And there are a few more issues why it is hard to "open source" a design. There are many ways to build a house, which is best for you depends on where you live.
Climate. Can be dry, can be humid, can be hot, can be cold. This influences your material choice - also in my experience heating is using natural gas, while cooling is using electricity. Heat from the sun: do you want to capture it or avoid it? Do you have lots of rain (tropical rainstorms) that need sufficient drainage? Or do you have snow in winter that requires a sufficiently strong roof?
Local regulations. In The Netherlands for example it is not allowed to design a home with the front door opening into the living room. There must be a small hallway with a second door to get to the living room. This again has to do with the climate. In other countries that's not an issue.
Fire safety regulations vary all over the world.
Windows and ventilation. Requirements vary with the intended use of a room (living room, bedroom, kitchen).
And then there is of course the issue that shipping containers and train carriages are not wonders of insulation. Unless you start off with a reefer container of course. But reefers are a bit smallish inside thanks to the thick walls. Especially the roof is getting low. All in all not very much sustainable when it comes to energy efficiency when in use. It's not just because we normally build our homes from concrete and bricks and not from steel sheets.
The idea of using "hot" water (well above room temperature) makes sense to me; it's so easy to lose heat using evaporation that way (cooling tower) and it takes very little extra energy to transport the heat away from the chips. When I hear that cooling of a data centre can take more power than the actual computers I would say there is an enormous power saving to be made by not using inefficient heat pumps like used in traditional aircon systems.
What does surprise me really is why those chips appear to run best at any temperature up to just above room temperature (usually they are rated for temperatures of up to 60 C or so). Room temperature is defined at 25 C, or 298 K. So a chip runs perfectly well at 298 K but is not considered so reliable anymore when it reaches a just 20% higher temperature of 360 K.
I see this as either a total coincidence, or a serious design issue. Maybe any chip-experts here can chip in on that? Why can't silicon/CMOS work reliably when it's at temperatures of some 80-100 C? It's not that it is anywhere near melting temperature. Also taken the proper material the housing of the chips should also have no problem in handling those temperatures.
Indeed the linked article (I actually read it) only mentions that this material can store mechanical energy - it doesn't give any hints on practical ways of getting the energy in (such high pressures are not easy to get to), and not a single hint on how it could be possible to get the energy out in a controlled way.
When files get fragmented performance starts to degrade
Nope, fragmented files are not a problem at all for flash.
With fragmented in this case I meant fragmented over many partial cells instead of using only complete cells except for the last one. Not fragmented as in the sense for platters where it means the file is scattered all over the disk.
That gives me the idea that an SSD should be tested with different file systems as well to see effects. Such as ext2 (no journaling), ext3/4 (ext2 with journaling: often seen as an issue because of the many writes), Apple's HSF+, and NTFS, and then as far as possible with and without TRIM enabled. Could be interesting. Preferably identical hardware, each file system with it's native OS.
That said I don't recall having seen any story here about such tests: which file system is best for your SSD (performance wise, wear/tear wise). Also I still haven't heard about SSD-specific file systems, while that would make sense to me considering the large technical differences between HDD and SSD. A file system should be able to take advantage of that.
TFA stated this is actually a follow-up test on tests done on Windows, where they found TRIM to have a large effect on the drive's performance. This included a drive they suspect to be technically similar to the one in the Mac (same manufacturer, age) - though unfortunately no direct comparison of actual hardware.
So basically if I understand it well, this is in effect an anti-fragmentation measure. When files get fragmented performance starts to degrade. In a way I have the feeling that if you match the block size of files written to the block size of the SSD (optionally padding with zeros to fill it up) you could get quite a performance boost - and only when the drive starts to fill up start using the unused, zeroed out fragments from the blocks.
Or would it be possible use the anti-fragmentation measures built in into many file systems directly instead of TRIM?
For starters instead of spreading FUD please give some links to reliable sources giving evidence of anything like that happening to normal business people, excluding "dangerous" types like politicians or journalists.
I would expect this risk is there as well, if not worse, when entering the US with their border searches of laptops. Who says they do not add anything to it during the "search"? Or what about US government mandated back doors in Windows? Then you don't even have to be in the US for them to be able to hack your computer. And yes the Chinese may also find out about those back doors but who says MS doesn't patch one and introduces another secretly during their regular patches?
You are a foreigner trust me odds are they may already be watching you a bit.
I have never heard of foreigners being watched extra well in China - at least not the regular visitors or business people. With the thousands if not millions of foreign visitors in China at any one time this is quite a Herculean job to do, even for China.
However I hear North Korea is doing that much better. It makes the country one of the safest to visit as a foreigner. Over there you will always have at least one police keeping an eye on you.
Back on topic I have never had any issues with inaccessible web sites when in China. Not that I use the web too much there anyway; and if anything was blocked well not likely it's so important it can not wait until later.
I think this discussion is mainly relevant considering we are reaching end points hardware-wise. There is only that many transistors one can put in a processor. There is only that many GHz silicon can manage. So we're reaching the end point of the processor as single unit - the logical step is not to increase the one processor, but to take more of those processors and try to let them work together. The human brain may be an interesting model for that.
And of course in the end Intel et. al have to think of the longer term future.
Exactly that's what I mean. I was a bit in a hurry composing that previous post:) it may not have been very accurate.
I think nowadays many great ideas are just too great to be finished just with the idea part. And on top of that many are only recognised much later: see the Nobel prize that is often given to scientists with a decades-long record of working on a particular idea, sometimes given only decades after they first published it.
These days this will only be getting "worse". The new developments are getting increasingly more complex (all the easy ones are done already, so to say). Newtons law of gravity which works great for many applications is much simpler than Einstein's gravity, for example. Newton's laws describe very accurately how gravity behaves on the Earth's surface, pretty much up to how the planets move around the Sun. But it does not allow for gravity lenses, for example, which relativity handles just nicely. Then there is still the issue of the Voyager 1 and 2 going too fast (or was it too slow?) - a minute effect, maybe our gravity models are wrong, maybe it's something different, we don't know and can not explain yet. Likely there will some time in the future be an even more complex gravity theory that works on even smaller and/or larger scales. When it comes to gravity we still have the issue of "dark matter" - personally I don't believe this exists, I think we'll sooner or later find an improvement on theories governing gravity that will account nicely for all the problems we have now on galactic scales.
That age may well be when he had his insight on the speed of light being constant and time being malleable, though the actual work of course only just started. The development of his theories of relativity and quantum physics and whatnot took at least another 20 years or so.
Many great scientists took years to reach their actual breakthrough. Thinking of the father of fibre optics (Charles Kao) who had his ideas at young age already but took decades of hard work and dedication to make it actually come true.
The overall penetration rate in Europe is some 23% according to the same page; UK is the highest indeed. Penetration rates in Asia (where >40% of the Internet population comes from) is much lower, Facebook is doing primarily well in their home market and in Europe. Plus another handful of mainly small countries.
Most companies will give you a number of registered users. That sounds better: it's a higher number than active users.
Secondly in case 50% of the accounts is active (which would surprise me; I expect a lower percentage), this would mean 800 mln total accounts. Or on account for every 10 people in this world. Currently the about 1.8 bln which would mean almost half of all Internet users have a Facebook account. Even at 400 mln registered users that means 22% of all Internet users in this world have a Facebook - this is already a very high number.
Let's focus on those 20% then - that are the users that really count for a site like Facebook. Probably it's even more skewed though. I don't have the stats at hand but looking at e.g. wikipedia it's a hard core of maybe 1% of users that produces 90% of the content. Facebook will have lots and lots of browsers/lurkers and relatively few actual content producers.
Anyway those 20% of registered users, that is the 80 mln of them, would amount to viewing 800,000 photos per second. 30 photos per page, that comes down to 27,000 pages per second, 2.3 bln pages per day, 29 pages per active user per day. Or just over 7 minutes time spent each day for an active user of the top 20%.
I think it is quite reasonable to assume that half of the registered users is not using the site at all - maybe more - people lose interest, sign up for a one-time must see page, whatever. And unused accounts are not deleted of course. I am one of the less active users; I have an account and spend maybe five minutes a week on Facebook, if that much.
So that would mean that every active user would spend almost 1 1/2 hours per day surfing that site. On average. Which falls for me in the "bullshit" category. Just totally unbelievable. I don't even waste that much time on slashdot.
Viewing a million photos per second is more believable. I just opened my own Facebook page and found over 30 photos in the "news feed" alone. And I bet they count them all, thumbnails included. So take that as average: 30 photos on a page. And for an active Facebook browser one page every 15 seconds on average, I doubt they linger much. That is two photos a second they are "viewing". That requires 500,000 users online on average to reach that 1 mln photos a second.
Now take that back to the time spent online: 1440 minutes in a day; 500,000 out of 400 mln actually online, that makes an average of 1.8 minutes per registered user per day to get to the required half million users online at any one moment. Hey that sounds much more reasonable to me already. And that would give me a total of a mere 720 mln minutes wasted per day on Facebook. That's a whopping two orders of magnitude off of the claimed 16 bln. My numbers may be guesstimates but I can't imagine I'm two orders of magnitude off.
Now to think of the amount of time I wasted on this posting...
Assuming the current.com registrars will carry the.xxx domain just like they do the.com/.org/etc domains already, I don't expect them to treat the domain much different.
Interesting; being a non-American now I didn't know that meaning of xxx, though I do know the related term "moonshine", primarily from American movies set in that time. Anyway that whole prohibition and related issues are of course part of the US culture specifically. If ever I run into old American newspaper cartoons (not unthinkable) I will keep this one in mind for better understanding.
Being an Internet-user and more generally of the modern age, I do know the other meaning of xxx as intended for use in the tld.
Interesting story, and I do have to support your uncle in it.
We know better - we know the RIAA and MPAA and their peers do not offer download services. And thus that any download services must be illegal. But only for that roundabout reason we know that.
When you walk down to the video store in your local mall, and you buy a DVD there. What do you expect, legal or not? I would expect it's a legal copy, the real thing. Will you ever question it? I don't think so. The same for buying food stuffs: you buy luncheon meat, see the words SPAM on it, and assume you're buying the real thing. You don't question the legality.
Same for music downloads. Nowadays you may buy DRM free MP3 from numerous sites, not just iTunes any more. Do you ever question whether they are legal? I doubt it. Big names like Amazon are likely legal and paying their copyright dues - but there are many more sites offering music for download I'm sure. As just a consumer I am not in the position to judge whether they are legal or not - I just assume they are. If the price is reasonable (i.e. not ridiculously cheap), then I assume it's the real deal.
Software is also sold over the Internet nowadays. I don't know whether you can buy Windows on-line and then download it (for some reason I think you can only use the 'net to mail-order that kind of overpriced proprietary software, quite silly when you come to think of it), but when I run into a site that purports to sell software at reasonable prices then I will assume it's legit.
It is not a stretch for your average non-geeky non-copyright-interested casual movie watcher like your uncle to know a lot about the Internet, see how many services are sold that way, be familiar with the concept of downloading movies and playing them that way, to have no second thoughts about sites offering said movies at a low price. He knows there is no distribution, no brick and mortar store, no mailing charges - just a digital copy to be downloaded at very little overhead, like his friends do with their music collections as well. So why not movies, it only makes sense. Also him not questioning whether the site is legit is imho totally sensible. The site looks professional, has good download speeds, charges sensible fees, is not overcharging his credit card but providing the services for months on end without serious outages or other problems. Your uncle logically assumes that this site is legit.
If said site is not legit, then it is the task of the MAFIAA to take it down, plain and simple.
And for the legal status of your uncle? I don't know really. Ianal. If you go to the local DVD store, buy a DVD at normal price, and it's an illegal copy: are you copyright infringer? Technically yes but you will have a very strong defense of ignorance of that offense, and of acting in good faith. Your uncle may well be able to get away with such a defense - at least he went out of his way to not download movies for free (which he knows is illegal) but instead to seek out a legit company (which he has good reason to believe is legit) to properly pay for his movies instead.
Basically any computer made since well 2000 or so is still fast enough to do basically all business work. Because, what do businesses use? An office suit, internet browser, e-mail software, and that's about it.
Many bigger companies have internal applications - typically running in IE6. Around for a decade or so now. Reports are written in Word or maybe OOo. There is not much added to Word that is useful for a broad audience since the '97 release or so. Accounting software also doesn't usually need much computing power - they possibly use the same software they did 20 years ago. E-mail is not getting any faster thanks to fancy new OSes or a 64bit processor.
For most businesses a computer upgrade is not bringing any benefit any more. It used to - upgrading from an XT to a 386 to a Pentium, together with the improvements in software, that did make office work more efficient. Not any more. It's fast enough. What's the use of a Ferrari when the speed limit is 80 km/hr? It goes vrooom! very nicely but gets you to the next traffic light maybe a second earlier than that Volkswagen. It's not worth the extra money for a business - only for those who like to show off.
I'm of course not talking about special use cases: animations, CAD, etc. That is a tiny minority of businesses, and then often just part of those businesses. Some 99% of workers don't need any serious computing horsepower on their desktop.
WinXP has worked fine for most of the last decade, why change? Don't fix if it ain't broken. And it will only break because MS decides it is - not for real technical reasons. It works. That P4 from 6 years ago or whatever: still hums along nicely. That 40GB hard disk is plenty, files are stored on the server and those big media collections are kept at home where a hard disk upgrade may be in place.
Slashdot Mirror
And there are a few more issues why it is hard to "open source" a design. There are many ways to build a house, which is best for you depends on where you live.
Climate. Can be dry, can be humid, can be hot, can be cold. This influences your material choice - also in my experience heating is using natural gas, while cooling is using electricity. Heat from the sun: do you want to capture it or avoid it? Do you have lots of rain (tropical rainstorms) that need sufficient drainage? Or do you have snow in winter that requires a sufficiently strong roof?
Local regulations. In The Netherlands for example it is not allowed to design a home with the front door opening into the living room. There must be a small hallway with a second door to get to the living room. This again has to do with the climate. In other countries that's not an issue.
Fire safety regulations vary all over the world.
Windows and ventilation. Requirements vary with the intended use of a room (living room, bedroom, kitchen).
And then there is of course the issue that shipping containers and train carriages are not wonders of insulation. Unless you start off with a reefer container of course. But reefers are a bit smallish inside thanks to the thick walls. Especially the roof is getting low. All in all not very much sustainable when it comes to energy efficiency when in use. It's not just because we normally build our homes from concrete and bricks and not from steel sheets.
The idea of using "hot" water (well above room temperature) makes sense to me; it's so easy to lose heat using evaporation that way (cooling tower) and it takes very little extra energy to transport the heat away from the chips. When I hear that cooling of a data centre can take more power than the actual computers I would say there is an enormous power saving to be made by not using inefficient heat pumps like used in traditional aircon systems.
What does surprise me really is why those chips appear to run best at any temperature up to just above room temperature (usually they are rated for temperatures of up to 60 C or so). Room temperature is defined at 25 C, or 298 K. So a chip runs perfectly well at 298 K but is not considered so reliable anymore when it reaches a just 20% higher temperature of 360 K.
I see this as either a total coincidence, or a serious design issue. Maybe any chip-experts here can chip in on that? Why can't silicon/CMOS work reliably when it's at temperatures of some 80-100 C? It's not that it is anywhere near melting temperature. Also taken the proper material the housing of the chips should also have no problem in handling those temperatures.
Indeed the linked article (I actually read it) only mentions that this material can store mechanical energy - it doesn't give any hints on practical ways of getting the energy in (such high pressures are not easy to get to), and not a single hint on how it could be possible to get the energy out in a controlled way.
What seems even crazier to me is that they start off with XeF2, then go to XeF4 and end up with XeF8.
In a closed system.
Where does the extra F come from, or where does the excess Xe go? Same issue when going in the opposite direction.
When files get fragmented performance starts to degrade
Nope, fragmented files are not a problem at all for flash.
With fragmented in this case I meant fragmented over many partial cells instead of using only complete cells except for the last one. Not fragmented as in the sense for platters where it means the file is scattered all over the disk.
That gives me the idea that an SSD should be tested with different file systems as well to see effects. Such as ext2 (no journaling), ext3/4 (ext2 with journaling: often seen as an issue because of the many writes), Apple's HSF+, and NTFS, and then as far as possible with and without TRIM enabled. Could be interesting. Preferably identical hardware, each file system with it's native OS.
That said I don't recall having seen any story here about such tests: which file system is best for your SSD (performance wise, wear/tear wise). Also I still haven't heard about SSD-specific file systems, while that would make sense to me considering the large technical differences between HDD and SSD. A file system should be able to take advantage of that.
TFA stated this is actually a follow-up test on tests done on Windows, where they found TRIM to have a large effect on the drive's performance. This included a drive they suspect to be technically similar to the one in the Mac (same manufacturer, age) - though unfortunately no direct comparison of actual hardware.
So basically if I understand it well, this is in effect an anti-fragmentation measure. When files get fragmented performance starts to degrade. In a way I have the feeling that if you match the block size of files written to the block size of the SSD (optionally padding with zeros to fill it up) you could get quite a performance boost - and only when the drive starts to fill up start using the unused, zeroed out fragments from the blocks.
Or would it be possible use the anti-fragmentation measures built in into many file systems directly instead of TRIM?
Come on stop being ridiculous here.
For starters instead of spreading FUD please give some links to reliable sources giving evidence of anything like that happening to normal business people, excluding "dangerous" types like politicians or journalists.
I would expect this risk is there as well, if not worse, when entering the US with their border searches of laptops. Who says they do not add anything to it during the "search"? Or what about US government mandated back doors in Windows? Then you don't even have to be in the US for them to be able to hack your computer. And yes the Chinese may also find out about those back doors but who says MS doesn't patch one and introduces another secretly during their regular patches?
You are a foreigner trust me odds are they may already be watching you a bit.
I have never heard of foreigners being watched extra well in China - at least not the regular visitors or business people. With the thousands if not millions of foreign visitors in China at any one time this is quite a Herculean job to do, even for China.
However I hear North Korea is doing that much better. It makes the country one of the safest to visit as a foreigner. Over there you will always have at least one police keeping an eye on you.
Back on topic I have never had any issues with inaccessible web sites when in China. Not that I use the web too much there anyway; and if anything was blocked well not likely it's so important it can not wait until later.
I think this discussion is mainly relevant considering we are reaching end points hardware-wise. There is only that many transistors one can put in a processor. There is only that many GHz silicon can manage. So we're reaching the end point of the processor as single unit - the logical step is not to increase the one processor, but to take more of those processors and try to let them work together. The human brain may be an interesting model for that.
And of course in the end Intel et. al have to think of the longer term future.
Exactly that's what I mean. I was a bit in a hurry composing that previous post :) it may not have been very accurate.
I think nowadays many great ideas are just too great to be finished just with the idea part. And on top of that many are only recognised much later: see the Nobel prize that is often given to scientists with a decades-long record of working on a particular idea, sometimes given only decades after they first published it.
These days this will only be getting "worse". The new developments are getting increasingly more complex (all the easy ones are done already, so to say). Newtons law of gravity which works great for many applications is much simpler than Einstein's gravity, for example. Newton's laws describe very accurately how gravity behaves on the Earth's surface, pretty much up to how the planets move around the Sun. But it does not allow for gravity lenses, for example, which relativity handles just nicely. Then there is still the issue of the Voyager 1 and 2 going too fast (or was it too slow?) - a minute effect, maybe our gravity models are wrong, maybe it's something different, we don't know and can not explain yet. Likely there will some time in the future be an even more complex gravity theory that works on even smaller and/or larger scales. When it comes to gravity we still have the issue of "dark matter" - personally I don't believe this exists, I think we'll sooner or later find an improvement on theories governing gravity that will account nicely for all the problems we have now on galactic scales.
It depends how you count breakthroughs.
That age may well be when he had his insight on the speed of light being constant and time being malleable, though the actual work of course only just started. The development of his theories of relativity and quantum physics and whatnot took at least another 20 years or so.
Many great scientists took years to reach their actual breakthrough. Thinking of the father of fibre optics (Charles Kao) who had his ideas at young age already but took decades of hard work and dedication to make it actually come true.
The overall penetration rate in Europe is some 23% according to the same page; UK is the highest indeed. Penetration rates in Asia (where >40% of the Internet population comes from) is much lower, Facebook is doing primarily well in their home market and in Europe. Plus another handful of mainly small countries.
Most companies will give you a number of registered users. That sounds better: it's a higher number than active users.
Secondly in case 50% of the accounts is active (which would surprise me; I expect a lower percentage), this would mean 800 mln total accounts. Or on account for every 10 people in this world. Currently the about 1.8 bln which would mean almost half of all Internet users have a Facebook account. Even at 400 mln registered users that means 22% of all Internet users in this world have a Facebook - this is already a very high number.
Because you're talking averages.
Web sites tend to have many many more inactive users than active.
And then still reaching such an average number!
Feel free to present your own if you think you have better numbers to play with.
Let's focus on those 20% then - that are the users that really count for a site like Facebook. Probably it's even more skewed though. I don't have the stats at hand but looking at e.g. wikipedia it's a hard core of maybe 1% of users that produces 90% of the content. Facebook will have lots and lots of browsers/lurkers and relatively few actual content producers.
Anyway those 20% of registered users, that is the 80 mln of them, would amount to viewing 800,000 photos per second. 30 photos per page, that comes down to 27,000 pages per second, 2.3 bln pages per day, 29 pages per active user per day. Or just over 7 minutes time spent each day for an active user of the top 20%.
That's not much really.
That would be 40 minutes per user per day.
I think it is quite reasonable to assume that half of the registered users is not using the site at all - maybe more - people lose interest, sign up for a one-time must see page, whatever. And unused accounts are not deleted of course. I am one of the less active users; I have an account and spend maybe five minutes a week on Facebook, if that much.
So that would mean that every active user would spend almost 1 1/2 hours per day surfing that site. On average. Which falls for me in the "bullshit" category. Just totally unbelievable. I don't even waste that much time on slashdot.
Viewing a million photos per second is more believable. I just opened my own Facebook page and found over 30 photos in the "news feed" alone. And I bet they count them all, thumbnails included. So take that as average: 30 photos on a page. And for an active Facebook browser one page every 15 seconds on average, I doubt they linger much. That is two photos a second they are "viewing". That requires 500,000 users online on average to reach that 1 mln photos a second.
Now take that back to the time spent online: 1440 minutes in a day; 500,000 out of 400 mln actually online, that makes an average of 1.8 minutes per registered user per day to get to the required half million users online at any one moment. Hey that sounds much more reasonable to me already. And that would give me a total of a mere 720 mln minutes wasted per day on Facebook. That's a whopping two orders of magnitude off of the claimed 16 bln. My numbers may be guesstimates but I can't imagine I'm two orders of magnitude off.
Now to think of the amount of time I wasted on this posting...
Assuming the current .com registrars will carry the .xxx domain just like they do the .com/.org/etc domains already, I don't expect them to treat the domain much different.
Interesting; being a non-American now I didn't know that meaning of xxx, though I do know the related term "moonshine", primarily from American movies set in that time. Anyway that whole prohibition and related issues are of course part of the US culture specifically. If ever I run into old American newspaper cartoons (not unthinkable) I will keep this one in mind for better understanding.
Being an Internet-user and more generally of the modern age, I do know the other meaning of xxx as intended for use in the tld.
At least they support https on their information web site, that's quite something.
That's probably only because Visa has meaningful competition.
Interesting story, and I do have to support your uncle in it.
We know better - we know the RIAA and MPAA and their peers do not offer download services. And thus that any download services must be illegal. But only for that roundabout reason we know that.
When you walk down to the video store in your local mall, and you buy a DVD there. What do you expect, legal or not? I would expect it's a legal copy, the real thing. Will you ever question it? I don't think so. The same for buying food stuffs: you buy luncheon meat, see the words SPAM on it, and assume you're buying the real thing. You don't question the legality.
Same for music downloads. Nowadays you may buy DRM free MP3 from numerous sites, not just iTunes any more. Do you ever question whether they are legal? I doubt it. Big names like Amazon are likely legal and paying their copyright dues - but there are many more sites offering music for download I'm sure. As just a consumer I am not in the position to judge whether they are legal or not - I just assume they are. If the price is reasonable (i.e. not ridiculously cheap), then I assume it's the real deal.
Software is also sold over the Internet nowadays. I don't know whether you can buy Windows on-line and then download it (for some reason I think you can only use the 'net to mail-order that kind of overpriced proprietary software, quite silly when you come to think of it), but when I run into a site that purports to sell software at reasonable prices then I will assume it's legit.
It is not a stretch for your average non-geeky non-copyright-interested casual movie watcher like your uncle to know a lot about the Internet, see how many services are sold that way, be familiar with the concept of downloading movies and playing them that way, to have no second thoughts about sites offering said movies at a low price. He knows there is no distribution, no brick and mortar store, no mailing charges - just a digital copy to be downloaded at very little overhead, like his friends do with their music collections as well. So why not movies, it only makes sense. Also him not questioning whether the site is legit is imho totally sensible. The site looks professional, has good download speeds, charges sensible fees, is not overcharging his credit card but providing the services for months on end without serious outages or other problems. Your uncle logically assumes that this site is legit.
If said site is not legit, then it is the task of the MAFIAA to take it down, plain and simple.
And for the legal status of your uncle? I don't know really. Ianal. If you go to the local DVD store, buy a DVD at normal price, and it's an illegal copy: are you copyright infringer? Technically yes but you will have a very strong defense of ignorance of that offense, and of acting in good faith. Your uncle may well be able to get away with such a defense - at least he went out of his way to not download movies for free (which he knows is illegal) but instead to seek out a legit company (which he has good reason to believe is legit) to properly pay for his movies instead.
From a business perspective I fully agree.
Basically any computer made since well 2000 or so is still fast enough to do basically all business work. Because, what do businesses use? An office suit, internet browser, e-mail software, and that's about it.
Many bigger companies have internal applications - typically running in IE6. Around for a decade or so now. Reports are written in Word or maybe OOo. There is not much added to Word that is useful for a broad audience since the '97 release or so. Accounting software also doesn't usually need much computing power - they possibly use the same software they did 20 years ago. E-mail is not getting any faster thanks to fancy new OSes or a 64bit processor.
For most businesses a computer upgrade is not bringing any benefit any more. It used to - upgrading from an XT to a 386 to a Pentium, together with the improvements in software, that did make office work more efficient. Not any more. It's fast enough. What's the use of a Ferrari when the speed limit is 80 km/hr? It goes vrooom! very nicely but gets you to the next traffic light maybe a second earlier than that Volkswagen. It's not worth the extra money for a business - only for those who like to show off.
I'm of course not talking about special use cases: animations, CAD, etc. That is a tiny minority of businesses, and then often just part of those businesses. Some 99% of workers don't need any serious computing horsepower on their desktop.
WinXP has worked fine for most of the last decade, why change? Don't fix if it ain't broken. And it will only break because MS decides it is - not for real technical reasons. It works. That P4 from 6 years ago or whatever: still hums along nicely. That 40GB hard disk is plenty, files are stored on the server and those big media collections are kept at home where a hard disk upgrade may be in place.