A convenient example since this was long before IDE/ATAPI was sufficiently advanced enough to really compete with SCSI. Since that time, SCSI has barely moved forward and IDE has jumped continents. Try the same experiment today with a generic, costly SCSI drive and a much-less-expensive 7200 RPM (maybe even 10,000 RPM, depending on the price you can snare) drive of equal capacity from Seagate or Quantum, and see where it gets you. Go ahead. The SCSI system can have, say, a cheapo K6-2 400 and with all the money you save on the IDE system you can buy an Athlon 500.
Now, which system do you think is going to kick ass?
Dude, that is the most clueless response I've ever heard. Remember, I mentioned that you could spend all the extra SCSI money you saved through buying IDE on getting a much, much faster processor to handle the extra overload, and in the long run as you add or replace disks you're saving mucho dinero?
Your response, however, refers to using a 6-year-old CPU. Ummmm. Mismatch. Divide by zero. Does not compute. Did you even bother reading what I wrote, or did the headline just set you off on a flamewar to protect the reputation of fair maiden SCSI? Bad flamer, no biscuit!
Of course you can't use IDE disks to serve that sort of purpose *IN A SIX YEAR OLD COMPUTER*! DUH! But I never tried to say you *could*, now did I? I was talking about actually building a server or workstation, not cobbling one up from leftover 386 cpus and some thermal grease.
The fact remains that SCSI is the past. The future is *not* SCSI, esp. since the new SCSI standards being proposed will *still* be far behind the new FireWire standards being proposed.
It's a matter of cost/performance ratio. Yes, SCSI is light on taking up CPU resources; no, SCSI isn't much faster than a good 7200 RPM ATA66 disk, and IDE is reaching into 10K RPM these days.
So, in terms of performance, is it worth the several hundred $ extra per hard disk? No. Purchasing a 25% faster CPU for several hundred extra dollars is the better long-term solution, because each time you need to add a new HD or replace an aging one you save the $$$ overhead you'd be paying for the additional SCSI drives.
No one ever said the most technologically sophisticated solution is the best solution--it's not. A 70s muscle car will generally kick the ass of a 90s sports car. The same is true with computer hardware, which is why commodity IBM clones have consistently kicked the ass of more elegant PPC boxes and even SPARCs and Alphas--sure, Alpha is the fastest thing this side of whatever the NSA's private little fab is putting out, but for the price of a smooth-as-silk Alpha or SPARC server, you could have built the ass-kickingest SMP x86 box--or two. Sure, SCSI will give you a performance boost--but you could get more processing power and more disk space with IDE 66; the processor power advantage would be nullified by the IDE pull on the CPU, but that still leaves you with more disk space.
More is better, right? So unless you want to serve pages from that pathetic 2GB SCSI disk all your life, because you can't afford to add more SCSI drives, just ride the ATA66 revolution. If you can afford mondo SCSI disk space anyway--go with IDE and get yourself some more bandwidth or throw in more RAM.
Thing is, with a computer there are always trade-offs, always several things you could get to improve performance. Few if any of us here have unlimited wallets--SCSI is dead. SCSI is the past. In the future, for the highest-end most expensive hard disks, we'll have FireWire or some other high speed standard--not SCSI. And for all other applications, IDE 66 and successors will be the way to go. The revolution's on, folks--all that stuff we've been using for 20 years is going by the wayside: x86 architecture (at least as we know it--maybe Sledgehammer and Crusoe will make it more serviceable), Microsoft operating systems, ISA slots, SCSI, and I wish my old college would hurry up and get rid of that ancient VAX, too.
>CSS keeps the key information for a disk in a >special block on the disk. This block will not >be writable on consumer DVD-R blanks... you will >NOT be able to duplicate a DVD using these >blanks. Writable blanks will be hard to find, >and IIRC they will require special commercial >equipment; you won't be able to write them in >your DVD-R drive. No no no, no no no no. There isn't even a standard, right now, for DVD-R discs or recorders--several companies are all hawking incompatible equipment and have differing plans they're trying to push through. But that doesn't matter, because it's easy enough to trick DVD software into thinking that just about anything is a DVD disk--I got several commercial DVD players for Win9x to play bit-for-bit rips of DVDs off of an 8.4G hard disk. So, if I had a DVD-RW of any type I could record it to that media and play it--but again, the media is too expensive to bother. The truth is that ESR is right: they want all those $5000 licensing fees for anything remotely DVD-related. Aside from which, even without DeCSS, I can capture the video stream and re-compress in MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 and still have better-than-VHS quality video which I can record to the media of my choice. >Making drives enforce the system really does >help from their point of view. Sure, you can >burn a new PROM for a drive, but how many people >are actually going to do that? They're hoping >that people will either have to spend money or >manually hack hardware; that will reduce copying >to a level they can live with... especially >since they were (and to some degree are) >probably expecting the Digital Millenium >Copyright Act's ridiculously draconian penalties >to prevent the spread of any hacks. No, you don't have to fudge with the hardware or burn/buy special PROMs. The best DVD-ROM on the market (for the next 5 minutes, at least), the Panasonic/AOpen 10x drive, can be hacked by merely downloading a "firmware upgrade" to remove all region restrictions--go to http://www.dvdutils.com to get it.
I took the liberty of e-mailing eToys from all three of my e-mail accounts today, e-mailing them different letters which all said the same basic thing: I've read an e-mail forward about your distasteful actions relating to etoy.com, and sent it on to dozens of friends, and your business is going to be fscked not to mention the fact that etoy.com is going to be very wealthy after the countersuit. E-mail them at service@etoys.com -- and they also have a web-based form for reporting "problems with the site" at http://www.etoys.com/cgi-bin/cs_print_page.cgi?m enupage=1&pagename=t9
And, by all means--*write all your non-slashdot friends some e-mail forwards about this matter*. Forwards are usually a pain in the a*s, but this is one of those times when grassroots action is necessary and e-mail forwards will help. Imagine if thousands of people start, and continue, e-mailing etoys.com about how disgusting their harassment of etoy.com is.
And, not that I'm advocating going *this* far, but if anyone should happen to have access to computers to which he can't be tied--well, it would be easy enough to make them call the eToys 800 numbers with their modems continuously...
A tenant has an expectation of privacy in his own rented quarters--which is why, even though it's the landlord's property, the landlord cannot arbitrarily come into your apartment. Imagine you and your girlfriend enjoying a nice, long, wet...game of Pong, when your landlord comes in and watches. Not legal, obviously, in that example--but most people don't realize that it's not legal under most circumstances. However, a landlord *can* let law enforcement into your apartment under circumstances under which it would be legal for Law Enforcement to search without a warrant--when there are risks of imminent danger, or the officers have reason to do a probable cause search, or in other specific cases.
But this has nothing to do with an ISP and the present case. It's a matter of the First Amendment, and the FBI got into the business of censoring that which is perfectly legal--and so the FBI should be punished through civil suit. When they lose enough of their budget they'll stop violating our rights.
We'd all probably be surprised by how often various agencies quench the fires of free speech on the Net--many people would probably have given in without a struggle and given up their sites quietly if paid a visit by the Hoovers. Then, there are probably many cases like this one which we simply never hear about due to media apathy/siding with the J. Edgars. Plus, a tactic which is even subtler: if you can't beat them, buy them out.
This is what very likely recently happened to Decadentcity.com and a related site, grokthis.com/decadent. I can't be 100% on this, but all evidence points to its verity. This isn't meant to be off-topic, it's meant to express something which probably has become a commonplace tactic by law enforcement. See, decadentcity.com and the related site were dedicated to message boards discussing "escorts"--like, the Heidi Fleiss type. It started out local to D.C. back in '96 and soon every major city had a message board and ads and reviews and "ripoff warnings" sections. Maybe a year ago a cryptic message about "new ownership" appeared on the site and then disappeared--and yet everything remained the same. The "new ownership" never revealed itself to the board--not so much as a single message or change to the site. The old owner had always dropped in, but he suddenly disappeared. The site was left untouched. The ads section--principal source of revenue--expired, and for about a year no advertisements were added or deleted even though the women themselves expressed interest on the boards. The boards chattered away, most of the escorts in the D.C. area (and, I'm told, in others) who'd been there for years left the board and several left the business without warning. Rumours circulated about the FBI buying the board as part of an investigation into the "organized crime" involved in escorting and message parlors nationally. Perhaps coincidentally, and perhaps not, the sites have been shut down ever since the very day a week or two ago when the national investigation the FBI had made into the spa/massage/escort business was revealed on the news nationally. I doubt it's coincidence, and I'm furious that either our federal tax dollars went to buy a legal message board (it's legal to *discuss* escorts/"gray market spas", first amendment and all) in order to use it to investigate a local crime like prostitution, or that the owner was possibly coerced into handing a discussion area to the government. What's the FBI doing investigating escorting/spas, anyway? Their excuse given to the media was that they were focusing on "a nationwide network of slavery and indentured servitude in Asian spas"--and yet, in three years on the Decadent City board, I never came across even the mere mention of such a thing. In all likelihood, the operation was mostly about getting a media victory and about using a major national discussion forum about escorts as a clearinghouse to help local law enforcement fight a moral battle about something most people think should be legalized--street prostitution is something most people abhor, but quiet out-of-the-way escorting is seen by 67% (Gallup? poll) of Americans as something which should be legal.
In reality, websites are probably censored or removed by the American government all the time. We need to start to hold the FBI and others accountable, and the mainstream media has to stop seeing the Feds as a purely benevolent force and realize that it's bad when they deep-fry Davidians or shut down a site for having video of a riot or try to accuse some hacker kid of being responsible for hundreds of millions of $$$ in damages for copying but not destroying corporate data purely for fun and challenge.
Whenever Sc*entologists attack an innocent critic, they need to be attacked back. Remember that Sc*entologists have a belief called "fair game"--anyone who criticizes the "church" is evil and thus "fair game" for an attack by any means necessary. Opponents of the cult are often accused of being child molesters or child pornographers--the Sc*entologists accused anon.penet.fi of sending kiddyporn through their remailer as well as sending copyrighted Sc*entology material, despite the fact that anon.penet.fi didn't allow binaries.
The only way to fight such abusiveness is to adopt the same odious tactics of getting them "by any means necessary." What we need are people with deep pockets to sponsor counter-campaigns of lawsuits against Sc*entology--harassment, for sterters. So much "bad publicity" about Sc*entology has been leaked over the last few years that a jury would be a pushover to convict, esp. since in most states a civil suit only requires a majority of jurors and not a unanimous verdict. Think of a class action lawsuit, comprised of all the people who have been harassed by the Sc*entologists--it could easily run into the billions, and a jury would be biased toward conviction in the first place. Bring in Hu*bard's own writings about "fair game" discrediting of detractors, and it's a sure win. The only problem is how many vacuous celebrities have been attracted to the cult, versus the fact that the cult's detractors have no patron(s) with deep pockets....
...yet no mainstream media mention this. The reason the studios want encryption isn't to reduce piracy, it's to try to move back towards the days when viewing a film required paying for it on each and every occasion. You'd have to get a local theater to schedule a showing, then the reels would have to be rented, then the audience would pay. In comes the VCR and suddenly people can record those same movies from television, uncut full-length movies in the case of pay TV. So the movie industry gives in and starts selling those video tapes instead of renting or selling expensive 35mm reels. Since people copied these movies, we got Macrovision for cutting down on it. But real pirates could eliminate Macrovision anyway, so the real purpose is just to keep the average joe from copying tapes. Then comes the chance to move to a digital medium which can be encrypted to prevent piracy--by home users, that is, since real pirates can still get equipment to get at the decrypted video stream and save it, then eliminate Macrovision. And don't forget about DIVX, which is what the companies would really love--paying for every single viewing, or to "unlock" the DIVX permanently meant that it could only be played in the same DIVX machine in the same single place.
Fortunately the public didn't buy into DIVX, but it's all very revealing. The studios--especially Sony, which is notorious for taking extreme measures to eek every last penny from film and music consumers--want to prevent any copying at all, even for backup: eventually it's going to get scratched or gnawed by the dog, and of course you have to go buy another. And heaven forfend, no you can't make a quick copy for a friend to borrow because $30 per film is a single-user license no matter how much money they've cleared from that 30-year-old classic already. Never mind that film and music are the art of our age, and the price for enjoying that art has become too steep (just consider CD prices, versus the 70 cents per CD sold an artist would be lucky to get). And of course, thanks largely to Sony, companies now want to move to a "secure" DVD-like encryped form of the CD. Wow, it's great to live in an age when so many arts are so accessible to the masses--nevermind that most musicians would be happy to give the recordings away for free and make their living off the concerts, since it takes a Madonna to make anywhere near 70 cents per CD sold--most only break-even when advertising and production costs are factored in. It's also unfortunate that Congress has seen fit to increase the length of copyright for music and film--common sense dictates that they should move into the public domain a reasonable period after the death of anyone involved and the profit margins of the studios have been inked-in, but that's not the case.
In Shakespeare's day, even the poorest could afford to see a play once or twice a week. Film is today's equivalent, and yet a theater ticket usually costs upwards of seven dollars--add popcorn and a drink, and maybe a hotdog if you're hungry, and this gets into serious cash. Nearly all movies at least break even at the box office, and most make a good profit. Then they make a mint in video rentals. You wouldn't think it would be such a big deal, then, to have sales of unencrypted digital films--copying one in digital quality is expensive anyway considering the storage space required. It's cost effective to just buy a DVD anyway instead of a bootleg unless...unless...unless the studios want to keep DVD prices at a high level even when the infrastructure is paid for and costs of production go down. Which they do, if the lesson of continually rising CD prices isn't lost on you. Consumers really ought to fight this sort of thing, and give the industry a blunt message: no encryption, you've already made millions in profit by the time DVD sales roll around anyway. No artificially high prices once the profit is there. I am a capitalist, and I hate to say it, but ideally the government would prevent such repeated gouging considering the need for art and entertainment. How much profit is enough--150% of the costs, 300% of the costs, 1000% of the costs? Enough is enough, studios and recording industries...
>Besides, I doubt Itanium will be "poorly >supported", on the contrary there has never been >any new ISA with the kind of support Itanium has, >like it or not.
Price points have already been discussed, and of course this being Chipzilla it's likely that prices will be higher than we've been led to believe. Like it or not, Merced will be squarely for servers and high-end workstations for a while. Meaning, most desktop apps will not be available on Itanium for a while--Willamette is supposed to be the successor to the current P!!!, not Merced and McKinley, so there's little incentive for most desktop consumer-based companies to port all their apps to the new architecture when the new architecture is for servers. Face it: what Intel wants to do is feed us the same old stuff while devoting most of their R&D to an architecture too expensive for 95% of us. That's why the only reason Intel has sped up their schedule for evolving consumer P!!! to.18 micron and tweaking it a bit is the pressure Athlon puts on Intel. Without AMD, we'd be waiting a long, long time to see Intel advance anything for consumer-oriented processors. Intel simply doesn't care about innovating in the consumer market. Keep on wishing, but Itanium ain't for us--it's for the same market that purchases UltraSparcs and current-generation high end Alphas.
The fact is that if the Transmeta CPU architecture is anything like what's in the Transmeta patents, and if they can at least come up with a few engineering samples, if will mean a radical shift in our ideas about processor design. As it stands, the instruction set is what defines a CPU--CISC, RISC, x86, HP-UX, etc., are all involved in defining the processors which use these instruction sets, but Transmeta changes this. The Transmeta idea as expressed in their patents would create a category above this--no longer is it 'an x86 processor', it's 'a processor running x86 instructions'. This is a radical idea, and a radical paradigm shift--we should all hope it comes to pass. If it's a great and practicable design, it shouldn't be too difficult for Transmeta to partner up with anyone from AMD to Motorola. This sort of radical advancement--again, if it comes to pass--makes me wonder what the heck Intel and all their capital were doing designing the inflexible Itanium, which executes its native (and sure to be poorly supported except for network/server apps for at least a year or two till prices come down remarkably) instructions with Alpha-killing speed but chokes on anything else including the x86 with which they were supposed to be compatible to some reasonable degree. Just 2cents from a guy who plans on supporting anything but the Itanium (mmmm, legacy games under 64-bit AMD....)
The way I see it, we'd have had retail 1GHz P!!! processors even before now if only Intel had its mind on the right technologies instead of pie-in-the-sky technologies that no one really wants. How many of us really care about Rambus, considering that we haven't nearly reached the limits of SDRAM? Think about what graphics cards manufacturers are using in their next-generation (or for the GeForce, current-generation) cards--Double Data Rate SDRAM, much as the Athlon FSB is really 100MHz but transfers data twice in the time it takes a normal FSB to transfer once, DDR SDRAM would effectively double memory performance whereas Rambus will start out more expensive than SDRAM and perform worse than 133MHz SDRAM.
We could have DDR SDRAM 200Mhz memory right now if Intel had supported it instead of Rambus, and DDR SDRAM would quickly reach effective speeds of 300MHz--150MHz x 2 times the transfer rate.
But what does this have to do with the 1GHz mark? Intel pushed Rambus for its own agenda, not caring about customers' needs; likewise, development has been almost completely shifted to Merced (oops, make that stupidly-named-Itanium) instead of pushing x86 to its limits first. Were it not for AMD--and this is supported by Intel's own "development roadmaps"--we wouldn't even have seen 700MHz Coppermine this year (and we still won't get it in quantity this year). We have AMD to thank for 700MHz P!!!, which is reason enough in my book to buy Athlon--Intel simply does not care about the consumer, they care about pushing the unnecessary and too-expensive technology of their Rambus partner, and they care about finishing their high-end server processor Itanium; they do *not* care about making their soon-to-be-low-end-compared-to-Merced P!!! run as fast as it can for their customers. Why do you think Intel is suing VIA, whose 133MHz SDRAM chipset beats Rambus performance to Hell and back? This is not off-topic--this is why we don't have 1GHz retail processors by now, which is as on-topic as it gets. Intel, we want x86 at well over 1GHz before we even want to think about Merced. We want you to care about what we care about. But since you don't, a lot of us are going to start thinking AMD Inside instead of caring about Intel, and by the time your prized Itanium rolls around we just might drop it in favour of AMD's 64-bit x86-on-PCP offering. Think about it.
I'm glad of these breakthroughs mostly because, as it stands, a DVD I buy in France can't be played with an American DVD player. If the addage is true that information should be free (as in freedom), then this is a terrible thing. It's especially bad since many films are not available outside their own regions--for example, there's a "director's cut" of the movie called in America *The Professional*, which is called *Leon: version integrale" which is only available in Europe. The American version of the film is fluff, but the French version is beautiful--they won't ever release it in the U.S. because 13-yr.-old Natalie Portman (Queen Amidala in her latest role) asks Leon to sleep with her, and though he refuses he does take her out to help him in his job as a hitman and teach her the ropes. None of that happens in the U.S. censored version. That's just one version. Now we're closer to breaking down the barriers of film-industry censorship, and that's a great thing. Thanks to the hackers and code-breakers who did this work. Thanks a lot.
The *only* reason that people are saying that Trek is "dead" is that there isn't a spinoff in production to take over the franchise once Voyager is retired--this does *not* mean that there isn't life in the old girl yet. Here's why: Despite the comments by many about how supposedly "bad" Voyager is, it is now an excellent show with good ratings. It used to be bad, though--it started out being totally unlike the rest of the Trek series, with very little Federation-related stuff going on; it was like Babylon 5 on crack. But the show was revamped a couple seasons into the run, the episodes now actually feel like Trek, and it is a great and worthy show now. Plus, Seven of Nine can assimilate me any time, a sentiment shared by almost everyone here... Yes, The Next Generation is dead and should be put out to pasture. Yes, the original series produced a very very bad movie and now everyone in it is too ancient or too dead to make another that might salvage their reputation. Yes, a DS9 film is likely to go nowhere. But Voyager is now a testimony to what the franchise can do when they stick to hardcore Trek--it took a crappy series less interesting than my left testicle, and turned it into an *excellent* show. All that's left is to find a compelling time and place for a new series--and the Trek universe is full of them--and to examine what made the early Voyager so bad and what made the rest of them so good to come up with the right kind of theme. Maybe they could even skip a century into the future from where current offerings lie, and evolve Trek in such a way as to interest everyone all over again: there was nothing like seeing the early TNG series and "filling in the blanks" to see how we got from NCC-1701 to NCC-1701-D (oops, was that supposed to be E?;) Look at the evolution of the series to see what I mean--in the 60s it was primarily a children's and young adults' show; it wasn't at all technical, and the reason they added baby-faced Chekov was that he looked the age of most of the audience. It was a show that was cancelled with extreme prejudice after just a couple seasons. Then it became a very embarrassing cartoon and comic book--you can't get much lower. Then the middle-aged crew came back in a film meant to appeal to those adults who grew up with the Trek universe, and it was a great comeback and the movies became serious sci-fi meant for grown-ups as well as kids. TNG brought it to a new TV generation who loved it, and a Golden Age finally hit--thirty years after the original series--with the original crew in films and two crews on TV. The early Voyager was the first sign that anything was wrong--but not much is wrong now. No, Insurrectuion wasn't a good film. So what. Thirty years from now, Trek will still be around--time has *proven* its resilience.
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A convenient example since this was long before IDE/ATAPI was sufficiently advanced enough to really compete with SCSI. Since that time, SCSI has barely moved forward and IDE has jumped continents. Try the same experiment today with a generic, costly SCSI drive and a much-less-expensive 7200 RPM (maybe even 10,000 RPM, depending on the price you can snare) drive of equal capacity from Seagate or Quantum, and see where it gets you. Go ahead. The SCSI system can have, say, a cheapo K6-2 400 and with all the money you save on the IDE system you can buy an Athlon 500.
Now, which system do you think is going to kick ass?
Dude, that is the most clueless response I've ever heard. Remember, I mentioned that you could spend all the extra SCSI money you saved through buying IDE on getting a much, much faster processor to handle the extra overload, and in the long run as you add or replace disks you're saving mucho dinero?
Your response, however, refers to using a 6-year-old CPU. Ummmm. Mismatch. Divide by zero. Does not compute. Did you even bother reading what I wrote, or did the headline just set you off on a flamewar to protect the reputation of fair maiden SCSI? Bad flamer, no biscuit!
Of course you can't use IDE disks to serve that sort of purpose *IN A SIX YEAR OLD COMPUTER*! DUH! But I never tried to say you *could*, now did I? I was talking about actually building a server or workstation, not cobbling one up from leftover 386 cpus and some thermal grease.
The fact remains that SCSI is the past. The future is *not* SCSI, esp. since the new SCSI standards being proposed will *still* be far behind the new FireWire standards being proposed.
Don't start flaming before reading.
It's a matter of cost/performance ratio. Yes, SCSI is light on taking up CPU resources; no, SCSI isn't much faster than a good 7200 RPM ATA66 disk, and IDE is reaching into 10K RPM these days.
So, in terms of performance, is it worth the several hundred $ extra per hard disk? No. Purchasing a 25% faster CPU for several hundred extra dollars is the better long-term solution, because each time you need to add a new HD or replace an aging one you save the $$$ overhead you'd be paying for the additional SCSI drives.
No one ever said the most technologically sophisticated solution is the best solution--it's not. A 70s muscle car will generally kick the ass of a 90s sports car. The same is true with computer hardware, which is why commodity IBM clones have consistently kicked the ass of more elegant PPC boxes and even SPARCs and Alphas--sure, Alpha is the fastest thing this side of whatever the NSA's private little fab is putting out, but for the price of a smooth-as-silk Alpha or SPARC server, you could have built the ass-kickingest SMP x86 box--or two. Sure, SCSI will give you a performance boost--but you could get more processing power and more disk space with IDE 66; the processor power advantage would be nullified by the IDE pull on the CPU, but that still leaves you with more disk space.
More is better, right? So unless you want to serve pages from that pathetic 2GB SCSI disk all your life, because you can't afford to add more SCSI drives, just ride the ATA66 revolution. If you can afford mondo SCSI disk space anyway--go with IDE and get yourself some more bandwidth or throw in more RAM.
Thing is, with a computer there are always trade-offs, always several things you could get to improve performance. Few if any of us here have unlimited wallets--SCSI is dead. SCSI is the past. In the future, for the highest-end most expensive hard disks, we'll have FireWire or some other high speed standard--not SCSI. And for all other applications, IDE 66 and successors will be the way to go. The revolution's on, folks--all that stuff we've been using for 20 years is going by the wayside: x86 architecture (at least as we know it--maybe Sledgehammer and Crusoe will make it more serviceable), Microsoft operating systems, ISA slots, SCSI, and I wish my old college would hurry up and get rid of that ancient VAX, too.
>CSS keeps the key information for a disk in a >special block on the disk. This block will not >be writable on consumer DVD-R blanks... you will >NOT be able to duplicate a DVD using these >blanks. Writable blanks will be hard to find, >and IIRC they will require special commercial >equipment; you won't be able to write them in >your DVD-R drive. No no no, no no no no. There isn't even a standard, right now, for DVD-R discs or recorders--several companies are all hawking incompatible equipment and have differing plans they're trying to push through. But that doesn't matter, because it's easy enough to trick DVD software into thinking that just about anything is a DVD disk--I got several commercial DVD players for Win9x to play bit-for-bit rips of DVDs off of an 8.4G hard disk. So, if I had a DVD-RW of any type I could record it to that media and play it--but again, the media is too expensive to bother. The truth is that ESR is right: they want all those $5000 licensing fees for anything remotely DVD-related. Aside from which, even without DeCSS, I can capture the video stream and re-compress in MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 and still have better-than-VHS quality video which I can record to the media of my choice. >Making drives enforce the system really does >help from their point of view. Sure, you can >burn a new PROM for a drive, but how many people >are actually going to do that? They're hoping >that people will either have to spend money or >manually hack hardware; that will reduce copying >to a level they can live with... especially >since they were (and to some degree are) >probably expecting the Digital Millenium >Copyright Act's ridiculously draconian penalties >to prevent the spread of any hacks. No, you don't have to fudge with the hardware or burn/buy special PROMs. The best DVD-ROM on the market (for the next 5 minutes, at least), the Panasonic/AOpen 10x drive, can be hacked by merely downloading a "firmware upgrade" to remove all region restrictions--go to http://www.dvdutils.com to get it.
I took the liberty of e-mailing eToys from all three of my e-mail accounts today, e-mailing them different letters which all said the same basic thing: I've read an e-mail forward about your distasteful actions relating to etoy.com, and sent it on to dozens of friends, and your business is going to be fscked not to mention the fact that etoy.com is going to be very wealthy after the countersuit. E-mail them at service@etoys.com -- and they also have a web-based form for reporting "problems with the site" atm enupage=1&pagename=t9
m enupage=1&pagename=t10
http://www.etoys.com/cgi-bin/cs_print_page.cgi?
and a "feedback" web-based form at
http://www.etoys.com/cgi-bin/cs_print_page.cgi?
I suggest everyone utilize them all.
And, by all means--*write all your non-slashdot friends some e-mail forwards about this matter*. Forwards are usually a pain in the a*s, but this is one of those times when grassroots action is necessary and e-mail forwards will help. Imagine if thousands of people start, and continue, e-mailing etoys.com about how disgusting their harassment of etoy.com is.
And, not that I'm advocating going *this* far, but if anyone should happen to have access to computers to which he can't be tied--well, it would be easy enough to make them call the eToys 800 numbers with their modems continuously...
A tenant has an expectation of privacy in his own rented quarters--which is why, even though it's the landlord's property, the landlord cannot arbitrarily come into your apartment. Imagine you and your girlfriend enjoying a nice, long, wet...game of Pong, when your landlord comes in and watches. Not legal, obviously, in that example--but most people don't realize that it's not legal under most circumstances. However, a landlord *can* let law enforcement into your apartment under circumstances under which it would be legal for Law Enforcement to search without a warrant--when there are risks of imminent danger, or the officers have reason to do a probable cause search, or in other specific cases.
But this has nothing to do with an ISP and the present case. It's a matter of the First Amendment, and the FBI got into the business of censoring that which is perfectly legal--and so the FBI should be punished through civil suit. When they lose enough of their budget they'll stop violating our rights.
We'd all probably be surprised by how often various agencies quench the fires of free speech on the Net--many people would probably have given in without a struggle and given up their sites quietly if paid a visit by the Hoovers. Then, there are probably many cases like this one which we simply never hear about due to media apathy/siding with the J. Edgars. Plus, a tactic which is even subtler: if you can't beat them, buy them out.
This is what very likely recently happened to Decadentcity.com and a related site, grokthis.com/decadent. I can't be 100% on this, but all evidence points to its verity. This isn't meant to be off-topic, it's meant to express something which probably has become a commonplace tactic by law enforcement. See, decadentcity.com and the related site were dedicated to message boards discussing "escorts"--like, the Heidi Fleiss type. It started out local to D.C. back in '96 and soon every major city had a message board and ads and reviews and "ripoff warnings" sections. Maybe a year ago a cryptic message about "new ownership" appeared on the site and then disappeared--and yet everything remained the same. The "new ownership" never revealed itself to the board--not so much as a single message or change to the site. The old owner had always dropped in, but he suddenly disappeared. The site was left untouched. The ads section--principal source of revenue--expired, and for about a year no advertisements were added or deleted even though the women themselves expressed interest on the boards. The boards chattered away, most of the escorts in the D.C. area (and, I'm told, in others) who'd been there for years left the board and several left the business without warning. Rumours circulated about the FBI buying the board as part of an investigation into the "organized crime" involved in escorting and message parlors nationally. Perhaps coincidentally, and perhaps not, the sites have been shut down ever since the very day a week or two ago when the national investigation the FBI had made into the spa/massage/escort business was revealed on the news nationally. I doubt it's coincidence, and I'm furious that either our federal tax dollars went to buy a legal message board (it's legal to *discuss* escorts/"gray market spas", first amendment and all) in order to use it to investigate a local crime like prostitution, or that the owner was possibly coerced into handing a discussion area to the government. What's the FBI doing investigating escorting/spas, anyway? Their excuse given to the media was that they were focusing on "a nationwide network of slavery and indentured servitude in Asian spas"--and yet, in three years on the Decadent City board, I never came across even the mere mention of such a thing. In all likelihood, the operation was mostly about getting a media victory and about using a major national discussion forum about escorts as a clearinghouse to help local law enforcement fight a moral battle about something most people think should be legalized--street prostitution is something most people abhor, but quiet out-of-the-way escorting is seen by 67% (Gallup? poll) of Americans as something which should be legal.
In reality, websites are probably censored or removed by the American government all the time. We need to start to hold the FBI and others accountable, and the mainstream media has to stop seeing the Feds as a purely benevolent force and realize that it's bad when they deep-fry Davidians or shut down a site for having video of a riot or try to accuse some hacker kid of being responsible for hundreds of millions of $$$ in damages for copying but not destroying corporate data purely for fun and challenge.
Whenever Sc*entologists attack an innocent critic, they need to be attacked back. Remember that Sc*entologists have a belief called "fair game"--anyone who criticizes the "church" is evil and thus "fair game" for an attack by any means necessary. Opponents of the cult are often accused of being child molesters or child pornographers--the Sc*entologists accused anon.penet.fi of sending kiddyporn through their remailer as well as sending copyrighted Sc*entology material, despite the fact that anon.penet.fi didn't allow binaries.
The only way to fight such abusiveness is to adopt the same odious tactics of getting them "by any means necessary." What we need are people with deep pockets to sponsor counter-campaigns of lawsuits against Sc*entology--harassment, for sterters. So much "bad publicity" about Sc*entology has been leaked over the last few years that a jury would be a pushover to convict, esp. since in most states a civil suit only requires a majority of jurors and not a unanimous verdict. Think of a class action lawsuit, comprised of all the people who have been harassed by the Sc*entologists--it could easily run into the billions, and a jury would be biased toward conviction in the first place. Bring in Hu*bard's own writings about "fair game" discrediting of detractors, and it's a sure win. The only problem is how many vacuous celebrities have been attracted to the cult, versus the fact that the cult's detractors have no patron(s) with deep pockets....
...yet no mainstream media mention this. The reason the studios want encryption isn't to reduce piracy, it's to try to move back towards the days when viewing a film required paying for it on each and every occasion. You'd have to get a local theater to schedule a showing, then the reels would have to be rented, then the audience would pay. In comes the VCR and suddenly people can record those same movies from television, uncut full-length movies in the case of pay TV. So the movie industry gives in and starts selling those video tapes instead of renting or selling expensive 35mm reels. Since people copied these movies, we got Macrovision for cutting down on it. But real pirates could eliminate Macrovision anyway, so the real purpose is just to keep the average joe from copying tapes. Then comes the chance to move to a digital medium which can be encrypted to prevent piracy--by home users, that is, since real pirates can still get equipment to get at the decrypted video stream and save it, then eliminate Macrovision. And don't forget about DIVX, which is what the companies would really love--paying for every single viewing, or to "unlock" the DIVX permanently meant that it could only be played in the same DIVX machine in the same single place.
Fortunately the public didn't buy into DIVX, but it's all very revealing. The studios--especially Sony, which is notorious for taking extreme measures to eek every last penny from film and music consumers--want to prevent any copying at all, even for backup: eventually it's going to get scratched or gnawed by the dog, and of course you have to go buy another. And heaven forfend, no you can't make a quick copy for a friend to borrow because $30 per film is a single-user license no matter how much money they've cleared from that 30-year-old classic already. Never mind that film and music are the art of our age, and the price for enjoying that art has become too steep (just consider CD prices, versus the 70 cents per CD sold an artist would be lucky to get). And of course, thanks largely to Sony, companies now want to move to a "secure" DVD-like encryped form of the CD. Wow, it's great to live in an age when so many arts are so accessible to the masses--nevermind that most musicians would be happy to give the recordings away for free and make their living off the concerts, since it takes a Madonna to make anywhere near 70 cents per CD sold--most only break-even when advertising and production costs are factored in. It's also unfortunate that Congress has seen fit to increase the length of copyright for music and film--common sense dictates that they should move into the public domain a reasonable period after the death of anyone involved and the profit margins of the studios have been inked-in, but that's not the case.
In Shakespeare's day, even the poorest could afford to see a play once or twice a week. Film is today's equivalent, and yet a theater ticket usually costs upwards of seven dollars--add popcorn and a drink, and maybe a hotdog if you're hungry, and this gets into serious cash. Nearly all movies at least break even at the box office, and most make a good profit. Then they make a mint in video rentals. You wouldn't think it would be such a big deal, then, to have sales of unencrypted digital films--copying one in digital quality is expensive anyway considering the storage space required. It's cost effective to just buy a DVD anyway instead of a bootleg unless...unless...unless the studios want to keep DVD prices at a high level even when the infrastructure is paid for and costs of production go down. Which they do, if the lesson of continually rising CD prices isn't lost on you. Consumers really ought to fight this sort of thing, and give the industry a blunt message: no encryption, you've already made millions in profit by the time DVD sales roll around anyway. No artificially high prices once the profit is there. I am a capitalist, and I hate to say it, but ideally the government would prevent such repeated gouging considering the need for art and entertainment. How much profit is enough--150% of the costs, 300% of the costs, 1000% of the costs? Enough is enough, studios and recording industries...
>Besides, I doubt Itanium will be "poorly
.18 micron and tweaking it a bit is the pressure Athlon puts on Intel. Without AMD, we'd be waiting a long, long time to see Intel advance anything for consumer-oriented processors. Intel simply doesn't care about innovating in the consumer market. Keep on wishing, but Itanium ain't for us--it's for the same market that purchases UltraSparcs and current-generation high end Alphas.
>supported", on the contrary there has never been
>any new ISA with the kind of support Itanium has,
>like it or not.
Price points have already been discussed, and of course this being Chipzilla it's likely that prices will be higher than we've been led to believe. Like it or not, Merced will be squarely for servers and high-end workstations for a while. Meaning, most desktop apps will not be available on Itanium for a while--Willamette is supposed to be the successor to the current P!!!, not Merced and McKinley, so there's little incentive for most desktop consumer-based companies to port all their apps to the new architecture when the new architecture is for servers. Face it: what Intel wants to do is feed us the same old stuff while devoting most of their R&D to an architecture too expensive for 95% of us. That's why the only reason Intel has sped up their schedule for evolving consumer P!!! to
The fact is that if the Transmeta CPU architecture is anything like what's in the Transmeta patents, and if they can at least come up with a few engineering samples, if will mean a radical shift in our ideas about processor design. As it stands, the instruction set is what defines a CPU--CISC, RISC, x86, HP-UX, etc., are all involved in defining the processors which use these instruction sets, but Transmeta changes this. The Transmeta idea as expressed in their patents would create a category above this--no longer is it 'an x86 processor', it's 'a processor running x86 instructions'. This is a radical idea, and a radical paradigm shift--we should all hope it comes to pass. If it's a great and practicable design, it shouldn't be too difficult for Transmeta to partner up with anyone from AMD to Motorola. This sort of radical advancement--again, if it comes to pass--makes me wonder what the heck Intel and all their capital were doing designing the inflexible Itanium, which executes its native (and sure to be poorly supported except for network/server apps for at least a year or two till prices come down remarkably) instructions with Alpha-killing speed but chokes on anything else including the x86 with which they were supposed to be compatible to some reasonable degree. Just 2cents from a guy who plans on supporting anything but the Itanium (mmmm, legacy games under 64-bit AMD....)
The way I see it, we'd have had retail 1GHz P!!! processors even before now if only Intel had its mind on the right technologies instead of pie-in-the-sky technologies that no one really wants. How many of us really care about Rambus, considering that we haven't nearly reached the limits of SDRAM? Think about what graphics cards manufacturers are using in their next-generation (or for the GeForce, current-generation) cards--Double Data Rate SDRAM, much as the Athlon FSB is really 100MHz but transfers data twice in the time it takes a normal FSB to transfer once, DDR SDRAM would effectively double memory performance whereas Rambus will start out more expensive than SDRAM and perform worse than 133MHz SDRAM.
We could have DDR SDRAM 200Mhz memory right now if Intel had supported it instead of Rambus, and DDR SDRAM would quickly reach effective speeds of 300MHz--150MHz x 2 times the transfer rate.
But what does this have to do with the 1GHz mark? Intel pushed Rambus for its own agenda, not caring about customers' needs; likewise, development has been almost completely shifted to Merced (oops, make that stupidly-named-Itanium) instead of pushing x86 to its limits first. Were it not for AMD--and this is supported by Intel's own "development roadmaps"--we wouldn't even have seen 700MHz Coppermine this year (and we still won't get it in quantity this year). We have AMD to thank for 700MHz P!!!, which is reason enough in my book to buy Athlon--Intel simply does not care about the consumer, they care about pushing the unnecessary and too-expensive technology of their Rambus partner, and they care about finishing their high-end server processor Itanium; they do *not* care about making their soon-to-be-low-end-compared-to-Merced P!!! run as fast as it can for their customers. Why do you think Intel is suing VIA, whose 133MHz SDRAM chipset beats Rambus performance to Hell and back? This is not off-topic--this is why we don't have 1GHz retail processors by now, which is as on-topic as it gets. Intel, we want x86 at well over 1GHz before we even want to think about Merced. We want you to care about what we care about. But since you don't, a lot of us are going to start thinking AMD Inside instead of caring about Intel, and by the time your prized Itanium rolls around we just might drop it in favour of AMD's 64-bit x86-on-PCP offering. Think about it.
I'm glad of these breakthroughs mostly because, as it stands, a DVD I buy in France can't be played with an American DVD player. If the addage is true that information should be free (as in freedom), then this is a terrible thing. It's especially bad since many films are not available outside their own regions--for example, there's a "director's cut" of the movie called in America *The Professional*, which is called *Leon: version integrale" which is only available in Europe. The American version of the film is fluff, but the French version is beautiful--they won't ever release it in the U.S. because 13-yr.-old Natalie Portman (Queen Amidala in her latest role) asks Leon to sleep with her, and though he refuses he does take her out to help him in his job as a hitman and teach her the ropes. None of that happens in the U.S. censored version. That's just one version. Now we're closer to breaking down the barriers of film-industry censorship, and that's a great thing. Thanks to the hackers and code-breakers who did this work. Thanks a lot.
The *only* reason that people are saying that Trek is "dead" is that there isn't a spinoff in production to take over the franchise once Voyager is retired--this does *not* mean that there isn't life in the old girl yet. Here's why: ;)
Despite the comments by many about how supposedly "bad" Voyager is, it is now an excellent show with good ratings. It used to be bad, though--it started out being totally unlike the rest of the Trek series, with very little Federation-related stuff going on; it was like Babylon 5 on crack. But the show was revamped a couple seasons into the run, the episodes now actually feel like Trek, and it is a great and worthy show now. Plus, Seven of Nine can assimilate me any time, a sentiment shared by almost everyone here...
Yes, The Next Generation is dead and should be put out to pasture. Yes, the original series produced a very very bad movie and now everyone in it is too ancient or too dead to make another that might salvage their reputation. Yes, a DS9 film is likely to go nowhere. But Voyager is now a testimony to what the franchise can do when they stick to hardcore Trek--it took a crappy series less interesting than my left testicle, and turned it into an *excellent* show.
All that's left is to find a compelling time and place for a new series--and the Trek universe is full of them--and to examine what made the early Voyager so bad and what made the rest of them so good to come up with the right kind of theme. Maybe they could even skip a century into the future from where current offerings lie, and evolve Trek in such a way as to interest everyone all over again: there was nothing like seeing the early TNG series and "filling in the blanks" to see how we got from NCC-1701 to NCC-1701-D (oops, was that supposed to be E?
Look at the evolution of the series to see what I mean--in the 60s it was primarily a children's and young adults' show; it wasn't at all technical, and the reason they added baby-faced Chekov was that he looked the age of most of the audience. It was a show that was cancelled with extreme prejudice after just a couple seasons. Then it became a very embarrassing cartoon and comic book--you can't get much lower. Then the middle-aged crew came back in a film meant to appeal to those adults who grew up with the Trek universe, and it was a great comeback and the movies became serious sci-fi meant for grown-ups as well as kids. TNG brought it to a new TV generation who loved it, and a Golden Age finally hit--thirty years after the original series--with the original crew in films and two crews on TV. The early Voyager was the first sign that anything was wrong--but not much is wrong now. No, Insurrectuion wasn't a good film. So what. Thirty years from now, Trek will still be around--time has *proven* its resilience.