We already know that the AMD Duron and the "Thunderbird" variant of the Athlon CPU will be great, if only because they are based on the modern Athlon CPU core with its 128 KB L1 cache and the all-new FPU unit.
The big considerations in regards to these new CPU's are chipset support and motherboard availability. In regards to chipset support, will AMD finally make the 760 chipset avaiable? And when will VIA Technologies ship the Apollo KZ133 chipset, the one that will support the Socket A design natively? And how about availability of motherboards that use Socket A? Once the 760 and Apollo KZ133 chipset motherboards become widely available, then AMD will avoid the issue of plenty of CPUs but no motherboard situation that plagued initial Athlon shipments last summer.
Re:The Strange Case Of The Video Card Industry
on
Goodbye, Number Nine
·
· Score: 2
I agree with your assessments.
What is amazing about nVidia is the fact that their first graphics chip product (NV1) was considered a major breakthrough because (in theory) you didn't need draw thousands of flat triangles to represent curved objects. Unfortunately, the implementation didn't quite work, but it laid the groundwork for better things to come.
The arrival of the Riva 128 chipset was the breakthrough that nVidia needed: it processed 3-D graphics quite quickly for its day, and it supported 8 MB of RAM, also a lot in those days. It worked particularly well with DirectX 5.0, in fact it was in many ways almost as fast as the original 3Dfx Voodoo chipset (but didn't need to hog a precious PCI slot).
nVidia really hit its stride with the Riva TNT and Riva TNT2 chipsets, which offered a major leap forward in 3-D performance and compared well with even Voodoo3. The GeForce 256 and GeForce GTS are outgrowths of the technology pioneered by the Riva TNT/TNT2 chipsets, which have far surpassed 3dfx's efforts (there are much doubts about Voodoo5).
But nVidia can't rest on its laurels even now. Both ATI and Matrox have heavily invested in improving their graphics chipsets, and the current ATI Rage Fury and Matrox G400 are nothing to sneer at, to say the least.
In fact, what you're referring to was the studies of using demolition nuclear devices to blow away mountains to build the Interstate 40 freeway where US 66 ran through (this is east of Barstow, CA).
Fortunately, saner minds prevailed and it was decided to build the freeway just north of these mountains. I think complaints from the Santa Fe railroad convinced the Dept. of Transportation to drop the idea, too.
If this is occurring even on Apache, then we may have a MAJOR security problem here.
This could indicate that Javascript (or ECMA-242 script as it's sometimes known) in general can cause a security leak. They better start testing this on Netscape Navigator 3.x and all Netscape Communicator versions NOW to see if Netscape is also vulnerable to this bug.
A quick update: I did a "cut and paste" of the statement made by peacefire.org here on Slashdot and have sent it on to Microsoft's Security team as a high-priority mail message.
If the folks at Peacefire did not reported these problems to Microsoft's Security team, then they are essentially doing a major disservice to the public.
Hopefully, they do know Microsoft's address for reporting security issues: secure@microsoft.com. That address is monitored 24 hours a day and the MS security folks will try to replicate the problem ASAP.
I think many of you remember on September 9, 1999 with the crazy "midnight madness" of the unveiling of Dreamcast in the USA. I was there at Electronics Boutique right next to the Barnes & Noble store in Santa Clara, CA and believe me, it bordered on insane, to say the least.:-/
I wonder will Sony do the same for PlayStation2 when that is released on Thursday, October 26, 2000? Given the even bigger hype for PlayStation2 than Dreamcast, I _know_ it'll be even more crazy than what I mentioned above if Sony does this. And I won't be surprised that Sony does this--after all, Sony Computer Entertainment America's main offices are in Foster City, CA.
Have you bothered to listened to all of the Beatles' original English releases (like I have)? From MEET THE BEATLES to LET IT BE, the Beatles single-handedly redefined the entire genre of rock music and greatly extended its artistic limits.
Their three best albums--SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND, REVOLVER and ABBEY ROAD--show an incredible, astonishing range of music that most of today's music acts can't even come CLOSE to matching. I mean, look at "A Day In the Life" from SGT. PEPPER; they masterfully combined what amounted to two incomplete songs into one of the greatest popular songs EVER made.
It is my personal opinion that at the end of the 21st Century, people will still consider the Beatles the musical geniuses of the 20th Century.
For anyone who knows a bit about microeconomics, the issue here is that because the big music companies that are RIAA members are in effect running a price-fixing cartel, prices remain artificially high. This unfortunately results in lots of incentives to cheat, as witnessed by the rapid growth of using.MP3 files to exchange music and the use of Napster. It's that incentive to cheat that nearly did in OPEC in the middle 1980's, because supporting US$34/barrel of oil was totally unsustainable.
In fact we can apply this same analogy to operating systems. Microsoft charges around US$85 per copy of the OEM edition of Windows 98 Second Edition; there is MUCH incentive to get something far cheaper, hence the rise of Linux with its pricing of around US$30 for the desktop commercial distributions down to zero if you just want the CD alone.;-)
Actually, when CD's first arrived in the USA in the spring of 1983, discs were priced at around US$18 to US$20 per disk. The price dropped to around US$15 to US$17 by 1985 when more production plants went online, and has stayed there more or less since. By conventional forces of economics, the price of an album-length CD should have dropped to US$8-$9 by 1990, because by 1990 there was enough CD pressing plants to more than keep up with demand and then some.
For some reason, the RIAA and its member companies bamboozled the American public into keeping the high prices; small wonder why the FTC did its investigation on possible price-fixing.
I do agree that listening to college radio with its very eclectic playlist is great, but there is one BIG problem: most college radio stations have TERRIBLE range. You'll be lucky if you can hear that college radio station 12 to 14 miles away from the transmitter, especially since many of them operate in the FM frequency range. Here in the Bay Area, the radio stations for Stanford University, San Jose State University and CSU Hayward are very range limited indeed.:-(
Well, the fact that radio stations are playing more or less the same old crap from the record label playlists is the reason why talk radio and news stations are zooming up in popularity.
Care to explain why KGO, KCBS and KNBR have such high popularity in the Arbitron books? Or how about why even a conservative talk radio station like KSFO are doing quite well?
No wonder why I find FM radio to be such a big wasteland of music. I remember in the old days I can listen to everything from classical to easy listening to jazz to hard rock! Nowadays, forget about it! (grrr)
You should be paying about US$3 to US$4 less than you're paying now. Given the fact that CD duplication costs are way cheaper than even duplicating analog audio cassettes, it is just a bit amazing that Americans can be fooled into paying more than US$9 per disc.
"The recording industry argue that the prices reflect the work they do in finding and promoting "artists". This does not wash when instead they push formulaeic ditties via pretty teenagers, and enforce playlists on radio stations. If the extra cash goes into this, then rebellion is timely."
Boy, have you hit it on the nose! (bamf!)
I think the RIAA is more than just doing price-fixing on audio CD's. Have you noticed that radio stations in the last 10-12 years have become increasingly bland and too full of "adult contemporary" stations? Where is the big variety of music we used to hear on radio stations, even in the big markets? Has the record companies become so interested in "formulaic" pop music and enforcing radio playlists that a lot of music is no longer being heard?
It's small wonder why.MP3 files have become extremely popular. They have become the new medium to spread music that most radio stations seem to have missed lately.
I should note that for many years that vinyl LP sales made good money, even at $8 per disc.
The fact that the RIAA members never really lowered the original US$15 to US$17 price for a CD (which was understandable in 1985 when CD pressing plants were still very uncommon and the record companies had to charge more to pay off the cost of these advanced manufacturing facilites but not in 2000 when modern technology stamps out CD's at a few cents per disk) tells me that the RIAA liked the higher price so much they never bothered to lower it. It the RIAA had lowered the price of a CD to US$9 max back in 1990 the issue of piracy would be MUCH less now.
As I said earlier, the whole issue with Metallica versus Napster points out the fact that music buyers in general are suffering from a case of sticker shock buying new CD's.
Right now, if you go to a "brick and mortar" music store the average price of an album-length CD is about US$15 to US$17, and already there is talk of the price going to US$18 very soon. Even the online music stores like CDNow.com, Borders.com, and other can only knock a few dollars off this high price.
Given that the duplication cost per CD is measured at about 35-50 US cents (that's including packaging), something tells me that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and its member companies may be conspiring in a price-fixing scheme to keep prices high. I mean, just how many middlemen are we paying in order to get the price of a CD to US$13 to US$17 per disk?
In my personal opinion, this is a true case of monopolistic practices, because the customer _is_ being hurt by a possible artificial high price by an OPEC-like cartel of record companies. Maybe lowering the price of an album-length CD to US$8 to US$9 will definitely help things along, since not only will there far less incentive to pirate the music, but also there will be substantially more volume sales of _legitimate_ CD's. Anyone who's taken a course in microeconomics can figure that out pretty quickly.
Congratulations on moving Slashdot.org to the new server machines.
The ultimate test will be later today, when at the middle of the day will Slashdot.org be able to keep up with the big demands from users. This was a BIG problem with Slashdot.org on weekdays, because in the middle of a weekday Slashdot.org often slowed to a deadly crawl.:-(
Another issue that hamstrung the Motorola 68k family was the fact that Motorola didn't seem to do very well improving the speed of the CPU.
I do know that Intel (and more recently AMD) are able to crank up the CPU core speed pretty easily. This shows that Intel and AMD engineers had a pretty good idea how much faster the clock speed could go without causing thermal meltdown problems. After all, how come Motorola has not gotten the PowerPC G4 CPU past 500 MHz? Shouldn't they be able bump it up to 1,000 MHz or more?
I think one idea Microsoft may be seriously considering is to produce TWO different versions of Windows 98/ME/2000.
One version will be the same as the current Windows 98/ME/2000, with Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, and other Microsoft "enhancements." The other will be akin to the original release of Windows 95; it will use the Windows 98 or 2000 base (including the ACPI Plug and Play), but will lack Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, etc.--essentially a "Plain Jane" release.
The "Plain Jane" release version is intended for OEM's, who can load whatever enhancement they want (Netscape Communicator/Netscape 6.0, RealPlayer 7.0, QuickTime 4.0, Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0, etc.) and have rights to even change the Windows intial startup screen to look different (it'll say "Windows 98" or "Windows 2000 Professional" but you'll also see logos for the OEM and the other add-ons the OEM preloads). Don't be surprised that the "Plain Jane" Windows 98/ME/2000 will be sold to OEM's at a flat cost of $29.95 per copy.
But one of these days, some really expert programmer with a nasty intent is going to write a virus that is extremely insidious and start literally shutting down hardware that works on the various layers of the OSI networking model. Given that routers ARE computers of sorts, let's see how long before someone could bring down much of the Internet by bringing down a major backbone provider such as UUNet.:-(
How do you feel about my opinion that the high prices of album-length Compact Discs are actually encouraging the passing of.MP3 files from CD's because many customers are not willing to pay high prices? This is especially in light of the fact that most record "brick and mortar" stores charge US$15 to US$17 per CD, and I've heard the price could reach US$18 very soon. Do you feel that lowering the price of album-length CD's to US$9 will actually discourage piracy since there will be less incentive to do piracy and far more incentive to buy the disc itself?
Well, running XEmacs and StarOffice doesn't really require the equivalent of DirectX in Linux. (smile)
However, if you're talking games with full 3-D graphics and EAX or Aureal 2.0/3.0 surround support, well, we're not quite there yet. The Linux programmers are aware of this and in fact I believe a project to develop the Linux equivalent of DirectX is well underway.
The commentary on ZD Net tells me I should make some comments on the current state of Linux.
As a _server_ operating system, Linux works great for workgroup to departmental data server and also as a small Web server. However, what I do find interesting is that many of the machines that run corporate-scale databases, major e-commerce sites (note I said _major_ e-commerce sites) and web portals run either Sun Solaris, IBM OS/390 or AIX, or FreeBSD. Hopefully, the upcoming Linux 2.4.x kernel will allow very-large-scale data transactions and this will allow Linux servers to run large-scale e-commerce sites (something on the scale of things like the big online bookstores).
As a _desktop_ operating system, Linux has improved quite a lot since the release of Red Hat Linux 5.0 some years ago, but the lack of true equivalents of ACPI Plug and Play and DirectX (though you can get around that with OpenGL), plus somewhat iffy printer support still indicates that Linux has still a ways to go. Hopefully, once these issues are resolved within the next 24 months, Linux will finally be a viable operating system even for first-time computer buyers, with ease of support for hardware changes as a customer upgrades the computer.
In your comment, you forgot one very important aspect of this entire debate: the cost of buying a Compact Disc.
Right now, the average cost of a CD is somewhere between US$13 to US$17 if you buy it at a record store; it's even MORE expensive in places like Japan, where album CD's cost 3000 yen, around US$28.50 at current exchange rates. That's pretty expensive for most everyone, and frankly, people are tired of paying these high prices.
If the RIAA were to decree that the record companies lower their prices for album CD's, I think much of the piracy problem will disappear VERY quickly. If CD's were priced at US$7.99 to US$8.99, the artists will make it up in more volume sales. After all, CD manufacturing technology has advanced enough that stamping costs is measured in a few cents PER CD!
I think if someone is willing to offer US$10 million for the first computer that can serious take on a 4-5dan professional player, the race will be on.
Right now, only IBM has the possible resources to develop such a machine--imagine a massively-parallel CPU system using over 1,000 of the latest PowerPC CPU's. Someone might try by using a Linux cluster, but that will take over 300 machines running the latest Alpha AXP CPU running in clustered fashion.
In short, developing a computer that can challenge a high-level professional Go player will be the computing challenge of the 21st Century.
Slashdot Mirror
We already know that the AMD Duron and the "Thunderbird" variant of the Athlon CPU will be great, if only because they are based on the modern Athlon CPU core with its 128 KB L1 cache and the all-new FPU unit.
The big considerations in regards to these new CPU's are chipset support and motherboard availability. In regards to chipset support, will AMD finally make the 760 chipset avaiable? And when will VIA Technologies ship the Apollo KZ133 chipset, the one that will support the Socket A design natively? And how about availability of motherboards that use Socket A? Once the 760 and Apollo KZ133 chipset motherboards become widely available, then AMD will avoid the issue of plenty of CPUs but no motherboard situation that plagued initial Athlon shipments last summer.
I agree with your assessments.
What is amazing about nVidia is the fact that their first graphics chip product (NV1) was considered a major breakthrough because (in theory) you didn't need draw thousands of flat triangles to represent curved objects. Unfortunately, the implementation didn't quite work, but it laid the groundwork for better things to come.
The arrival of the Riva 128 chipset was the breakthrough that nVidia needed: it processed 3-D graphics quite quickly for its day, and it supported 8 MB of RAM, also a lot in those days. It worked particularly well with DirectX 5.0, in fact it was in many ways almost as fast as the original 3Dfx Voodoo chipset (but didn't need to hog a precious PCI slot).
nVidia really hit its stride with the Riva TNT and Riva TNT2 chipsets, which offered a major leap forward in 3-D performance and compared well with even Voodoo3. The GeForce 256 and GeForce GTS are outgrowths of the technology pioneered by the Riva TNT/TNT2 chipsets, which have far surpassed 3dfx's efforts (there are much doubts about Voodoo5).
But nVidia can't rest on its laurels even now. Both ATI and Matrox have heavily invested in improving their graphics chipsets, and the current ATI Rage Fury and Matrox G400 are nothing to sneer at, to say the least.
In fact, what you're referring to was the studies of using demolition nuclear devices to blow away mountains to build the Interstate 40 freeway where US 66 ran through (this is east of Barstow, CA).
Fortunately, saner minds prevailed and it was decided to build the freeway just north of these mountains. I think complaints from the Santa Fe railroad convinced the Dept. of Transportation to drop the idea, too.
If this is occurring even on Apache, then we may have a MAJOR security problem here.
This could indicate that Javascript (or ECMA-242 script as it's sometimes known) in general can cause a security leak. They better start testing this on Netscape Navigator 3.x and all Netscape Communicator versions NOW to see if Netscape is also vulnerable to this bug.
A quick update: I did a "cut and paste" of the statement made by peacefire.org here on Slashdot and have sent it on to Microsoft's Security team as a high-priority mail message.
If the folks at Peacefire did not reported these problems to Microsoft's Security team, then they are essentially doing a major disservice to the public.
Hopefully, they do know Microsoft's address for reporting security issues: secure@microsoft.com. That address is monitored 24 hours a day and the MS security folks will try to replicate the problem ASAP.
I think many of you remember on September 9, 1999 with the crazy "midnight madness" of the unveiling of Dreamcast in the USA. I was there at Electronics Boutique right next to the Barnes & Noble store in Santa Clara, CA and believe me, it bordered on insane, to say the least. :-/
I wonder will Sony do the same for PlayStation2 when that is released on Thursday, October 26, 2000? Given the even bigger hype for PlayStation2 than Dreamcast, I _know_ it'll be even more crazy than what I mentioned above if Sony does this. And I won't be surprised that Sony does this--after all, Sony Computer Entertainment America's main offices are in Foster City, CA.
Why on EARTH do you dislike the Beatles?
Have you bothered to listened to all of the Beatles' original English releases (like I have)? From MEET THE BEATLES to LET IT BE, the Beatles single-handedly redefined the entire genre of rock music and greatly extended its artistic limits.
Their three best albums--SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND, REVOLVER and ABBEY ROAD--show an incredible, astonishing range of music that most of today's music acts can't even come CLOSE to matching. I mean, look at "A Day In the Life" from SGT. PEPPER; they masterfully combined what amounted to two incomplete songs into one of the greatest popular songs EVER made.
It is my personal opinion that at the end of the 21st Century, people will still consider the Beatles the musical geniuses of the 20th Century.
For anyone who knows a bit about microeconomics, the issue here is that because the big music companies that are RIAA members are in effect running a price-fixing cartel, prices remain artificially high. This unfortunately results in lots of incentives to cheat, as witnessed by the rapid growth of using .MP3 files to exchange music and the use of Napster. It's that incentive to cheat that nearly did in OPEC in the middle 1980's, because supporting US$34/barrel of oil was totally unsustainable.
;-)
In fact we can apply this same analogy to operating systems. Microsoft charges around US$85 per copy of the OEM edition of Windows 98 Second Edition; there is MUCH incentive to get something far cheaper, hence the rise of Linux with its pricing of around US$30 for the desktop commercial distributions down to zero if you just want the CD alone.
Actually, when CD's first arrived in the USA in the spring of 1983, discs were priced at around US$18 to US$20 per disk. The price dropped to around US$15 to US$17 by 1985 when more production plants went online, and has stayed there more or less since. By conventional forces of economics, the price of an album-length CD should have dropped to US$8-$9 by 1990, because by 1990 there was enough CD pressing plants to more than keep up with demand and then some.
For some reason, the RIAA and its member companies bamboozled the American public into keeping the high prices; small wonder why the FTC did its investigation on possible price-fixing.
I do agree that listening to college radio with its very eclectic playlist is great, but there is one BIG problem: most college radio stations have TERRIBLE range. You'll be lucky if you can hear that college radio station 12 to 14 miles away from the transmitter, especially since many of them operate in the FM frequency range. Here in the Bay Area, the radio stations for Stanford University, San Jose State University and CSU Hayward are very range limited indeed. :-(
Well, the fact that radio stations are playing more or less the same old crap from the record label playlists is the reason why talk radio and news stations are zooming up in popularity.
Care to explain why KGO, KCBS and KNBR have such high popularity in the Arbitron books? Or how about why even a conservative talk radio station like KSFO are doing quite well?
No wonder why I find FM radio to be such a big wasteland of music. I remember in the old days I can listen to everything from classical to easy listening to jazz to hard rock! Nowadays, forget about it! (grrr)
You should be paying about US$3 to US$4 less than you're paying now. Given the fact that CD duplication costs are way cheaper than even duplicating analog audio cassettes, it is just a bit amazing that Americans can be fooled into paying more than US$9 per disc.
Dix wrote:
.MP3 files have become extremely popular. They have become the new medium to spread music that most radio stations seem to have missed lately.
"The recording industry argue that the prices reflect the work they do in finding and promoting "artists". This does not wash when instead they push formulaeic ditties via pretty teenagers, and enforce playlists on radio stations. If the extra cash goes into this, then rebellion is timely."
Boy, have you hit it on the nose! (bamf!)
I think the RIAA is more than just doing price-fixing on audio CD's. Have you noticed that radio stations in the last 10-12 years have become increasingly bland and too full of "adult contemporary" stations? Where is the big variety of music we used to hear on radio stations, even in the big markets? Has the record companies become so interested in "formulaic" pop music and enforcing radio playlists that a lot of music is no longer being heard?
It's small wonder why
Dante,
I should note that for many years that vinyl LP sales made good money, even at $8 per disc.
The fact that the RIAA members never really lowered the original US$15 to US$17 price for a CD (which was understandable in 1985 when CD pressing plants were still very uncommon and the record companies had to charge more to pay off the cost of these advanced manufacturing facilites but not in 2000 when modern technology stamps out CD's at a few cents per disk) tells me that the RIAA liked the higher price so much they never bothered to lower it. It the RIAA had lowered the price of a CD to US$9 max back in 1990 the issue of piracy would be MUCH less now.
Folks,
As I said earlier, the whole issue with Metallica versus Napster points out the fact that music buyers in general are suffering from a case of sticker shock buying new CD's.
Right now, if you go to a "brick and mortar" music store the average price of an album-length CD is about US$15 to US$17, and already there is talk of the price going to US$18 very soon. Even the online music stores like CDNow.com, Borders.com, and other can only knock a few dollars off this high price.
Given that the duplication cost per CD is measured at about 35-50 US cents (that's including packaging), something tells me that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and its member companies may be conspiring in a price-fixing scheme to keep prices high. I mean, just how many middlemen are we paying in order to get the price of a CD to US$13 to US$17 per disk?
In my personal opinion, this is a true case of monopolistic practices, because the customer _is_ being hurt by a possible artificial high price by an OPEC-like cartel of record companies. Maybe lowering the price of an album-length CD to US$8 to US$9 will definitely help things along, since not only will there far less incentive to pirate the music, but also there will be substantially more volume sales of _legitimate_ CD's. Anyone who's taken a course in microeconomics can figure that out pretty quickly.
Congratulations on moving Slashdot.org to the new server machines.
:-(
The ultimate test will be later today, when at the middle of the day will Slashdot.org be able to keep up with the big demands from users. This was a BIG problem with Slashdot.org on weekdays, because in the middle of a weekday Slashdot.org often slowed to a deadly crawl.
Another issue that hamstrung the Motorola 68k family was the fact that Motorola didn't seem to do very well improving the speed of the CPU.
I do know that Intel (and more recently AMD) are able to crank up the CPU core speed pretty easily. This shows that Intel and AMD engineers had a pretty good idea how much faster the clock speed could go without causing thermal meltdown problems. After all, how come Motorola has not gotten the PowerPC G4 CPU past 500 MHz? Shouldn't they be able bump it up to 1,000 MHz or more?
I think one idea Microsoft may be seriously considering is to produce TWO different versions of Windows 98/ME/2000.
One version will be the same as the current Windows 98/ME/2000, with Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, and other Microsoft "enhancements." The other will be akin to the original release of Windows 95; it will use the Windows 98 or 2000 base (including the ACPI Plug and Play), but will lack Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, etc.--essentially a "Plain Jane" release.
The "Plain Jane" release version is intended for OEM's, who can load whatever enhancement they want (Netscape Communicator/Netscape 6.0, RealPlayer 7.0, QuickTime 4.0, Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0, etc.) and have rights to even change the Windows intial startup screen to look different (it'll say "Windows 98" or "Windows 2000 Professional" but you'll also see logos for the OEM and the other add-ons the OEM preloads). Don't be surprised that the "Plain Jane" Windows 98/ME/2000 will be sold to OEM's at a flat cost of $29.95 per copy.
Hmmm....
Colin,
:-(
Writing things like this in Visual Basic is easy.
But one of these days, some really expert programmer with a nasty intent is going to write a virus that is extremely insidious and start literally shutting down hardware that works on the various layers of the OSI networking model. Given that routers ARE computers of sorts, let's see how long before someone could bring down much of the Internet by bringing down a major backbone provider such as UUNet.
Here's my question for Metallica:
.MP3 files from CD's because many customers are not willing to pay high prices? This is especially in light of the fact that most record "brick and mortar" stores charge US$15 to US$17 per CD, and I've heard the price could reach US$18 very soon. Do you feel that lowering the price of album-length CD's to US$9 will actually discourage piracy since there will be less incentive to do piracy and far more incentive to buy the disc itself?
How do you feel about my opinion that the high prices of album-length Compact Discs are actually encouraging the passing of
Well, running XEmacs and StarOffice doesn't really require the equivalent of DirectX in Linux. (smile)
However, if you're talking games with full 3-D graphics and EAX or Aureal 2.0/3.0 surround support, well, we're not quite there yet. The Linux programmers are aware of this and in fact I believe a project to develop the Linux equivalent of DirectX is well underway.
The commentary on ZD Net tells me I should make some comments on the current state of Linux.
As a _server_ operating system, Linux works great for workgroup to departmental data server and also as a small Web server. However, what I do find interesting is that many of the machines that run corporate-scale databases, major e-commerce sites (note I said _major_ e-commerce sites) and web portals run either Sun Solaris, IBM OS/390 or AIX, or FreeBSD. Hopefully, the upcoming Linux 2.4.x kernel will allow very-large-scale data transactions and this will allow Linux servers to run large-scale e-commerce sites (something on the scale of things like the big online bookstores).
As a _desktop_ operating system, Linux has improved quite a lot since the release of Red Hat Linux 5.0 some years ago, but the lack of true equivalents of ACPI Plug and Play and DirectX (though you can get around that with OpenGL), plus somewhat iffy printer support still indicates that Linux has still a ways to go. Hopefully, once these issues are resolved within the next 24 months, Linux will finally be a viable operating system even for first-time computer buyers, with ease of support for hardware changes as a customer upgrades the computer.
Jon,
In your comment, you forgot one very important aspect of this entire debate: the cost of buying a Compact Disc.
Right now, the average cost of a CD is somewhere between US$13 to US$17 if you buy it at a record store; it's even MORE expensive in places like Japan, where album CD's cost 3000 yen, around US$28.50 at current exchange rates. That's pretty expensive for most everyone, and frankly, people are tired of paying these high prices.
If the RIAA were to decree that the record companies lower their prices for album CD's, I think much of the piracy problem will disappear VERY quickly. If CD's were priced at US$7.99 to US$8.99, the artists will make it up in more volume sales. After all, CD manufacturing technology has advanced enough that stamping costs is measured in a few cents PER CD!
I think if someone is willing to offer US$10 million for the first computer that can serious take on a 4-5dan professional player, the race will be on.
Right now, only IBM has the possible resources to develop such a machine--imagine a massively-parallel CPU system using over 1,000 of the latest PowerPC CPU's. Someone might try by using a Linux cluster, but that will take over 300 machines running the latest Alpha AXP CPU running in clustered fashion.
In short, developing a computer that can challenge a high-level professional Go player will be the computing challenge of the 21st Century.