Intel is terrified of the Durons and Thunderbirds about to hit the market. That explains this move. The Thunderbirds are going to smoke PIII -- but they don't do SMP yet. (Actually, for all I know the CPUs themselves do, but there is no chipset to support it so it does not matter.)
So expect to see some FUD soon about how only Intel can provide the true high end, SMP solution. Regardless of the fact that SMP is worthless for 99% of what people do with computers. (Don't take this the wrong way -- I have dual celeron -- just to say that most people run '95 or '98, and of those few who run NT or something better, most of the time they are surfing the web or editting text.)
What is ironic about this, is that Intel has no competitive SMP solution itself. Sure, you can use i840 -- and pay out the nose for RDRAM. And the performance is *still* not up to that provided by the BX chipset.
But BX, even though it is still the best performing chipset on the market (SMP or otherwise), is not really a viable modern solution for SMP, either. BX runs hot at dual 100; I have air piped directly over it from the intake fan. If/when I try for more, I will probably need to stick a fan on it. And of course, going above 100Mhz is not supported AGPwise on any BX board, nor even PCIwise on most.
But none of that will stop Intel. "Only genuine Intel is fit for the real high end!"
Anyone recall a year ago when the Athlon first came out? The benchmarks then all had athlon handily beating the PIIIs at the then-current top speeds of 600-650. And it was not small, particular: anywhere from 10 to 25% faster. The two processors both had 512K of L2 cache, not on-die so running at half of the CPU speed.
Then Intel went to coppermine: 256K of L2 cache running full speed. This yielded about a 10% speedup: for instance see Tom's comparison here.
Meanwhile, though faster Athlons were released (at 700, 750 MHz), they had no faster L2 cache: they had to run at 40% or 33% of the core speed. The result? Coppermine beats Athlon, narrowly. You can see it happening in this graph, if you imagine the blue line extending about straight (which is more-or-less what happened.) The two chips are quite comparable at the lower end, or maybe Athlon wins. But in the 1G processors, PIII is the winner (see this, for instance).
Now with Thunderbird, Athlon will again be more or less the same in L2 cache as PIII: 256K full speed on-die cache. So, we should expect the Thunderbird to kick PIII's butt, by about 10% or so plus the fact that it will actually be available.
Duron should also beat celeron, though perhaps by a smaller margin.
I don't think anyone is disputing that microsoft has a valid copyright on the code in question. Given that, I cannot see any legal leg for slashdot to stand on with regards to the actual posting of the copyrighted code here.
The other stuff -- howto avoid the clickwrap agreement, and links -- Microsoft can go suck eggs; give 'em hell.
Your attempts to challenge MS only look defensive from this POV; indeed, frivolous. You are not even asking them pertinent questions like how they think posting a link infringes on their copyright.
But as for copyrighted material: if I was to take slashcode, strip off the copyright, and post it here... would you leave it up? How about if I replace the copyright with one asserting copyright for Microsoft?
No. Current PC-133 can often be overclocked to 140-150 Mhz, but that is too near the edge of the performance envelope for commercial use. Faster memory is going to be DDR, by all indications.
>Is DDR memory "there" yet? Cost-effective?
Almost there. It is already in use on graphics cards, as you may know. The technology works. And it is not that much more expensive than normal SDRAM, unlike RDRAM.
> How do you expect the various AMD *ons to shake out in price/performace for a given clock speed?
I would think the order for price/performance will be like this:
Duron, Celeron, "Thunderbird", PIII
The reason is simple: Intel has a serious brand going there (bum BUM ba BUM!), and so AMD need to be that much better to beat them. Right now, AMD is.
>Should I wait a few months? Six months? A year? Or is the price/performance improvement going to be more or less continuous during that time?
Right now, wait. The reason is that right now, the bottleneck in system performance in the PC world is memory bandwidth. Up until fairly recently, this was not a problem -- back when clock multiplier ranged up to 3 or 3.5. But starting with the PIIs and continuing until now, CPU cores are running so fast that they are spending a lot of time waiting on memory.
Go check out the performance of various CPUs in benchmarks, say at Anandtech as in this set of benches of recent processors. What do you see? That at the high end, even with full-speed L2 cache of 256K, PIIIs are still only gaining about 60% of their theoretically possible speedup. That is, a PIII 1000 rates 191 on the SySMark 2000, while the PIII 866 gets 176. 1000/866 is 1.154; that is, the PIII 1G is running 15% faster in core. But it is only getting 8.5% higher performance.
Now go look at this page on Tom's site, where he is exploring the effect of raising the bus speed to 150Mhz. He find some very significant speed ups from raising bus speed; i.e., in Quake III a PIII 975/150 (150Mhz bus) is faster than a PIII 1000/133.
The upshot of this is, that once AMD has a chipset out supporting DDR, they should have a real winner. You might start out just buying a Duron and using old SDRAM in it, but then later upgrading the processor to some mongo Athlon 1.4G or whatever, with DDR SDRAM 133.
Right now the best price-performance you can do is to buy a BX board, some PC-100, and overclock a celeron-II from 566 to 850ish. (Assuming you can find a cel-II; I dunno that you can buy them on the street yet.) Very good price/performance here, but no future.
Anon Coward writes: "The Associated Press reports that all book sales in the US have been stopped [temporarily]. This because of a glitch in the FBI's computers. Hey -- why didn't we think of this before? What a way to reduce dissent and stop the thoughts had!" Perhaps one day the entire world will be as safe as Washington, D.C. and other officially unlearned zones.
The thing I found neastest in the piece was the idea of diddling your TCP stack to ACK in nonstandard ways. This is the second part of the paper... anyway, apparently this can be used to grab all of the bandwidth at the remote site.
You may be wondering how significant all this really is. Well, it's pretty significant. Stefan told us about the one time he attempted to use his modified TCP stack to download IE from Microsoft. He reported so completely flooring the University of Washington's Internet connection that he never tried again.
Umph. How long until script kiddies are using this for DDOS? Fortunately, the fix is capable of being done in a distributed manner.
Having a single owner for anything (including copylefted code) has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that the owner, being a single entity, can decide to adapt the license when appropriate. This allows flexibility, although possibly causing a code fork. But this advantage is also a disadvantage, depending on your point of view.
For example, consider the issue of selling proprietary services using free source code. That is, you take some useful open source thing, say, slashcode, modify it, and then set up a website to sell the results. Well, that may or may not be what Taco would like, but under GPL right now it is fair game. (Assuming slash is under GPL; if it is not now, just assume Taco assigns the copyright to them.)
OK, one thing you might do to prevent it, is come up with some modified licence, the GPL++, which also specifies that if you use the code in *any* public way (not just to compile public binaries), then you have to provide source. That may or may not be a good idea, well specified, etc. etc. -- but let's assume it is.
OK, well then some projects are going to have an awful hard time to moving to that license, because they have many copyright holders. Sure, it is at least theoretically possible to round up 100 people who have contributed, just not that easy. Even if you can get hold of all of them, you have to get them all to agree that the changed licence is a good idea; and knowing the wars over GPL vs LGPL and the Berkeley licence, and Artistic, etc, this is a problem.
For the FSF, if they did decide to do it, they could rather easily. And they could do it for all of their offerings in sync, thereby getting network effects.
Again, whether this is good or bad depends on
how likely it is you think that there will be need in the future to adapt the license on a particular piece of software
how likely it is that, given (1), the FSF will make the "right" changes
Anyone who believes this, ought to be very happy. Any time you can identify irrationality in how the market is working, you can make money off of it by merely buying and selling stocks or other financial implements rationally.
In this case, it is argued that the stock market is "too high". OK, if the stock market is too high, that must mean that some specific stock(s) are too high. Identify the most extreme ones.
Short them.
There; you should be a millionaire in short order. Be sure to go way out on margin, you want to lever every bit of money to get the greatest return.
Now, to Mr Katz and anyone else who really believes that the markets are valued wrong: why are you not out earning zillions?
Could it be you don't really believe what you are saying? Could it be that talk is cheap? Could it be that money talks -- bullshit walks?
The stock market is unlike other domains where pundits get to flap their jaws all the time to no apparent effect. In the stock market, you put up or shut up. Have you ever noticed why stock analysts on news shows are always so much more wishy-washy than, say, political commentators? That's why.
Jon, how much have you earned in the stock market lately?
Here is some interesting stuff I found in a chat with Orson Scott Card, about the movie Dune.
I am hopeful this one, by spending enough time, will have enough screen space to show everything that happens in the book. Still, seems like a tall order given that half of what "happens" is people thinking to themselves.
Moderator: Does the track record for epic SF in films - Dune, Waterworld - make you nervous about actually seeing your work on the big screen?
OrsonScottCard: Dune was a botch because they tried to keep the whole book in it. It can't be done - not well, anyway.
OrsonScottCard: It's like Gone with the Wind. Scarlett had three children in the book. In the movie, she has only one. There just wasn't time.
OrsonScottCard: The thing is, a movie is about a novella's worth of story. Dune was a botch because in order to leave in all
OrsonScottCard: the main high points of the movie, they had to cut out all the build-up that made each of those climaxes
OrsonScottCard: work. The "all-climax" version is just numbing. When Linda Hunt popped on the screen and announced,
OrsonScottCard: "I am the Kwisatz Haderach (or however the heck you spell it)," it got a laugh in the theater I was in.
OrsonScottCard: Not because she said it wrong, but because there was no buildup. It meant nothing to us.
OrsonScottCard: Also, I think evidence is clear that Lynch has no clue how to create a film that communicates with people.
OrsonScottCard: I mean that, of course, in the nicest possible way.
Seems to me there is way too much ignorance being displayed here about what Netpliance is trying to do.
They are not selling hardware, per se. The main piece makes it clear that the guy went there thinking that, and was educated a bit.
The software is a key element -- they are licencing it to other companies. IMO this is the main thing they are selling. They are mainly in the business of selling very easy to setup/use/maintain internet software. But they are also not just selling software.
They are also selling support -- handholding -- the ability to call them up when things go wrong, and have them fix it.
But in fact, what they are selling is a mix of all three of the elements above. Unlike AOL, they are targeting a fixed hardware bundle. I don't think I need to explain to geeks how much easier that makes things for them, in terms of writing the software and offering support. So, it makes these things cheaper.
Why sell a mix of things like this? Because what (most) people buy when they "buy a computer" is not the computer itself, or the software, or the support -- they are buying a service, a bundle of abilities that collectively make their life easier.
What geeks don't understand about computerish stuff, is that we don't see this market the same way as normal people do. We see the individual things in this market as having value intrinsic to themselves. So to us, something like the i-opener is cool -- it has value for us separate from what-it-does, but simply based on what-it-is. Yes, part of that is the fact that it is cheap, but part isn't.
Normal people don't think this way, about computers. They simply want a service at a price low enough that it makes sense. Netpliance thinks it has identified a way to provide a service -- a bundle of hardware, software, and support -- at the right price, so that they can make a mint. Maybe they are right. Maybe not. But either way, the idea that they would be interested in the desire of geeks for cool toys is silly. The market for providing cool geek toys is large, but already saturated with players.
Regarding Don's point the market is corrupt, that selling computers with rebates for ISP subscription is bait and switch: that is a very arrogant attitude. It assumes that the common person is unable to read, or understand, the fine print. Yes, I agree that it is annoying to have to read the fine print to find out the "real" price for a system. But I am a big boy now, and I can do so. The idea that I am somehow superior to some "common person" in this ability is offensive to me.
I was curious as to whether there was really a need for an EMI shield on memory. Clearly, the author of the article thought it mattered (though it was funny that he could not get his system to 150Mhz anyway... so what was the point of it all?)
Anyway, I went to google for some links.
Here is a fairly general overview of EMI in computers. It talks about various strategies for dealing with it.
Here is an article mostly about SDRAM, but which says the following: "Spread Spectrum Clocking (SSC) is a frequency modulation technique for EMI reduction. In the latest motherboards, the master clock generator chip does not maintain a constant frequency." Anyone know if that is true? I didn't know that...
Finally, an article showing Intel is concerned about the problems of EMI in modern computers.
All in all, interesting stuff (I love absurb overclocking articles!) but I would like to have found some evidence that shielding memory like they did has any real benefit.
[Raymond] doesn't
deny the importance of the breakup of AT&T -- he simply dismisses it as
irrelevant since he views it as immoral. (Two wrongs don't make a right, he argues, as "AT&T was a creature of regulation." That's not quite a complete history, but it was not paternity that was at stake in my argument: The question was what cut the lock that AT&T had on innovation in telecommunications, not what created it.)
Sorry, Mr. Lessig, but it very much does matter where AT&T came from. If we look at only the last 50 years, say, we see what most people do: AT&T as a monopoly (why?), with no solution apparent other than force -- more regulation, that is. After all, don't monopolies justify regulation?
But the AT&T monopoly was created by the U.S. Government, via -- that's right -- regulation. Those interested in this history can see it online:
So, after a point maybe you are right -- maybe the only solution was to use the government to force some outcome on old AT&T. But to say this justifies "regulation" is analogous to cranking up your radio because you have your TV on so loud you cannot hear it. I trust the analogy is not lost on you.
Contract law, rightly limited property rights, antitrust law, the
breakup of AT&T: These, I suggested, were regulations that had done good.
As for the identification of contract law, property rights, etc, with "regulation" -- well, WHATever. I would call these things "law", say, perhaps "commercial law", and then call "regulation" something else -- such as:
a rule or order issued by an executive
authority or regulatory agency of a government and having the
force of law (definition from www.m-w.com).
You takes your terms, and you makes your argument. As long as you are clear that essentially any governmental action is "regulation", then I suspect you will find a lot of people that think some "regulation" might be OK.
But if you restrict regulation to meaning something more like what is in Merriam Websters, then you are going to find some of us in the libertarian camp parting ways with you. The rule of law, property rights and other human rights -- these are one thing. Government fiat is another. Most people, I hope, can tell the difference. By conflating the two, you weaken your argument.
If you read their white paper, you will see (claimed) advantages to libsafe over stackguard. In particular, libsafe does not require source/recompilation. A second, minor benefit is that in their tests at least, libsafe was faster, taking essentially no extra time, whereas stackguard's effect was at least measurable in two of their four real-world-program benchmarks.
Regarding the point that many are making here about grepping for strcpy: well, that is all fine and good for open source thingies. But we need to keep in mind our ultimate goal: Linux world domination! Among other things, that means:
Closed source games running on Linux
Closed source "productivity" programs, like Office 2005, running on Linux
Open source thingies running on Linux, used by people like my gramma, who will not run grep by themselves and not even get updated software when security problems are found.
More closed source games running on Linux!
In all these cases, it is unrealistic to expect to be able to grep or recompile when needed.
Seems like intellectual property is coming up a lot here. Just last week I posted this. Here goes again: For those wanting to find out more about the economics of intellectual property, I recommend this analysis. The piece is about standards, but the first two sections give a very helpful discussion about the economic rationale for and meaning of IP law.
Contrary to what many here are saying, Love is right -- in a sense. Open Source software is proprietary. Read the definitions people are posting: among them is, in essence, the idea that private property is proprietary.
Well, Open Source is private property, not public. Read the GPL. The word "copyright" is in there. Copyright is a form of private property. In the case of the GPL, the work is copyrighted by, meaning owned by, meaning the proprietary property of, the Free Software Foundation.
That's right. Proprietary.
Obviously, the meaning of the word in the dictionary is not equivalent its meaning in everyday use. Typically, the use that property is put to is the benefit of the owner; hence, we see "proprietary" as meaning "to be used to benefit the owner", among other meanings.
But the whole point of the GPL is subvert the ability of any party to control the use of software. That it works using the copyright system is a demonstration of the awesome power of the concept of property rights.
So if Love wants to use words a little strangely, well, WHATever. So long as he does not try to draw any false conclusions from it, it is OK with me.
If the Dreamcast liquid cooling system is similar to the one in the 3440CT, you can see why they might want it: it is flat. The 3440 itself is really, really thin. (There are pictures of it on Toshiba's site.)
I love the idea of free software, and therefore: thank you! However, one aspect of your philosophy has always puzzled me. You want to change the current system of copyright as applied to software. For example, on the fsf site you write:
Clearly, the crucial difference between information and acceptable kinds of property is not abstractness per se. So what is it? I propose a simple and practical explanation.
United States copyright law considers copyright a bargain between the public and "authors"... The public trades certain freedoms in exchange for more published works to enjoy.
Thus the standard for judging copyright is the utility to the end user. But (and here is the question): do we not get all we want from the current system? After all, if an author wants money for his work, he can use the copyright. If he does not, he can make his work free. Over time, as we have seen, the free software world gradually takes over all software domains, since information wants to be free and the advantages of free software in the long run dominate unfree software.
In other words, it appears to me that with the availability of both copy right and left, we are having our cake and eating it, too. We have propriety software to lead development in marginally worthwhile things, and rich people that will pay them to do it. And for the rest of us, we have an increasingly vast corpus of good freebeer freedom software.
Or to put it another way: is not the GPL itself implemented in copyright? It is as if you were for Unix but against C.
For those wanting to find out more about the economics of intellectual property, I recommend the this analysis. The piece is about standards, but the first two sections give a very helpful discussion about the economic rationale for and meaning of IP law.
"Flip chip" refers to mounting the chip that is the CPU "upside down" on the circuit board its on. This puts the metal substrate "down", against the circuit, and the silicon "up", where is it that much (1-2mm) closer to the heatsink. The idea is to make them easier to cool.
Sheesh. I read all fricking 170 comments (well, absent the lower threaded ones), and nobody says the obvious. OK, I will:
Information wants to be free ! !
Napster is a perfect example of what this adage is really saying. Music is just information. It "wants" to be free, both in the free beer and the freedom sense, exactly because the marginal cost of production is zero. And as is the case in other markets, regardless of whether or not the market happens to be legal, the market moves to equilibrium between supply and demand. As others are saying here, yes it is too bad in a way (especially for those few artists who have made it in the old system. Who are the ones that Salon quotes, in the main). But in another way, it is simply a thing that is coming, whether we want it or not.
I wonder whether the xbox is going to be the next I-Opener -- cool/cheap hack for geeks. Seems to me, it is going to be very difficult for Microsoft to prevent all "unofficial" uses of the thing; they want to use commoditized parts and protocols to keep the price down. If they get too fascist in terms of (say) soldering down everything to the mobo, then they crimp their own profit potential by removing all expandability and upgradeability.
We can only hope that the way they decide to sell it is as a loss-leader for some kind of networked service... (like Netpliance). $200 for a mostly-complete 600Mhz system will still be a great deal in a year. If it is $400, though, the price/performance may not be there.
The price is the big issue, along with exactly when they can get it to market. But we cannot know these things with any certainty until they actually ship.
Slashdot Mirror
So expect to see some FUD soon about how only Intel can provide the true high end, SMP solution. Regardless of the fact that SMP is worthless for 99% of what people do with computers. (Don't take this the wrong way -- I have dual celeron -- just to say that most people run '95 or '98, and of those few who run NT or something better, most of the time they are surfing the web or editting text.)
What is ironic about this, is that Intel has no competitive SMP solution itself. Sure, you can use i840 -- and pay out the nose for RDRAM. And the performance is *still* not up to that provided by the BX chipset.
But BX, even though it is still the best performing chipset on the market (SMP or otherwise), is not really a viable modern solution for SMP, either. BX runs hot at dual 100; I have air piped directly over it from the intake fan. If/when I try for more, I will probably need to stick a fan on it. And of course, going above 100Mhz is not supported AGPwise on any BX board, nor even PCIwise on most.
But none of that will stop Intel. "Only genuine Intel is fit for the real high end!"
Then Intel went to coppermine: 256K of L2 cache running full speed. This yielded about a 10% speedup: for instance see Tom's comparison here.
Meanwhile, though faster Athlons were released (at 700, 750 MHz), they had no faster L2 cache: they had to run at 40% or 33% of the core speed. The result? Coppermine beats Athlon, narrowly. You can see it happening in this graph, if you imagine the blue line extending about straight (which is more-or-less what happened.) The two chips are quite comparable at the lower end, or maybe Athlon wins. But in the 1G processors, PIII is the winner (see this, for instance).
Now with Thunderbird, Athlon will again be more or less the same in L2 cache as PIII: 256K full speed on-die cache. So, we should expect the Thunderbird to kick PIII's butt, by about 10% or so plus the fact that it will actually be available.
Duron should also beat celeron, though perhaps by a smaller margin.
I don't think anyone is disputing that microsoft has a valid copyright on the code in question. Given that, I cannot see any legal leg for slashdot to stand on with regards to the actual posting of the copyrighted code here.
The other stuff -- howto avoid the clickwrap agreement, and links -- Microsoft can go suck eggs; give 'em hell.
Your attempts to challenge MS only look defensive from this POV; indeed, frivolous. You are not even asking them pertinent questions like how they think posting a link infringes on their copyright.
But as for copyrighted material: if I was to take slashcode, strip off the copyright, and post it here... would you leave it up? How about if I replace the copyright with one asserting copyright for Microsoft?
>Is PC-133 "there" yet? Is it a cost-effective improvement over PC-100?
Yes. Assuming your mobo is running at 133, anyway. Via has chipsets out for both intel and AMD processors that support PC-133.
>Is PC-133++ anywhere near? (I.e., PC-150, PX-whatever.)
No. Current PC-133 can often be overclocked to 140-150 Mhz, but that is too near the edge of the performance envelope for commercial use. Faster memory is going to be DDR, by all indications.
>Is DDR memory "there" yet? Cost-effective?
Almost there. It is already in use on graphics cards, as you may know. The technology works. And it is not that much more expensive than normal SDRAM, unlike RDRAM.
> How do you expect the various AMD *ons to shake out in price/performace for a given clock speed?
I would think the order for price/performance will be like this:
Duron, Celeron, "Thunderbird", PIII
The reason is simple: Intel has a serious brand going there (bum BUM ba BUM!), and so AMD need to be that much better to beat them. Right now, AMD is.
>Should I wait a few months? Six months? A year? Or is the price/performance improvement going to be more or less continuous during that time?
Right now, wait. The reason is that right now, the bottleneck in system performance in the PC world is memory bandwidth. Up until fairly recently, this was not a problem -- back when clock multiplier ranged up to 3 or 3.5. But starting with the PIIs and continuing until now, CPU cores are running so fast that they are spending a lot of time waiting on memory.
Go check out the performance of various CPUs in benchmarks, say at Anandtech as in this set of benches of recent processors. What do you see? That at the high end, even with full-speed L2 cache of 256K, PIIIs are still only gaining about 60% of their theoretically possible speedup. That is, a PIII 1000 rates 191 on the SySMark 2000, while the PIII 866 gets 176. 1000/866 is 1.154; that is, the PIII 1G is running 15% faster in core. But it is only getting 8.5% higher performance.
Now go look at this page on Tom's site, where he is exploring the effect of raising the bus speed to 150Mhz. He find some very significant speed ups from raising bus speed; i.e., in Quake III a PIII 975/150 (150Mhz bus) is faster than a PIII 1000/133.
The upshot of this is, that once AMD has a chipset out supporting DDR, they should have a real winner. You might start out just buying a Duron and using old SDRAM in it, but then later upgrading the processor to some mongo Athlon 1.4G or whatever, with DDR SDRAM 133.
Right now the best price-performance you can do is to buy a BX board, some PC-100, and overclock a celeron-II from 566 to 850ish. (Assuming you can find a cel-II; I dunno that you can buy them on the street yet.) Very good price/performance here, but no future.
Anon Coward writes: "The Associated Press reports that all book sales in the US have been stopped [temporarily]. This because of a glitch in the FBI's computers. Hey -- why didn't we think of this before? What a way to reduce dissent and stop the thoughts had!" Perhaps one day the entire world will be as safe as Washington, D.C. and other officially unlearned zones.
- Do everything that MS wants
- Remove nothing at all, screw MS
- Remove only copyrighted material, no links etc
- Remove copyrighted material and suggestions as to how to bypass the EULA, but not links
- Remove copyrighted material and links, but not suggestions on bypassing EULA
I vote for (3), FWIW.Having a single owner for anything (including copylefted code) has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that the owner, being a single entity, can decide to adapt the license when appropriate. This allows flexibility, although possibly causing a code fork. But this advantage is also a disadvantage, depending on your point of view.
For example, consider the issue of selling proprietary services using free source code. That is, you take some useful open source thing, say, slashcode, modify it, and then set up a website to sell the results. Well, that may or may not be what Taco would like, but under GPL right now it is fair game. (Assuming slash is under GPL; if it is not now, just assume Taco assigns the copyright to them.)
OK, one thing you might do to prevent it, is come up with some modified licence, the GPL++, which also specifies that if you use the code in *any* public way (not just to compile public binaries), then you have to provide source. That may or may not be a good idea, well specified, etc. etc. -- but let's assume it is.
OK, well then some projects are going to have an awful hard time to moving to that license, because they have many copyright holders. Sure, it is at least theoretically possible to round up 100 people who have contributed, just not that easy. Even if you can get hold of all of them, you have to get them all to agree that the changed licence is a good idea; and knowing the wars over GPL vs LGPL and the Berkeley licence, and Artistic, etc, this is a problem.
For the FSF, if they did decide to do it, they could rather easily. And they could do it for all of their offerings in sync, thereby getting network effects.
Again, whether this is good or bad depends on
Anyone who believes this, ought to be very happy. Any time you can identify irrationality in how the market is working, you can make money off of it by merely buying and selling stocks or other financial implements rationally.
In this case, it is argued that the stock market is "too high". OK, if the stock market is too high, that must mean that some specific stock(s) are too high. Identify the most extreme ones.
Short them.
There; you should be a millionaire in short order. Be sure to go way out on margin, you want to lever every bit of money to get the greatest return.
Now, to Mr Katz and anyone else who really believes that the markets are valued wrong: why are you not out earning zillions?
Could it be you don't really believe what you are saying? Could it be that talk is cheap? Could it be that money talks -- bullshit walks?
The stock market is unlike other domains where pundits get to flap their jaws all the time to no apparent effect. In the stock market, you put up or shut up. Have you ever noticed why stock analysts on news shows are always so much more wishy-washy than, say, political commentators? That's why.
Jon, how much have you earned in the stock market lately?
I am hopeful this one, by spending enough time, will have enough screen space to show everything that happens in the book. Still, seems like a tall order given that half of what "happens" is people thinking to themselves.
They are not selling hardware, per se. The main piece makes it clear that the guy went there thinking that, and was educated a bit.
The software is a key element -- they are licencing it to other companies. IMO this is the main thing they are selling. They are mainly in the business of selling very easy to setup/use/maintain internet software. But they are also not just selling software.
They are also selling support -- handholding -- the ability to call them up when things go wrong, and have them fix it.
But in fact, what they are selling is a mix of all three of the elements above. Unlike AOL, they are targeting a fixed hardware bundle. I don't think I need to explain to geeks how much easier that makes things for them, in terms of writing the software and offering support. So, it makes these things cheaper.
Why sell a mix of things like this? Because what (most) people buy when they "buy a computer" is not the computer itself, or the software, or the support -- they are buying a service, a bundle of abilities that collectively make their life easier.
What geeks don't understand about computerish stuff, is that we don't see this market the same way as normal people do. We see the individual things in this market as having value intrinsic to themselves. So to us, something like the i-opener is cool -- it has value for us separate from what-it-does, but simply based on what-it-is. Yes, part of that is the fact that it is cheap, but part isn't.
Normal people don't think this way, about computers. They simply want a service at a price low enough that it makes sense. Netpliance thinks it has identified a way to provide a service -- a bundle of hardware, software, and support -- at the right price, so that they can make a mint. Maybe they are right. Maybe not. But either way, the idea that they would be interested in the desire of geeks for cool toys is silly. The market for providing cool geek toys is large, but already saturated with players.
Regarding Don's point the market is corrupt, that selling computers with rebates for ISP subscription is bait and switch: that is a very arrogant attitude. It assumes that the common person is unable to read, or understand, the fine print. Yes, I agree that it is annoying to have to read the fine print to find out the "real" price for a system. But I am a big boy now, and I can do so. The idea that I am somehow superior to some "common person" in this ability is offensive to me.
Anyway, I went to google for some links.
Here is a fairly general overview of EMI in computers. It talks about various strategies for dealing with it.
Here is an article mostly about SDRAM, but which says the following: "Spread Spectrum Clocking (SSC) is a frequency modulation technique for EMI reduction. In the latest motherboards, the master clock generator chip does not maintain a constant frequency." Anyone know if that is true? I didn't know that...
Finally, an article showing Intel is concerned about the problems of EMI in modern computers.
All in all, interesting stuff (I love absurb overclocking articles!) but I would like to have found some evidence that shielding memory like they did has any real benefit.
But the AT&T monopoly was created by the U.S. Government, via -- that's right -- regulation. Those interested in this history can see it online:
Here is a good history.
So, after a point maybe you are right -- maybe the only solution was to use the government to force some outcome on old AT&T. But to say this justifies "regulation" is analogous to cranking up your radio because you have your TV on so loud you cannot hear it. I trust the analogy is not lost on you.
As for the identification of contract law, property rights, etc, with "regulation" -- well, WHATever. I would call these things "law", say, perhaps "commercial law", and then call "regulation" something else -- such as: a rule or order issued by an executive authority or regulatory agency of a government and having the force of law (definition from www.m-w.com).You takes your terms, and you makes your argument. As long as you are clear that essentially any governmental action is "regulation", then I suspect you will find a lot of people that think some "regulation" might be OK.
But if you restrict regulation to meaning something more like what is in Merriam Websters, then you are going to find some of us in the libertarian camp parting ways with you. The rule of law, property rights and other human rights -- these are one thing. Government fiat is another. Most people, I hope, can tell the difference. By conflating the two, you weaken your argument.
Apocolyptic thoughts filled my brain. Why not end it all, here and now, taking down all those who torment me in this Hellmouth of life?
Nah, I thought, that would make me a Creative Jerk. Wouldn't want to Flame anyone and cause a problem.
Besides, its probably all due to my lack of Electronic Community, which this is all about, right?
Or maybe I just need to hook up with one of them Chickclickers.
Regarding the point that many are making here about grepping for strcpy: well, that is all fine and good for open source thingies. But we need to keep in mind our ultimate goal: Linux world domination! Among other things, that means:
- Closed source games running on Linux
- Closed source "productivity" programs, like Office 2005, running on Linux
- Open source thingies running on Linux, used by people like my gramma, who will not run grep by themselves and not even get updated software when security problems are found.
- More closed source games running on Linux!
In all these cases, it is unrealistic to expect to be able to grep or recompile when needed.Go read this economic analysis of IP law
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Academic/Standards/Stand ards.html
Seems like intellectual property is coming up a lot here. Just last week I posted this. Here goes again: For those wanting to find out more about the economics of intellectual property, I recommend this analysis. The piece is about standards, but the first two sections give a very helpful discussion about the economic rationale for and meaning of IP law.
Well, Open Source is private property, not public. Read the GPL. The word "copyright" is in there. Copyright is a form of private property. In the case of the GPL, the work is copyrighted by, meaning owned by, meaning the proprietary property of, the Free Software Foundation.
That's right. Proprietary.
Obviously, the meaning of the word in the dictionary is not equivalent its meaning in everyday use. Typically, the use that property is put to is the benefit of the owner; hence, we see "proprietary" as meaning "to be used to benefit the owner", among other meanings.
But the whole point of the GPL is subvert the ability of any party to control the use of software. That it works using the copyright system is a demonstration of the awesome power of the concept of property rights.
So if Love wants to use words a little strangely, well, WHATever. So long as he does not try to draw any false conclusions from it, it is OK with me.
Here is a nice page with a great picture of the Dreamcast cooling system.
If the Dreamcast liquid cooling system is similar to the one in the 3440CT, you can see why they might want it: it is flat. The 3440 itself is really, really thin. (There are pictures of it on Toshiba's site.)
In other words, it appears to me that with the availability of both copy right and left, we are having our cake and eating it, too. We have propriety software to lead development in marginally worthwhile things, and rich people that will pay them to do it. And for the rest of us, we have an increasingly vast corpus of good freebeer freedom software.
Or to put it another way: is not the GPL itself implemented in copyright? It is as if you were for Unix but against C.
For those wanting to find out more about the economics of intellectual property, I recommend the this analysis. The piece is about standards, but the first two sections give a very helpful discussion about the economic rationale for and meaning of IP law.
I need moderator points. But absent them, let me cast out dittos. Jon, listen to this one.
"Flip chip" refers to mounting the chip that is the CPU "upside down" on the circuit board its on. This puts the metal substrate "down", against the circuit, and the silicon "up", where is it that much (1-2mm) closer to the heatsink. The idea is to make them easier to cool.
Information wants to be free ! !
Napster is a perfect example of what this adage is really saying. Music is just information. It "wants" to be free, both in the free beer and the freedom sense, exactly because the marginal cost of production is zero. And as is the case in other markets, regardless of whether or not the market happens to be legal, the market moves to equilibrium between supply and demand. As others are saying here, yes it is too bad in a way (especially for those few artists who have made it in the old system. Who are the ones that Salon quotes, in the main). But in another way, it is simply a thing that is coming, whether we want it or not.
We can only hope that the way they decide to sell it is as a loss-leader for some kind of networked service... (like Netpliance). $200 for a mostly-complete 600Mhz system will still be a great deal in a year. If it is $400, though, the price/performance may not be there.
The price is the big issue, along with exactly when they can get it to market. But we cannot know these things with any certainty until they actually ship.