era where the only artists were one who did it for the love of art, and some amazing art was produced. However, most of that art was only ever seen by the patrons who could afford to fund its creation.

You have to face (which it would seem you might well have) that either you have a right to see art, or you have a right to copy art, but you can't have both. If you take away the ability of the artist to control the distribution of the work, then the inevitable result will be a return to all the best art being in private collections that are never seen by the public.

Not to be too snippy, but you aren't turning down the paychecks in protest, are you? Wink It does make for an odd argument though, when you are getting paid to produce content, but you don't think it is worth buying, and I am producing content with no hope of financial compensation (in fact it is costing me money), and I am the one defending the commercial value of the content.

Seriously though, what about the DMCA offends you? Is it the law itself, or some of the egregious misapplication of the law? For example, I am quite offended by the abuse of personal injur

In case you are like me and hate the reg only articles at sites like the NYT, here's the same topic from Ars Technica,

Google "ipod killer" -> 1,160,000 results.

We've seen iPod killers from Sony, iRiver, Dell, Nokia, and of course Creative.

Microsoft has been killing the iPod for years now. They need to get their other iPod killers out of the way to give their new device a piece of that tasty iPod flesh that Apple competitors have been feasting on for years.

Will the record companies give you the choice? For their perspective, we quote Tommi Kyyrä, of IFPI Finland: "Now, we need to understand that listening to music on your computer is an extra privilege. Normally people listen to music on their car or through their home stereos," said Kyyrä. "If you are a Linux or Mac user, you should consider purchasing a regular CD player."

Actually the Spanish American War (federal excise) tax was finally repealed a few months ago. Not only that but it was retroactive to 3 years ago. It took over a hundred years to do, but it did happen.

So can the gf poster get all he wants now?

it will be years before OSX overtakes Windows

Based on this study and a little extrapolation, I believe it already happened, around 1983.

Yes, exactly.

Open Source is totally unprofitable

360 is currently being outsold by the PS2, fer cryinoutloud. Which is a really bad sign.

When the next generation offers only a modest graphic upgrade and fewer in-game features (360) or wildly unaffordable hardware (PS3), one wonders what the result will be... will Wii win by default, or will less-hardcore gamers just not even bother with the next generation or move on to some non-gaming diversion altogether? Not hard to see 360/PS3's mutual suckiness crashing the industry pretty hard.

--realinvalidname

My jaw dropped when I read Ars Technica's comment that Microsoft was "abandoning many years of a largely consistent user interface in favor of an almost entirely redesigned system."

Every new release of Office I've ever used has shuffled the commands into different menus, reorganized which commands are in menus, which are in toolbars, which are in both, which have shortcut keys, which do not, and what those keys are.

(Why do I have the feeling that Office's user interface decisions are made by marketing managers exercising their right to tailor Office to their personal taste, rather than by UI professionals performing user testing?)

(Yes, I am aware that Office has a sort of user-interface construction set that lets you remould all of these nearer to your heart's desire... thereby making it almost impossible for you to use any other copy of Word but your own...)

An article from 3 months ago saying essentially the same thing, that it's a "early 2007" release.

Sorry, that should have said 'as most any modern console'

PS3 will be sold at a loss, like the PS2, the PSP, the Gamecube, the Sega Saturn.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060219-6216 .html
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/may20 06/id20060501_525587.htm?chan=innovation_game+room _top+stories


Loss Leader described on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader

Video game console makers that sell their console units at very low margins, or even at a loss, to achieve a higher market share. They rely on profits from software sales where the markups are considerably higher. They also receive profits from 3rd party software companies for licensing fees. Microsoft has used this technique with the Xbox. Sony has done the same, to a lesser extent, with the PlayStation 2 and PSP. Nintendo was able to profit on the sales of its Gamecube console for a short time before selling it at a loss.

http://www.actsofgord.com/Proclamations/chapter0 2.html an article on the myth of selling consoles at a loss. It does happen, but its not a historic all encompassing trend.

We've already scored victories ... we killed a proposed statewide smoking ban

Jeezus Aich Christ.. you'd think this is rocket science. If people don't want to pay for the software or agree to their EULA then don't use the software...[rest of rant removed]

Name me one damned piece of software that doesn't come with a EULA 30 pages long these days, and that doesn't include onerous conditions. Even the free licenses have clauses you may not like or agree with. In the real world you're "just don't use it" rhetoric is nonsense. Forget games. Do you get to pick the software you use at work? If you said you had a moral objection to using it and refused how long do you think your job would last? Better yet name me a practical operating system without a EULA. Your choice on a modern personal computer is limited to MacOS, WIndows and Unix/Linux. ...and another damned thing. I don't get to take the damned software back if I don't agree to the EULA, because shock horror I might have made a copy. Worse, until people have their systems screwed up - when it's too late to do anything about it - they don't learn about the problems with certain anti-piracy schemes.

Horseshit. Either back it up with a cite or STFU.

Oh that's good. You can google for a dozen phrases such as "CD keys increase piracy". Go and google for "starforce copy protection" while you're at it.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060313-6365 .html
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6145864.html

I refuse to do any more research for you. You haven't countered one damn thing I said or provided one bit of evidence for anything you've said yet you want me to. Instead of countering my arguments you just tell me not to use software if I don't like it. Too damn late if I bought it!

Ahhh go bury your head in the sand. Obviously you see your living threatened so you choose to only see one side of the argument. Yeah lets continue with a system that doesn't work, and makes even the most well intentioned companies and peoples criminal. Have fun. It's obvious to any cretin that if the software copy protection is going to do damage to a system there are going to be more people willing to break it. If it's cheap and it doesn't waste your time or stuff your system, why would people want a cracked/pirated copy?

If you've got URLs, please post 'em. I try to have a neutral view of things, it's just that market penetration numbers are very hard to find... (manufacturers hide theirs, analysts charge lots of money for theirs).

I thought it was pretty well established that LCD prices were clearly dropping a decent amount every year [1], though I guess that's partly due to lower than expected demand.

Well, whatever. HDNet+PVR and bittorrent are always alternatives for geeks.

There are 2 separate file optimizations going on here.

The first is automatic file defragmentation. When a file is opened, if it is highly fragmented (8+ fragments) and under 20MB in size, it is defragmented. This works by just moving the file to a new, arbitrary, location. This only happens on Journaled HFS+ volumes.

The second is the "Adaptive Hot File Clustering". Over a period of days, the OS keeps track of files that are read frequently - these are files under 10MB, and which are never written to. At the end of each tracking cycle, the "hottest" files (the files that have been read the most times) are moved to a "hotband" on the disk - this is a part of the disk which is particularly fast given the physical disk characteristics (currently sized at 5MB per GB). "Cold" files are evicted to make room. As a side effect of being moved into the hotband, files are defragmented. Currently, AHFC only works on the boot volume, and only for Journaled HFS+ volumes over 10GB.

Consider the avian flu (H5N1). The World Health Organization has found evidence that this disease has mutated and is now starting to transmit from human to human, where previously it was only transmitted from bird to human. (link) The chance for a world pandemic has greatly increased with this revelation, yet people and communities who have prepared themselves, and are in good health to begin with will most likely survive the infection, or avoid becoming infected in the first place.

Similarly, it is the computer networks and systems that are focused on security that tend to be the best protected when it comes to zero-day exploits. Good network and system administrators know the general weaknesses of the computers they are responsible for, and work to protect those weaknesses from exposure. Good administrators that have planned well, tend to monitor an attempted attack on their network, while poor administrators tend to find themselves recovering from a successful attack.

I'm pretty sure you're just trolling and trying to picking a fight now. I was going to say, "interesting point", but instead how about a "grow up". However, I decided to google it to see what you were talking about. One minute of googling reveals that you don't know what you're talking about.

Your comparison is factually wrong. Q2DE is built in to Tiger, but disabled by default. There are no reasons for the user to enable it really, but it's there if you want to play with it. That is, if you have a ATI Radeon 9600 or NVIDIA GeForce FX or better.

So basically, you're 100% incorrect. Apple has not dropped Q2DE nor has it failed to launch it on time. It's there in Tiger. Furthermore, it is the future, as Quickdraw is officially deprecated.

Ars Tiger article - Quartz 2D Extreme section
Mac OS X Hints - enabling Quartz 2D Extreme in Tiger

Go ahead and hate Apple all you want. I couldn't care less if I tried. Just get a grip on the facts instead of making things up.

Not the same thing:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/ 14

This was a feature announced to combat the imaging model in Vista. It's in Tiger, but disabled so it's never used. I suspect it will be brought back to life this WWDC.

• first, it costs $25 to even enable the feature. their ceo says it's to help pay for the licensing costs... i guess, but it's still too pricey for a simple add-on. divide that number by five and i might consider it. especially when i have to buy a separate license for every PC i run the software from. it should be tied to the device's media access key, IMHO.
• you can't convert stuff you've already transferred over from your tivo to the mobile format. i use my PC as a backup for my tivo - as the DVR runs out of room i move stuff over to the PC and stream it from there if i want to watch it. so the ~30 shows sitting on my PC are gone off my tivo and I can't re-transfer them.
• i can't convert-on-demand. i have to go into the preferences and turn on mobile conversion, and then transfer a show from the tivo. wrong, guys, i should be able to right click on a show from the list and convert on the fly.
• i can't convert to both ipod and psp formats at once. true, i'm a gadget nerd and few probably own both devices, but give me the option instead of leaving it out. i don't get why software developers continually forget that more options = happier consumersx.
• the psp has a 480x272 widescreen. i should be able to render my tivo recordings at that resolution, but output from this app is max 320x240. which will look sad and grainy on my psp.
• they still haven't fixed long transfer times. there's no reason at all that it should take an hour to copy a 1GB file from my tivo to my PC on my 100mbit LAN.
• the transfers take a long time, so if my connection dies during a transfer or i lose power, the software should allow resuming of transfers. nope. restart it and walk away for another hour.

DRM is a solution to piracy. It isn't a great solution, but if music is free to redistribute, then very few will be original distributors. Scarcity is an essential concept in economics.

That doesn't seem to be true. There are businesses selling DRM-free music. They have been mentioned in the "Alternatives" thread, and elsewhere. As an example, eMusic is listed as the #2 retailer of downloadable music. There are many artists giving away their music or selling it directly to fans in order to get people to come to their shows. It is only a small conglomerate of labels that feels they need DRM in order to stay alive. They might be right, but do not equate the continued profits of those few businesses with the success of music and culture in general. I would be interested to see any articles or statements from non-RIAA labels in support of DRM. I honestly haven't heard any. Isn't competition also an essential concept in free market economics?

Consider for a moment that you produce an electronic product (e.g., music, movies, video games, etc). How will you get paid for your efforts? If the cost of production (and reproduction) is zero, and you have no way to limit it, you will have a hard road ahead.

You mean, how will you get paid more than 7 cents per song for your efforts? Eliminating the massive overhead that goes into distributing music via the current monopoly model will likely enable artists to be better off. Plus, it's not like all artists made a living before. Your question should actually be, "How will our few multimillion-dollar pop stars continue to get paid for their efforts?" Because an incredible number of talented musicians are already making no money under the current model. Artists will get paid because people like their music. People will pay to be the first to receive the new music, even if it can be freely distributed after that. People will pay for shows, for signed editions, and to encourage the production of more stuff they like.

It amuzes me that kids think free music is a right. It takes a lot of effort to produce a quality product (of any kind). Demanding that it be free is insane.

I'm unfortunately not much of a kid anymore, but let's not forget that DRM applies to a lot more than music. It's being used by libraries on their audio books. It is applied to eBooks, including literature and educational materials. It's applied to the software that runs, well, just about everything these days. We are letting the companies who own this DRM technology dictate under what terms we can educate ourselves (and our kids) in ways that we have never allowed before. What are the ramifications of this?

Even if it's true that we need to provide a greater incentive to people to create useful works, that would only point to a need to find a better way to do it than restricting access to those works, since such restrictions have wide-ranging impacts (like bringing down entire incredibly useful infrastructures like P2P). Copyright was conceived to be exactly such a device; something artificial to promote useful works. So we have room to come up with other such devices if need be.

It isn't "your" music.

No, but the benefit of exclusive ownership of copyrighted works to the rights-holder does need to be balanced against the benefit to society. That's what it says in the Constitution, anyway. Copyright has a limited term of ownership (even though that keeps getting longer) and is not like physical property in ways that others around here have already explained. Creation should be rewarded, but the kind of exclusive control required to justify DRM is an attempt to turn this into a kind of property it was never intended to be.

I agree that we need to have a society that supports artists and musicians. It's a littl

The music industry won't care about some users protesting about DRM, since their only goal is to turn the whole market into a standardless pay per view system, and they will succeed sooner or later when people get used to the idea of using only specific software and hardware for managing music. With comments like these (original story in finnish mirrored here), it's pretty clear that not only the 'merican music industry seriously wants to assure those responsible for various judicial systems that increasing incompability is the only way to go in the digital age.

eMusic. $0.25 per song (or less!), over a million songs to choose from in many different genres. And what they send you is unencumbered MP3s. No DRM, universal compatibility. Try it out for free by downloading a recent Winamp -- 50 free songs are included. (or sign up for a 14-day, 25 song trial via their website). Support good non-RIAA music!

Note: I have no affiliation with eMusic, other then being a satisfied customer.

The correct legal phrasing is "resisting arrest".

Well, it can't pinpoint your location absolutely

It can

I do the same with my 12" iBook, and it's great - at home I set it on the desk and plug everything in, then I unplug everything and stuff it in a backpack. Most of the time when I'm away from home, I don't need to do anything that would be difficult on a 12" screen, and the small size is much more convenient to haul around.

There are small PC laptops available, of course, but apparently most people haven't seen them, because I very frequently get comments on how small my laptop is (plus it's white and has a glowing Apple logo on the back, so that tends to stand out too).

The only downside is, my iBook isn't quick. :-( I'm hoping Apple figures out how to make a 13" MacBook Pro; the new MacBooks look awesome but I want decent video (mostly because of Quartz 2D Extreme which should be working in Mac OS X 10.5).

Data storage would be a complete non-issue. Just apply the same cutting edge technology used to give this Nano incredible storage capacity.