They note that the Theora/Vorbis has not seen commercial distribution...
This is incorrect. Vorbis has shipped tens of millions of units in products by organizations such as, well, Microsoft, to pick an example well known as being uninteresting to patent trolls.
Theora has been in a few games, and other commercial products, but hasn't had the same exposure.
...the reasoning here is that H.264 and AAC are DESIGNED to work together
Is it? Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora were designed to work together?
h.264 probably has more technical scope for quality/bitrate than theora does, but that's generally immaterial. The <strong>current implementations</stong> of h.264 are better than the current implementations of h.264 because resources have been allocated to make it so. There are a handful of implementations of each. The MPEG standard has been implemented by many large bodies. Theora by small ones. Even the open source h.264 implementation has a lot more volunteers than have ever worked on Theora.
We found it varied quite a bit depending on where you lived. East London? quite hard to get rid of them. Richmond? No problem. In both cases we had a big-ass CRT, but no telly (if I may mix dialects).
I talked to Uraeus about this a bit. The machine has combined ARM9/TI DSP cores. The idea is that you want the codecs running on the DSP, and apparently the free Xiph codecs we're included in the launch because there's no DSP port of the reference implementations. (There's no GCC back end for the dsp, although some folks are working on a related series.) This includes Ogg Theora, Speex and FLAC as well as Ogg Vorbis.
Whether the ARM is too slow (or battery consumptive) to run the decoders on its own, I'm not clear but with everything open source it will be easy to check.
I'll be a Guadec, where they are apparently also doing a demo, so hopefully will know more next week.
In the long term though we need help with the DSP gcc port and someone to do hand-optimized asm for the xiph codecs. If anyone's interested, please let us know.
You should take a look at the Elphel 333 fpga security cameras. They can do real-time encoding in the free Theora video format at HD resolutions, and provide the stream over ethernet.
The cameras don't have sound, so you'd have to use the mac mini to handle the audio, and the image quality isn't as good as one of the "prosumer" HDV cameras. On the other hand, by doing the compression in hardware you don't have any resource problems like you would transcoding an HDV or component HD feed, and can concentrate on just decoding the stream.:)
Best, you'll be supporting free multimedia instead of the MPEG patent holders.
There's an article describing the camera if you want more details.
I tried this flying from Frankfurt to Vancouver last year. It was great for the first couple of hours, but the connection stopped working somewhere around iceland.
I don't know if it was a technical problem or a coverage issue with the latitude, but I was very very disappointed. $30 for 10 hours is expensive. $30 for 2 hours is insane.
JPEG 2000 has one feature that might make it better in "archival" purposes - there is a lossless mode which still achieves higher compression ratios than PNG.
Yes, lossless JPEG 2000 is a reasonable option. I'm not sure any lossy video codec counts as 'archival' storage. Might as well just put published DVDs in a preservation vault. The wide release of movies of movies on DVD has done more for the preservation of movies themselves than anything else in history.
Still, for a digital archive of the film masters, until the patent issues with JPEG 2000 are resolved, I'd just put MNG and FLAC in an Ogg file.
And if you can spare the space, a directory with a wav file and a stack of uncompressed TIFF images is even better. Compression formats are complicated to reverse engineer.
It is indeed very fast, but it wouldn't compile ghostscript for me.
# apt-get install tcc
[...]
$ cd ~/projects/ghostscript/gs
$ make distclean
[...]
$ CC=tcc./configure && make
[...]
tcc -DHAVE_MKSTEMP -DHAVE_HYPOT -O -DHAVE_STDINT_H -DGX_COLOR_INDEX_TYPE="unsigned long long" -I./src -I./obj -I./obj -I./src -o./obj/zfcid.o -c./src/zfcid.c
In file included from./src/zfcid.c:23:
In file included from./src/bfont.h:24: ./src/ifont.h:34: identifier expected
make: *** [obj/zfcid.o] Error 1
Compiler bug?
I also like how it has an auto-run switch to invoke the compiler output. So you can make C source executable from
the command line by putting #!/usr/bin/tcc -run at the top. I would use that for quick test programs in C. Once it's debugged you can run it through gcc.
Flash is an open SPECIFICATION, meaning Macromedia will tell you how to read and write them. IT IS NOT AN OPEN FORMAT.
If only. Then it would be no worse than PDF. Have you ever read the license terms associated with the published specification? They specifically restrict you to generation and disallow playback implementations. So, no open source flash player. That's not even an open specification, that's just the same sad old we-must-control-things mindset that open source has been fighting since the beginning.
Some of the open source work that's been done has been based on reverse-engineering, but really, just use SVG. It's a real pity too. Flash (the technology, not what it's usually used for) is quite useful and well implemented to boot. Just another case of routing around the damage.
A related technology that could make notebook computers usable outdoors would be the real killer app, as far as I'm concerned.
I would really really like a screen that worked in sunlight too, but it's not a killer app. As has already been pointed out, you can get transflective screens as an option on some laptops, but there's no general interest. Most people only use their laptops in offices and airplanes--places without a lot of natural light.
Transflective screens are more common on handheld devices of course. OLED displays can help with contrast and of course power consumption when competing with high incident light levels.
To solve the problem in general you really want a reflective display so you can take advangate of ambient light when available, mainly to save save power, combined with emissive capabilities for use in the dark. That's probably 20 years away; we've not entirely paid off R&D on LCD screen technology yet.
Personally, I'm more interested in letting iTunes support Ogg Vorbis.
You can do this by installing the Ogg Vorbis quicktime components. iTunes will use them to play Vorbis files. It's a little slow to load and unfortunately doesn't work with streams, but it's great for accessing your Vorbis files from within the interface.
No. The field names are ACSII only (actually a printable subset minus '=') but the contents of the fields are specified as UTF-8.
The intention was you could put arbitrary binary data in there too, but there's no general mechanism for marking it as anything else. So any non-UTF-8 use would be application specific.
This is my favorite story about Apple's communication strategy.
Me: I think I've found a bug. Attached is an example of the issue.
Apple: Thank you for the report. We will forward it to our Engineers.
Apple: Er, our engineers are having trouble reproducing. Could you send us more information.
Me: Here's the tarball I attached last time. It actually contains source code demonstrating the problem. If you forward that to your Engineers, it will probably help.
Apple: Oh. Right....a year goes by...
Apple: We believe your bug is fixed in the next release. Please test and confirm.
Me: Well, I don't have a pay developer membership, so I don't have the development builds. If you send me one, I'll be happy to test.
Apple: Thank you for your inquiry. We do not comment on the status or existence of future software releases.
So, my bug was fixed in software that doesn't exist. At least they told me.
And I'm more amused than annoyed. At least one can submit bugs, and they generally have fixed all of them by the next major release. But open and communicative...not really.:)
low-impact game players like me are out of date in 3-6 months and can not play games until we upgrade our computers!!
this is insane and why I like consoles.
Funny. I must be a lower-impact game player than you. I find consoles go out of date every 3-6 years, and I only get a couple of games out of them before I have to upgrade.
I'm quite serious; the last three console games I played at home were on the Nintendo 64. I expect the successor to the GameCube will be out by the time I get through the current Zelda.
My computer is usually upgraded more often, but that's because I do more than play games on it. Your point about timescales isn't a good argument; it's entirely relative to your own convenience and has nothing to do with what's good for gaming in general.
I was really happy to see Apple used distcc for their distributed compiles as well.
Too bad it's so hard to build their gcc on other OSen. My linux desktop is much faster than my macos laptop, and it would be nice to be able to add it to the pool.
Anyone have pointers on porting apple's toolchain?
What you describe is Trademark law, which is probably the sanest branch of north american IP at this point. You cannot trademark common words or phrases (modulo certain exceptions)
so an effort is generally made to prevent brand names from becoming same by prosecuting uses of the trademark that don't refer specifically to the actual product.
Copyrights belong to the author (or sponsor) automatically and can only be given up voluntarily or lost when the rights period expires, which is now some significant time after the author dies.
Patents are granted on a first come, first served basis to whoever applies for one and provides a monopoly on the implementation of a particular method for a fixed term.
Neither copyright nor patent rights are contingent on enforcement the way trademarks are. Holders of these two rights can and do choose which infringements to pursue.
This is the problem with MPEG-4. We can avoid the copyright issue by writing an open source version from scratch, since the standard is at least published. We don't have to call it MPEG-4 so there are no trademark issues, although while the MPEG logo is trademarked in the US, one can refer to the specification because that itself is not a trademark and because there is no attempt at confusion.
But there is no way around patents because they grant a monopoly on implementation rights. Just because you wrote your own doesn't mean you don't have to buy a license, or that you won't be forced to buy one sometime in the next 20 years. If you live in a jurisdiction that doesn't enforce patents, you're fine for now. If you just want to trade movies underground, you're probably fine because there's safety in numbers. But if you're like me, and want digital media to be as easy and ubiquitous as webpages; something anyone can do, something you don't need permission for, you need a something that's Free as in Freedom and Free as in Beer. Something like Theora.
As mentioned, you have to be moving slower than the escape velocity to be in orbit around something. The formula is v = sqrt(2GM/r). G is 6.67x10^-11 m^3/s^2kg everywhere.
For Earth, M is 6x10^24 kg, and the highest relevent velocity as at the surface, so r = 6x10^6 m. That's 11.2 km/s. Very fast. Which is why it's hard just to get into orbit.
Now for the comet. If it's 4 km across, r = 2000 m. I can't find a value for the mass, but based on the common description of comets as dirty snowballs let's guess the density is about that of water, or 1000 kg/m^3. The volume of a sphere is 4/3 r^3 so our guess for M is 3.35x10^13 kg.
That makes the escape velocity for 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko at 1.5 m/s which pretty much the same brisk walking-speed which which the lander is expected to hit the comet, especially if our guess at the density is high. Thus, the lander could easily bounce off, and a person could with some effort jump off, fast enough that the comet's gravity wouldn't bring them back. On the other hand, an rocky asteroid (denser) the size of Manhattan (bigger) would probably be hard to get away from under your own power. This comet is right on the edge.
However, recently Ogg Vorbis has been falling out of favour because of some questions beinr brought up and currently still unanswered about the truth of the statement that Ogg Vorbis is "patent-free" because of a few patents uncovered recently which Ogg Vorbis may have infringed on.
To give air to the otherside of that flamewar, the 'unanswered' questions had more to do with a misunderstanding on the part of some forum members about how the patent system works in the US. "Patent-free" does not mean no one will sue you ever, because anyone can sue you anytime for anything. It's all about the negotiation of expectation for who would win at what cost in a potential legal action.
In that context, and because we feel Xiph.org the organization is a likely target of punitive legal action, we unfortunately feel the less said about what we think about specific patents, the better, to avoid advertising routes of legal attack. Hardly the usual values of openness, but that's what the US legal system argues for.
What Vorbis needs is independent defenders who understand the issues, not demands for justification from groups that should mostly be on the same side.
We've been collecting what freely-redistributable clips we can find at media.xiph.org. There's not much there, but it's still worth a look. Particularly interesting for your case are some public domain HD test clips made available by TU München LDV. Of course, they're quite short given the size of uncompressed HD frames.
Please let us know if you find anything else, that's exactly what the collection is for.
In general, the suggestions of contacting copyright holders for permission is the best one. There are various collections of test clips and movies online, but they're generally either small and without audio, or already compressed. Plus, the more content we get under free licenses, the better the world will be.:-)
The Internet Archive does have a collection of movies with contact information, so that might be an easy place to start.
I don't think the Theora specification will be available any time soon. The Vorbis specification is not yet published. There is just a reference implementation.
A spec for theora the main feature on the todo list for the first beta release. Dan Miller, one of the architects of the VP3 codec, is writing it.
The vorbis spec has been available since the 1.0 release.
If they do a good job without breaking anything else or causing additional inconvenience I wouldn't mind at all. Would you mind if some stranger came along and pulled the weeds out of your garden? It's like they're doing system administration for free; if their interest and yours is in improving the state of the networks commons, such division of labor is only an efficiency.
People get concerned about security as an end unto itself, forgetting the real world is messier than that. An excess of control can be as wasteful as a deficit. What's good for the RIAA is good us too. It's never good to be a battleground of course, but ants in the basement are better than roaches in the kitchen. If the one prevents the other, why not?
Thus we should patch security holes not to keep someone from using a few resources we wouldn't miss, or indeed use in the meantime, but because someone might combine those resources with ten thousand other compromised machines to perform a nuisance attack on another host, or with ten million to do the same to the net at large.
how is this not moore's law?
on
Forget Moore's Law?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Google had no intention of buying the superchip. Rather, he said, the company intends to build its future servers with smaller, cheaper processors.
How is this not Moore's law? Maybe not in the strict sense of number of transistors per cpu, but it's exactly that increase in high-end chips that make mid-range chips "smaller, cheaper" and still able to keep up with requirements.
That's the essense of Moore's law. Pretending it isn't is just headline-writing manipulation, and it's stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
They note that the Theora/Vorbis has not seen commercial distribution...
This is incorrect. Vorbis has shipped tens of millions of units in products by organizations such as, well, Microsoft, to pick an example well known as being uninteresting to patent trolls.
Theora has been in a few games, and other commercial products, but hasn't had the same exposure.
...the reasoning here is that H.264 and AAC are DESIGNED to work together
Is it? Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora were designed to work together?
h.264 probably has more technical scope for quality/bitrate than theora does, but that's generally immaterial. The <strong>current implementations</stong> of h.264 are better than the current implementations of h.264 because resources have been allocated to make it so. There are a handful of implementations of each. The MPEG standard has been implemented by many large bodies. Theora by small ones. Even the open source h.264 implementation has a lot more volunteers than have ever worked on Theora.
We found it varied quite a bit depending on where you lived. East London? quite hard to get rid of them. Richmond? No problem. In both cases we had a big-ass CRT, but no telly (if I may mix dialects).
I talked to Uraeus about this a bit. The machine has combined ARM9/TI DSP cores. The idea is that you want the codecs running on the DSP, and apparently the free Xiph codecs we're included in the launch because there's no DSP port of the reference implementations. (There's no GCC back end for the dsp, although some folks are working on a related series.) This includes Ogg Theora, Speex and FLAC as well as Ogg Vorbis.
Whether the ARM is too slow (or battery consumptive) to run the decoders on its own, I'm not clear but with everything open source it will be easy to check.
I'll be a Guadec, where they are apparently also doing a demo, so hopefully will know more next week.
In the long term though we need help with the DSP gcc port and someone to do hand-optimized asm for the xiph codecs. If anyone's interested, please let us know.
You should take a look at the Elphel 333 fpga security cameras. They can do real-time encoding in the free Theora video format at HD resolutions, and provide the stream over ethernet.
The cameras don't have sound, so you'd have to use the mac mini to handle the audio, and the image quality isn't as good as one of the "prosumer" HDV cameras. On the other hand, by doing the compression in hardware you don't have any resource problems like you would transcoding an HDV or component HD feed, and can concentrate on just decoding the stream. :)
Best, you'll be supporting free multimedia instead of the MPEG patent holders.
There's an article describing the camera if you want more details.
I tried this flying from Frankfurt to Vancouver last year. It was great for the first couple of hours, but the connection stopped working somewhere around iceland.
I don't know if it was a technical problem or a coverage issue with the latitude, but I was very very disappointed. $30 for 10 hours is expensive. $30 for 2 hours is insane.
JPEG 2000 has one feature that might make it better in "archival" purposes - there is a lossless mode which still achieves higher compression ratios than PNG.
Yes, lossless JPEG 2000 is a reasonable option. I'm not sure any lossy video codec counts as 'archival' storage. Might as well just put published DVDs in a preservation vault. The wide release of movies of movies on DVD has done more for the preservation of movies themselves than anything else in history.
Still, for a digital archive of the film masters, until the patent issues with JPEG 2000 are resolved, I'd just put MNG and FLAC in an Ogg file.
And if you can spare the space, a directory with a wav file and a stack of uncompressed TIFF images is even better. Compression formats are complicated to reverse engineer.
Why not give some more information so we can figure out why it doesn't work?
Why not check out Ghostscript and see for yourself?
It's always possible it's a source bug, but we've only ever had minor trouble on ancient vendor unix compilers.
It is indeed very fast, but it wouldn't compile ghostscript for me.
# apt-get install tcc[...]
$ cd ~/projects/ghostscript/gs
$ make distclean
[...]
$ CC=tcc
[...]
tcc -DHAVE_MKSTEMP -DHAVE_HYPOT -O -DHAVE_STDINT_H -DGX_COLOR_INDEX_TYPE="unsigned long long" -I./src -I./obj -I./obj -I./src -o
In file included from
In file included from
make: *** [obj/zfcid.o] Error 1
Compiler bug?
I also like how it has an auto-run switch to invoke the compiler output. So you can make C source executable from the command line by putting #!/usr/bin/tcc -run at the top. I would use that for quick test programs in C. Once it's debugged you can run it through gcc.
Flash is an open SPECIFICATION, meaning Macromedia will tell you how to read and write them. IT IS NOT AN OPEN FORMAT.
If only. Then it would be no worse than PDF. Have you ever read the license terms associated with the published specification? They specifically restrict you to generation and disallow playback implementations. So, no open source flash player. That's not even an open specification, that's just the same sad old we-must-control-things mindset that open source has been fighting since the beginning.
Some of the open source work that's been done has been based on reverse-engineering, but really, just use SVG. It's a real pity too. Flash (the technology, not what it's usually used for) is quite useful and well implemented to boot. Just another case of routing around the damage.
A related technology that could make notebook computers usable outdoors would be the real killer app, as far as I'm concerned.
I would really really like a screen that worked in sunlight too, but it's not a killer app. As has already been pointed out, you can get transflective screens as an option on some laptops, but there's no general interest. Most people only use their laptops in offices and airplanes--places without a lot of natural light.
Transflective screens are more common on handheld devices of course. OLED displays can help with contrast and of course power consumption when competing with high incident light levels.
To solve the problem in general you really want a reflective display so you can take advangate of ambient light when available, mainly to save save power, combined with emissive capabilities for use in the dark. That's probably 20 years away; we've not entirely paid off R&D on LCD screen technology yet.
Especially since Microsoft will not allow the codec to be included in installs ever.
Well, you never know. If they lose the appeal on the EU antitrust case, they may a least be forced to ship RealPlayer in that jurisdiction.
And RealPlayer plays Theora. :-)
That's the nice thing about being the right choice.
It's a typo. Now fixed. Thanks for pointing it out!
Personally, I'm more interested in letting iTunes support Ogg Vorbis.
You can do this by installing the Ogg Vorbis quicktime components. iTunes will use them to play Vorbis files. It's a little slow to load and unfortunately doesn't work with streams, but it's great for accessing your Vorbis files from within the interface.
Vorbis-comments are ASCII only, right?
No. The field names are ACSII only (actually a printable subset minus '=') but the contents of the fields are specified as UTF-8.
The intention was you could put arbitrary binary data in there too, but there's no general mechanism for marking it as anything else. So any non-UTF-8 use would be application specific.
So, my bug was fixed in software that doesn't exist. At least they told me.
And I'm more amused than annoyed. At least one can submit bugs, and they generally have fixed all of them by the next major release. But open and communicative...not really.
low-impact game players like me are out of date in 3-6 months and can not play games until we upgrade our computers!!
this is insane and why I like consoles.
Funny. I must be a lower-impact game player than you. I find consoles go out of date every 3-6 years, and I only get a couple of games out of them before I have to upgrade.
I'm quite serious; the last three console games I played at home were on the Nintendo 64. I expect the successor to the GameCube will be out by the time I get through the current Zelda.
My computer is usually upgraded more often, but that's because I do more than play games on it. Your point about timescales isn't a good argument; it's entirely relative to your own convenience and has nothing to do with what's good for gaming in general.
I was really happy to see Apple used distcc for their distributed compiles as well.
Too bad it's so hard to build their gcc on other OSen. My linux desktop is much faster than my macos laptop, and it would be nice to be able to add it to the pool.
Anyone have pointers on porting apple's toolchain?
What you describe is Trademark law, which is probably the sanest branch of north american IP at this point. You cannot trademark common words or phrases (modulo certain exceptions) so an effort is generally made to prevent brand names from becoming same by prosecuting uses of the trademark that don't refer specifically to the actual product.
Copyrights belong to the author (or sponsor) automatically and can only be given up voluntarily or lost when the rights period expires, which is now some significant time after the author dies.
Patents are granted on a first come, first served basis to whoever applies for one and provides a monopoly on the implementation of a particular method for a fixed term.
Neither copyright nor patent rights are contingent on enforcement the way trademarks are. Holders of these two rights can and do choose which infringements to pursue.
This is the problem with MPEG-4. We can avoid the copyright issue by writing an open source version from scratch, since the standard is at least published. We don't have to call it MPEG-4 so there are no trademark issues, although while the MPEG logo is trademarked in the US, one can refer to the specification because that itself is not a trademark and because there is no attempt at confusion.
But there is no way around patents because they grant a monopoly on implementation rights. Just because you wrote your own doesn't mean you don't have to buy a license, or that you won't be forced to buy one sometime in the next 20 years. If you live in a jurisdiction that doesn't enforce patents, you're fine for now. If you just want to trade movies underground, you're probably fine because there's safety in numbers. But if you're like me, and want digital media to be as easy and ubiquitous as webpages; something anyone can do, something you don't need permission for, you need a something that's Free as in Freedom and Free as in Beer. Something like Theora.
As mentioned, you have to be moving slower than the escape velocity to be in orbit around something. The formula is v = sqrt(2GM/r). G is 6.67x10^-11 m^3/s^2kg everywhere.
For Earth, M is 6x10^24 kg, and the highest relevent velocity as at the surface, so r = 6x10^6 m. That's 11.2 km/s. Very fast. Which is why it's hard just to get into orbit.
Now for the comet. If it's 4 km across, r = 2000 m. I can't find a value for the mass, but based on the common description of comets as dirty snowballs let's guess the density is about that of water, or 1000 kg/m^3. The volume of a sphere is 4/3 r^3 so our guess for M is 3.35x10^13 kg.
That makes the escape velocity for 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko at 1.5 m/s which pretty much the same brisk walking-speed which which the lander is expected to hit the comet, especially if our guess at the density is high. Thus, the lander could easily bounce off, and a person could with some effort jump off, fast enough that the comet's gravity wouldn't bring them back. On the other hand, an rocky asteroid (denser) the size of Manhattan (bigger) would probably be hard to get away from under your own power. This comet is right on the edge.
However, recently Ogg Vorbis has been falling out of favour because of some questions beinr brought up and currently still unanswered about the truth of the statement that Ogg Vorbis is "patent-free" because of a few patents uncovered recently which Ogg Vorbis may have infringed on.
To give air to the otherside of that flamewar, the 'unanswered' questions had more to do with a misunderstanding on the part of some forum members about how the patent system works in the US. "Patent-free" does not mean no one will sue you ever, because anyone can sue you anytime for anything. It's all about the negotiation of expectation for who would win at what cost in a potential legal action.
In that context, and because we feel Xiph.org the organization is a likely target of punitive legal action, we unfortunately feel the less said about what we think about specific patents, the better, to avoid advertising routes of legal attack. Hardly the usual values of openness, but that's what the US legal system argues for.
What Vorbis needs is independent defenders who understand the issues, not demands for justification from groups that should mostly be on the same side.
We've been collecting what freely-redistributable clips we can find at media.xiph.org. There's not much there, but it's still worth a look. Particularly interesting for your case are some public domain HD test clips made available by TU München LDV. Of course, they're quite short given the size of uncompressed HD frames.
Please let us know if you find anything else, that's exactly what the collection is for.
In general, the suggestions of contacting copyright holders for permission is the best one. There are various collections of test clips and movies online, but they're generally either small and without audio, or already compressed. Plus, the more content we get under free licenses, the better the world will be. :-)
The Internet Archive does have a collection of movies with contact information, so that might be an easy place to start.
Good luck!
I don't think the Theora specification will be available any time soon. The Vorbis specification is not yet published. There is just a reference implementation.
A spec for theora the main feature on the todo list for the first beta release. Dan Miller, one of the architects of the VP3 codec, is writing it.
The vorbis spec has been available since the 1.0 release.
Do try to keep up.
If they do a good job without breaking anything else or causing additional inconvenience I wouldn't mind at all. Would you mind if some stranger came along and pulled the weeds out of your garden? It's like they're doing system administration for free; if their interest and yours is in improving the state of the networks commons, such division of labor is only an efficiency.
People get concerned about security as an end unto itself, forgetting the real world is messier than that. An excess of control can be as wasteful as a deficit. What's good for the RIAA is good us too. It's never good to be a battleground of course, but ants in the basement are better than roaches in the kitchen. If the one prevents the other, why not?
Thus we should patch security holes not to keep someone from using a few resources we wouldn't miss, or indeed use in the meantime, but because someone might combine those resources with ten thousand other compromised machines to perform a nuisance attack on another host, or with ten million to do the same to the net at large.
Google had no intention of buying the superchip. Rather, he said, the company intends to build its future servers with smaller, cheaper processors.
How is this not Moore's law? Maybe not in the strict sense of number of transistors per cpu, but it's exactly that increase in high-end chips that make mid-range chips "smaller, cheaper" and still able to keep up with requirements.
That's the essense of Moore's law. Pretending it isn't is just headline-writing manipulation, and it's stupid.