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On a second note, the average slashdot reader might have no problem understanding what iPod Express is and that the receipt is supposed to be mailed to you, but not everybody knows what they were getting into. While I was in an Apple store before Christmas, I had the joy of listening to one of the Express employees trying to convince a skeptical customer that an emailed receipt for an in-store purchase is perfectly valid. The employee ended up disappearing briefly and returning with a paper receipt. Based on this Ars article, it looks like this is a common occurance.

I saw this yesterday on Ars Technica. It wasn't slashdotted then! :)

The blog by the CTO was actually quite extensive and open, leading me to believe that this is legit, just not ready yet.

The app uses bittorrent protocol, but simply integrates a "buddy list" style private network, such that you can't share with the public. I'll be interested to see how (or if) it traverses NATs. The copyright cartel doesn't have much to worry about, unless public sharing can be hacked into this through some kind of re-broadcast mechanism. I doubt Allpeers will put it in there, as that's clearly not what it's targeted at.

There are a couple things you may not have considered with your hunch. First, if you are doing 3D textured graphics, then transfer speed to texture and vertex memory is key to performance, and PCI is many times slower than AGP. 10x is not "barely an improvement" in the real-time 3d graphics world.

True, but on a typical home system, where the PCI bus is mostly available, is it enough bandwidth to keep the video card supplied with data fast enough? Are games these days really pushing so much data that the PCI bus isn't sufficient? Sure, it's nice to have 10x the bandwidth, but is that being used?

Secondly, there typically isn't just one bus in a system, and that PCI bus is typically on the other side of more than one bridge relative to the CPU, where AGP is typically only one bridge away.

You have a slight error there. The PCI bus, and the slots, should always be separated from the CPU by only the northbridge. I don't think I've ever encountered a chipset where the PCI slots were off the southbridge. They're kinda "between" the bridges. Arstechnica has a nice diagram of this in their motherboard fundamentals article series here on page 3. The diagram they show is the 440HX, which is many moons old.

Finally I just don't understand the obsessiveness of your argument. Who cares about PCI? Do you think it costs that much more to manufacture an AGP card? The $$$ are in the GPU and memory, not in the bus interface. A PCI card wouldn't save you $$$ other than being not in demand and therefore cheaper because no one wants them. Are there really mainstream motherboards with no AGP slots? Haven't seen one in years.

It's not about cost to manufacture anymore. These days AGP is cheaper for everyone, unless they have one of those crap pre-built machines with no AGP slot. It's about why the interface was created in the first place. It was designed to expand the memory available to the graphics processor by giving it a fast connection to system RAM. The first few iterations of AGP did this very poorly. By the time AGP was doing it right, its purpose was null and void because manufacturers were sticking gobs of cheap RAM directly on the cards. Whether the faster bus has done any good in the long term isn't something any review site has decided to look at. Nobody has the numbers to compare the final version of AGP with PCI in the real world, not just with specifications. It seems like change for change's sake, in hind-sight. Heck, even during the transition, it was apparent AGP wasn't really doing anything for anybody, but nobody who matters stood up to say so.

The problem I have with AGP is that if I want to stick an additional video card in my machine, I have to hunt and peck for a decent PCI card, and it costs me a bit more than it should in time, money, and effort to find. Dual and quad-head AGP cards are available, sure, but they cost significantly more than just adding a PCI card, and then I'm left with an AGP card I can't do anything with unless I happen to have another machine that needs an upgrade.

PCI-Express is a bastard hack of a combo PCI/AGP philosophy. Now, not only do we no longer have a set number of standard slots, we have different numbers of different sized slots to deal with. Gone are the days of a 5 or 6-slot motherboard where any expansion card could be installed in any slot, and heck you could put 5 of the same thing in if you had the need. Now you need to not only make sure you have the right kind of PCI-Express slot available, you need to make sure that the card you got is going to fit right in a particular space. No more "Well, not enough room in my case to use slot 3, I'll just stick it in slot 5." Maybe it won't be so bad, but PCI-Express is too new to see where it'll end up, and I feel like being pessimistic right now. It just feels like more change for change's sake. And yet again, if I need to get another video card, I need t

You've really only ever seen one mp3 player in your life? A lot of this might have to do with your age (I don't know it, but I'm guessing it isn't anywhere between 16-24). I'm in college, and last january after returning from break just about every other person you passed had the telltale white headphones popping out. For people around my age, if you want an mp3 player you get an ipod. I only know one other person who has a non-ipod mp3 player, but he's also a linux junkie, which sort of explains that.

I'm not going to call bullshit on you, but it's not like the ipod is a made-up phenomenon. Quickly googled numbers , in fact, suggest 90% of the mp3 player market (pretty far off from the 0% you suggested). Not really a minority. There is certainly hype surrounding the ipod machine, but that doesn't mean there are hard numbers as well.

P.

But despite reports, this does not mean that P2P is legal in France. The vote would still need to pass in the French Senate, and even before then, it will probably need a second reading in the lower house, because the first one was a sham. To put it bluntly, this is a publicity stunt. The bill, which passed last night by a vote of 30 to 28, saw the remaining 519 deputies absent from the vote. They weren't there.

The people over at Ars Technica have a great little article about this whole fiasco concerning the wiretapping of US citizens without a warrent...

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051220-5808 .html

From the article:

"Now let's take a look a statement of former senator Bob Graham (D-FL), who was one of the few senators to be briefed on the program. From a new Washington Post article:

        "I came out of the room with the full sense that we were dealing with a change in technology but not policy," Graham said, with new opportunities to intercept overseas calls that passed through U.S. switches."

and

" This system's [TIA] purpose would be to monitor communications and detect would-be terrorists and plots before they happen... This project is not interested in funding "evolutionary" changes in technology, e.g., bit-step improvements to current data mining and storage techniques. Rather, the amount of data that the directors are anticipating (petabytes!) would require massive leaps in technology (and perhaps also some massive leaps in surveillance laws). According to DARPA, such data collection "increases information coverage by an order of magnitude," and ultimately "requires keeping track of individuals and understanding how they fit into models.""

ttyl
          Farrell

TFA doesn't say how many shares - I wouldn't worry too much (Note I said "too" much). The shareholders will realize who he is and either ignore him totally or try to buy up his shares.

He probably doesn't own more than a few shares - just enough to be a "shareholder" and raise holy hell at the shareholders meeting. Maybe a publicity stunt? We haven't heard much from Jack in awhile now. Besides, isn't the Florida Bar Assoc. looking into his conduct at this time?

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051019-5458 .html

Check out this article on Ars Technica, which speculates along the same lines you have.

Joss Whedon says NO. http://arstechnica.com/staff/palatine.ars/2005/12/ 20/2154

"As I understand it, both formats allow "one click" transfers to hard disk drives, distribution through home networks and standard-definition downloads to portable devices."

The "Managed Copy" feature only gaurantees that you will be able to make a copy to send over a network, not that it will be free. Arstechnica explains it pretty well: "all content provided on HD DVD must give users the option of making at least one copy. Jordi Ribas, director of technical strategy for the Windows Digital Media Division, told me that while the feature is mandatory, the studios will have the option of charging for it."

Your player will have to be connected to the internet to allow for copies, and it's likely you will have to pay for any copy you make, even temporary ones.

No, it will not. Read this review and stres test of the ipod: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/nano.ars/3

<sarcasm>I wonder if more people would adopt XP SP2 if Gates got David Letterman to comment on the Micro, Soft security (like Win95 http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/total-shar e.ars/8)

Or maybe they could plug in a USB device and demonstrate how stable the system is, like Gates did for Win98 (http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9804/20/gates.c omdex/)</sarcasm>

Ars has a great article on how all of this is ultimately unconsitutional, and it mostly just a ploy to force the industry to self-regulate. It makes sense, because you cannot make 3rd parties so powerful.

I don't understand, the conclusion graph seems to suggest that mac marketshare surged in 1991 to 1993, whereas the text in the mac section says it surged with the release of the imac. http://media.arstechnica.com/articles/culture/tota l-share.media/marketshare.jpg

I thought Apple had something of a resurgence in the last couple years, but I don't see much indication of that.

Yea, but try to get the Cell, Xenon, and Broadway to run normal applications and performance won't be so good. Look at the Ars article on the next generation chips and you'll find that branch prediction is horrible on these chips here.

so here's the break down:

$0.87 to the label
$0.08 to the artist
$0.04 to the distributer (apple)

check it out.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20040922-4219 .html

and by the way, who are the members of the RIAA? the label execs. members of the RIAA get the cash. what are you, some RIAA member or something?

I guess former Cheerleaders all have the sort of mindset that attracts them to sign up for reality TV, attention seeking, aspiring actresses etc.

The changes Carriers are going to try to make boil down to QoS. Check out the TISPAN standards or 3GPP IMS on which TISPAN relies heavily. There are other standards as well.

Remember the Whitacre comment about "mah pipes"? He was talking about an SBC GPON network. They'll offer "triple play" services to consumers... sure... but the "video" and "telephone" networks won't run on the web... they'll be running on a private network. That means the "data" network is essentially just one of three QoS networks coming into the house. Which means they can control the bandwidth, priority, etc. of that traffic. Do you think SBC or Comcast is going to allow a fat data pipe into their customers home so Google can "steal" their IPTV/VoIP customers?

What can we do about this? Throw up our hands up in disgust and switch to another ISP? Who? Comcast? Verizon? They'll be doing the same thing. What's left? A Wifi provider? Please. WiMax? Yeah right. No wireless standard is going to compete with Fiber for at least several years. The only way Comcast/Verizon/SBC will give the "data" slice of the GPON network a fat bandwidth/priority is if I pay out the wazoo for it. Either that or make web companies foot the bill:

Look for this same QoS battle to unfold in the mobile world as Carriers roll out IMS. Carriers are nuts for ARPU and they're running around trying to deploy "instant messaging" and "video services" in their own walled gardens. Do you think they want to allow some web company to use "mah pipes" and "steal" the customers from their ARPU generating services? Just as there is a QoS bottleneck in the home so too is there one on your phone (when IMS is deployed, your phone talks SIP, etc.) via the PDP Context.

I wish I could have seen the reaction when Google announced their GLM service. You can be sure the phone companies would much prefer to charge for this type of service... and believe me they'll try everything they can to do so. The similarities between what's happening in your home and will happen on your cellphone are abundant. Wireless carriers own the spectrum to provide you services... just as Carriers own the GPON (other similar) network they're deploying. If they had their way there may be no internet... they'd provide all the major internet services themselves via "walled gardens".

That claim about Desktop Accessories has been debunked, they're not like Konfabulator: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/ 17

"When they became available in the US, I got my hands on one... "

Based on this photo in the review http://media.arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/noki a770.media/770.jpg,
he got his hands on one all right.

Hate to burst alot of bubbles, BUT:
The Xenon CPU IS NOT the same as 3 G5's all on one chip! Read the arstechnica article here:

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360 -2.ars/2

Basically it says: "The basic idea behind both Cell and Xenon is to make the execution core less complex by stripping out hardware that's intended to optimize instruction scheduling at runtime. Neither the Xenon nor the Cell have an instruction window, which means that these two processor designs largely forget about instruction-level parallelism. Instead, instructions pass through the processor in the order in which they're fetched, with the twist that two adjacent, non-dependent instructions are executed in parallel where possible."

This means that standard PPC code (OS X, etc) WILL NOT RUN on this. This is also the reason that IBM is selling these things at only $106 a pop to M$. Have you checked the prices for SINGLE CORE G5s for Apple? Their like $600-700 a piece! So, I am guessing that stripping these down makes them much easier and therefore faster and cheaper to mass produce, and therefore the price difference.

Anyway, there are reports that only one core is availble to intitial game developers, and one of the cores is strictly for M$ bullshit content protection TC such as the hypervisor, etc.

Not to mention from the article:

Microsoft and IBM engineers worked together during the definition phase of the project to specify a design to satisfy the constraints of a mass-produced consumer device

Sounds like a shitload of TC shit build right into the chip, so I am NOT holding my breath for linux to be ported to this (not that I wouldn't be thrilled to see this). Cetainly not when the port to STI Cell architecture has been under dev for what, over a year? Damn, can't wait for PS3 release.

Maybe they should target a few cruise missles at Sony, for their second DRM snafu.

After all, a rootkit is a tactic that would be attractive to some terrorist organizations...

Of course, I don't missles fired at me for running MythTV. Maybe its just a bad idea.

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/6/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=50 009562&f=77909585&m=2550903662

Well, there is no prior art from Apple with regards to a DAP, but there is prior art from Apple nee NeXT.

Does anyone remember the dispute with John Carmack, in which they decided to enforce a software patent covering a shading algorithm just as Doom 3 was about to ship... unless he added enhanced support for their sound card? He was forced to relent.

Let's remake Sherlock (by stealing Konfabulator) and call it Dashboard! Let's replace "Find" with Spotlight! Even though it's just a new search technology, let's change everything about the search interface in Find! It's not better, but it's New New NEW! Different Different DIFFERENT! Yeah!

Here's some video of the Finder doing what it does best: confounding user expectations and absolutely hosing any semblance of consistency and statefulness. The movie shows the smart folder from the earlier video... being opened and closed in both metal and non-metal modes. While watching, just try and guess how the window will look when it's re-opened after each of the demonstrated actions. You may need to step through the movie slowly to get a full grasp of the insanity.

[movie here]

Under what set of circumstances does this get to ship? I would love to see the "design document" for Spotlight's integration into the Finder's interface, if such a thing even exists. (I highly doubt that it does.) I'm tempted to say this is par for the course when it comes to Finder windows in Mac OS X. But really, this is way beyond the Finder's standard level of user abuse.

So where's the XBox 360?

On EBay, which currently accounts for 10% of all 360 sales. Looks like prices from $550 to $1000. I kept wondering why the XBox was being manufactured for shortages, when M$ wasn't taking advantage of shortage pricing, but instead pricing under cost*. One article raises the speculation that the secondary market might be intentional.** Maybe M$ decided it prefers an auction economy, perhaps to dodge allegations of price gouging, which are apparently all the rage, for better or worse.

So where's the congratulatory hype?

Here's some, though we're probably not seeing a huge amount of post-release PR because they can't meet extra demand such PR would generate anyway. And they probably gave their PR department a holiday after all their pre-release work.

Or maybe they fired them after all their ads got banned from TV.

Where are our promo boxes?

The other comments have covered this pretty well. Really, if M$ sent a big heavy box in the mail to the editors of /., would any of them actually risk opening it?

Or maybe yours just got smashed uh... "in the mail."

*Another estimate of XBox cost/unit, from BusinessWeek.

**I don't actually think M$ planned to sell direct on Ebay to capitalize on created shortages, but it's still an interesting idea.

Just so everyone knows, because some people aren't paying attention: The AC isn't trolling. They're being satirical. This is the story that they are alluding to.

Ars Technica theorizes that Real's ultimate goal is mobile penetration. And honestly, I see no other route for them. One of the other reasons I like Rhapsody is that I can play it back wherever I have the client installed, which is awfully convenient - but with the upside that I'm not centralizing the music on a relatively easy to lose portable. And sadly enough, I have lost enough portables in the past that this is a big benefit to me.

I think a portable device eschewing all those relatively big and costly hard and flash drives in favor of, say, higher quality audio equipment and a wifi antenna for feeding into Rhapsody would be the ultimate.

Although in the meantime, I'd greatly appreciate Linux support! Is this web-based, platform-neutral addition rolled out already? I checked out Real's site, and saw that they seemed to have the components for it in place, but I was automatically shot down for my "browser and operating system combination," which is currently Firefox 1.5 and Ubuntu Linux. Ah well... I'll always have my usual strategy, which is dubbing the music streams analog to Vorbis files.

I'm more interested in the link in the article to the AOL and Nickelodeon teamup for free video with a couple inserted commercials. I don't understand the need to watch TV on a 3" screen, nore pay $2 for a show that aired last night. And furthermore my friends and I have been talking about old Nick toons for some time now. In highschool I stayed up watching Nick at Nite on a regular basis. I think AOL might have done something good! *shock and amazement*

When you get home from work
Where your boss was a jerk
And you feel like a trugaladite.
There's instant relief
From this hardship and grief.
Thank goodness for Nick *ding-dling* at NITE!

It's for proofing hundreds of frames in a relatively short period of time. Of course most of us (the reviewer included), don't routinely shoot 500 or 1000 frames in a day, and then need to get the best 10 to an editor two hours later.

If that's what it's for, it's got some serious problems. "Hmm, I should probably tag these 500 images with 'Swimsuit Shoot: Cindy' so I can easily find them later." *clicky*clicky*. "Two and half hours to retag them? I better call my editor for an extension." When you discover that you picked the wrong images because the thumbnails were wrong, and sent your editor damaged images because he wants 8-bit TIFFS and Aperture isn't good at the conversion, well, maybe Aperture isn't up to snuff. The reviewer managed to ferret out these problems.

It's for proofing hundreds of frames in a relatively short period of time. Of course most of us (the reviewer included), don't routinely shoot 500 or 1000 frames in a day, and then need to get the best 10 to an editor two hours later.

If that's what it's for, it's got some serious problems. "Hmm, I should probably tag these 500 images with 'Swimsuit Shoot: Cindy' so I can easily find them later." *clicky*clicky*. "Two and half hours to retag them? I better call my editor for an extension." When you discover that you picked the wrong images because the thumbnails were wrong, and sent your editor damaged images because he wants 8-bit TIFFS and Aperture isn't good at the conversion, well, maybe Aperture isn't up to snuff. The reviewer managed to ferret out these problems.

Along similar lines, intel has announced the opening of Fab 28 in Israel, which will be used for making processors at a 45nm scale.

Sounds like you guys are talking about the LG LRM-519 machine just released last week.
Microsoft and LG release the LG LRM-519 digital media recorder.

An Apple media centre won't have a tv tuner. Apple wants to sell tv shows via iTunes.

And as for those who claim they didn't download any music, the RIAA says that if defendants got a letter in the mail saying they or someone in their house illegally downloaded music, chances are it is true.

"Dear RIAA,

  I am writing this letter in an attempt to recoup monies lost to me in 1990-1991 by damages associated with wearing parachute pants. Your client MC Hammer sevearly and perminantly damaged my image through his pervasive use of obnoxious beats and addictive lyrics. I am seaking actual damages of $43.00 per victim and punative damages of $5,000,000 per victim.

Please contact my settlement firm of Dewee, Cheatum and Howe at 1-800-555-1234. This is a good faith effort to collect and any resistanceaction to oppose will be met with legal actions. If you take this to court I will prove my case with a preponderence of hyperbole, you cannot win. Settle now and avoid the embarrassment.

Sincerly,
The American Public

*By you or any agent of your organization reading this letter you agree to the demands set forth in this setlement proposal. You have already been found guilty by your own business method, wherein by being a recipient of said letter proves guilt. After all, we don't send these letters to just anybody.*

That would be the Motorola/Cisco cable box duopoly...

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051118-5597 .html

In a stunning turn of events, Massachusetts state secretary of administration and finance Thomas Trimarco has revealed that Microsoft's recent efforts to make Office XML a ratified ECMA standard may indeed make the format acceptable to the government. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts had previously rejected Office XML in favor of OpenDocument and PDF formats.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051117-5590 .html excerpt: "As one might expect, the Linux system did not even come close to stacking up to Windows Server. The "granularity and high modularity of Linux" led each administrator down a different path when issues occurred due to the ambiguity of the problem. The Linux administrators were also portrayed as being confused when updates needed to be found, and at one point, a system was rendered useless by a GLIBC upgrade that went awry. On a positive note, once the SUSE server was upgraded to version 9, everything went back to a state of normal operation. Overall, the study displays Microsoft as king of the server hill. The 49-page study (which I managed to read in its entirety), although claiming to be unbiased, reads like a huge piece of Microsoft propaganda. The Linux administrators were portrayed as lab monkeys at certain points, whereas the Microsoft administrators came off as drones that just went out to Windows Update for all their system needs. It's very difficult to read this study without believing that an obvious bias was in place."

Secondly, the released Quake engine had a couple of assembly routines. Proving that C wasn't always the best choice, even back then. My understanding is that the versions of quake with assembly loops are roughtly 30% faster than the C only version they are comparing this with.

But assembly will often only be faster due to optimizations for a particular processor. For example Quake I (and presumably Q2?) did a perspective correction divide only every few pixels to take into account how long a divide took on a Pentium so it wouldn't cause a stall. The image quality was perfectly optimized for what you could get out of a Pentium. This made it run great on a Pentium, but didn't do much for a K6, Pentium Pro/P2/P3, Athlon, P4, etc. So fast Pentium optimized assembly isn't going to mean much on today's CPUs with different quirks.

But for the same reason the pain stakenly optimized Pentium assembly doesn't provide much benefit on the next gen Pentium Pro or the next next gen Pentium 4 the C code that was targeted for the Pentium isn't running optimally either. The compiler set up the entire code base to run down the primary U pipe of the pentium and reordering instructions where ever it could find a simple one it could put on the V pipe to run in parallel. Quite a different strategy than one would apply to the Athlon which can do any three instructions in parallel. With Java (or .NET) the code can instantly be optimized for your CPU, even if it is something not out yet.

Frankly, I'm extrmely surprised the Java version doesn't always beat the old Pentium version (unless it has been recompiled to target a modern architecture thanks to it being Free software these days). Being able to target the correct characteristics of your CPU, coupled with hotspot and dynamic profile guided optimization make it seem like a sure bet. Especially after reading about things like HP's dynamo.

IBM's PPC970 is known to produce vast quantities of heat, particularly with three cores. And ATI's modern GPUs are hot potatoes as well - particularly when you consider that the ATI GPU in the XBOX is also serving as the northbridge.

I'm just surprised that no one was smart enough to put a bloody Sempron in one of these consoles...

IBM's PPC970 is known to produce vast quantities of heat, particularly with three cores. And ATI's modern GPUs are hot potatoes as well - particularly when you consider that the ATI GPU in the XBOX is also serving as the northbridge.

I'm just surprised that no one was smart enough to put a bloody Sempron in one of these consoles...

Sony issues recall for overheating PS2 AC Adaptors
Latest PS2 has compatibility issues
Read Disc Errors
Not to mention the Y-plug mouse and keyboard issue...

Nope, nothing wrong at all...

One thing that struck me was the end of this ArsTechnica article comparing the next-gen consoles. Ars hammers home the point that Sony, being a content-creator, and Microsoft being only a device-maker, means that Sony will always tend to have more DRM on their system than the XBox does. Now, granted, consoles may not necessarily become the final media player in your living room, but if they're the ones that make it, quixotically, it seems like XBox is the most open way towards that for now.

Office workers all get the day off? It's been hilarious fun, but I'm looking forward to Monday when I can get back to higher-level debates again

Higher-level debates? On Slashdot? Perhaps you're looking for Ars. Actually, on second thought, after reading your various vitriol posted today, stay away. Ars is a horrid place.

Another good roundup at Ars Technica (without the OCZ unfortunately). The Verbatim Store 'n' Go Pro doesn't look too bad for the price, but I'd probably go with the Kingston Data Traveler Elite myself...

Sure defects in electronics are normal, but these look more commonplace than defects. I was just assuming that parent was wrong when it was stated that "So half a dozen out of the hundreds of thousands of new Xbox 360 owners are having problems" because that statistic was made up on the spot. The problem isn't whether this defect will be in the first few batches and will be able to be addressed from here on in. The problem is that these defects will keep happening because the units are being rationed so that MS doesn't look like they will sell out at the beginning, reducing supply to a trickle during the holidays (we're still in november here). So the same units we are seeing in the stores now will still be the ones we will be getting in the stores months from now, unless MS dismantles all of the XBox360s they are rationing and check for defects, which means they will have to pull the console from the shelves now to check it out. Should MS ship consoles that have possible defects? No, they should be as sure as possible that they don't do this. There is evidence that these consoles are possibly defective, so let's see if MS does the right thing and pulls the console from the shelves and re-launches later on. NOW do you see the problem?

This is certainly NOT normal for the console industry.

Tom's is great if you want to comparison shop, but if you're not interested in reading performance charts and umpteen comparisons, I usually head over to Arstechnica's system guide, where they have the God Box, Hot Rod and Budget Box systems. I've built two systems based off their recommendations, and all the parts they've recommended that I've used have been great.

--trb