"Theft" is not a legal term but rather a colloquial term. Those who discuss law seriously find it more productive to use the legal terms such as "larceny," "grand theft auto," "armed robbery," and "copyright infringement" that have different sets of statutes and different sets of case law behind them, rather than some blanket term such as "theft."
Some legal dictionary may actually define "theft" along the lines of "any offense involving the unlawful taking of another's property." But now define "taking," and define "property." If the copyright in a work is in fact property, why don't copyright owners have to pay property tax?
But the fact remains that there is a fundamental difference in me restricting how someone else uses my system, and in someone else dictating how I use my system by a cyber attack.
If the "someone else" is your customers, and you hold a government-granted monopoly such as a cable television franchise, your customers may be able to convince a jury that imposing restrictions on all residential Internet access accounts is tantamount to a "cyber attack" on their freedom of speech.
The blacklister provides information to various people who choose, on their own, to say "I do not like what you are doing, Mr. Spammer, and I will not allow you to use MY system to do it."
Two problems:
The blacklister may provide a definition of "Mr. Spammer" that is too broad (that causes too much collateral damage) to be useful to the "various people". This is the main complaint about SPEWS, that innocent customers bound to a contract with some ISP on the same/12 as a spammer are treated as having no more right to send e-mail than actual spammers. Such contracts may be hard to get out of; they may be multi-year contracts entered into long before the ISP's neighbor landed on SPEWS, or they may be contracts with the area's monopoly provider of residential high-speed Internet access.
A residential ISP with a geographical monopoly on high-speed Internet access may enforce blacklisting on its customers, even its customers who do not want their mail filtered. This becomes a problem especially if those customers do not agree with the policies of the blacklist of choice (see #1).
By that logic you might as well assume that we will all have huge amounts of NV-RAM soon, and if that's true, wtf is the point of Prevayler again?
If an app dies, its RAM will be reclaimed by the OS and erased. Backing up data to some other form of storage is useful even with non-volatile RAM for several reasons, one of them being the ability to take a backup off-site.
If the recipient doesn't want it he can appraise the solicitor of that fact directly, or through a sort of preemptive notice (e.g. by putting up a sign).
How does the owner of an e-mail account put up such a sign? And how does the owner of an e-mail account "appraise the solicitor" without the solicitor adding the e-mail account to a list of accounts whose owners have "appraised the solicitor"?
Games need bandwidth, not global bandwidth. This bandwidth can be provided by a LAN with 100BASE-TX switches to a gigabit backbone. Besides, some university IT departments (such as Rose-Hulman's) already have AUPs that ban connecting to an off-campus game server or opening a game server to off-campus connections without express written consent, granted only in cases where students are developing the game for a grade.
Re:Microsoft prices its operating systems per CPU
on
Is Prescott 64-bit?
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Assuming there's a way to detect how many simultaneous bundles an IA-64 CPU can handle, I see Microsoft preferring to charge different amounts for an OS that can support a different level processor.
And watch people stick a new processor in the motherboard and find that Windows now refuses to boot unless the user enters a credit card number.
Once multithreading trickles down to even the entry-level processors, how will PC vendors be able to afford the Windows licenses for PCs sold to home users?
I don't see that claimed anything about patented algorithms not making for serious apps.
I wasn't referring to patents per se. I was alluding to the flaw in the "recompile everything" solution that Gentoo fans like to repeat, the fact that not all programs can be recompiled. Proprietary apps cannot in general be recompiled unless the copyright owner feels that recompiling the app for another architecture and hiring additional technical support staff would increase his net earnings. In some cases, the publisher will recompile it for you for the price of another seat of license.
Here's where my comment about patents comes in: Not all programs even have a free replacement. For example, look at the GIMP vs. Photoshop debate, where the patents encumbering CMYK and color space conversion are the main barriers to improvement of free software to the point where the print world would consider it.
automagically 64-bit-optimize [] a fairly large number of existing apps [] (Like PostgreSQL, Apache, OpenOffice, XFree86, GIMP, etc)
I'll give you GIMP, as some of its filters could benefit from CPU improvements, but a few of the apps you said would improve on x86-64 are in fact disk-bound (OOo and PostgreSQL), RAM-bound (GIMP or anything else that deals with large data sets), network-bound (Apache and Mozilla), video-bound (XFree86), or even human-thought-bound (any program used interactively by authors of works), and can't be made significantly faster by increasing CPU speeds. Some apps (such as Apache) can't run in homes due to contractual restrictions on residential Internet access.
Re:Microsoft prices its operating systems per CPU
on
Is Prescott 64-bit?
·
· Score: 1
You could probably pull it off if you ran openMOSIX on the cluster, and the new multiprocessor VMWare under openMOSIX.
VMWare is proprietary and very expensive per seat. Windows Server is proprietary and very expensive per seat. The price of licensing such software would probably be more expensive than just upgrading to the next faster single core. Besides, the proprietary filters in Photoshop were written with a low-latency UMA multiprocessor in mind, not a comparatively high-latency NUMA cluster.
Why would they feel inclined to price an OS that supports multibundle IA-64 CPUs the same as an OS that supports a single IA-32 CPU?
For the same reason the Windows OS was priced the same for 486 (one execute unit), Pentium (one pipe and one half-pipe), Pentium II/III (one pipe and two half-pipes), Athlon, and Pentium 4.
Macs vs. Sun and desktop market share
on
Athlon 64 Debuts
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· Score: 1
Macs are a lot more common in homes than Sun machines. I can still find mass market proprietary educational software for Macintosh computers. Where can I find something like Reader Rabbit for Solaris OS on SPARC hardware?
Are they common in single-family homes in the United States? If not, the mainstream American press won't call them "desktops."
PCs are cheaper when they're sub-low-end
on
Athlon 64 Debuts
·
· Score: 1
the whole 'PCs are cheaper than Macs' theory is gonna get a lot less credence.
There are low-end Macs, mid-range Macs, and high-end Macs. There are low-end Winboxes, mid-range Winboxes, and high-end Winboxes. However, there are sub-low-end Winboxes such as eMashit and Microtel PCs, but Apple makes no sub-low-end Macs.
The practical algorithm for color correction is patented in several jurisdictions, and the patent holders refuse to license the patents royalty-free. Gentoo can't emerge an app unless the app can be redistributed royalty-free. Do you claim that any application containing a patented algorithm is not a "serious APP"?
CD-DA ripping becomes no longer CPU bound
on
Athlon 64 Debuts
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· Score: 1
And when you want to rip your CD collection to mp3 (or ogg, or whatever), you're gonna want the fastest thing around, if you've got a decent collection.
Last time I checked, ripping Compact Disc Digital Audio to.ogg was I/O bound, where the speed of reading PCM audio from the CD limited the whole process. Without some sort of massively multibeam pickup technology, it won't get much faster because CD-ROM drive makers have already run up against the maximum speed at which a CD can rotate without shattering, which is why CD-ROM drives significantly faster than 48x peak haven't become popular. Careless handling of CDs in homes with kids, as well as CD crippling mechanisms, have forced CD audio extraction program authors to use compensations such as rereading sectors. But even if CD audio extraction throughput were to scale up with CPU power, another possible limiting factor is the human interaction factor of taking each CD out of the tray and putting in another one.
Yes, DVD transcoding uses a lot of CPU power, but nobody does that in the USA, right?
Contiki ported to Athlon
on
Athlon 64 Debuts
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· Score: 2, Informative
Athlon 64 can run 99 percent of Commodore 64 software in emulation, including the C=64 version of the Contiki OS. In addition, it can probably run almost all these other ports.
You want native? If the Athlon 64 processor and chipset can boot up as a normal x86, it can run Contiki for PC DOS.
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It is not ONLY speed that kills.
<dea>You're right. It's not just speed. It is also crack, MDMA, heroin, alcohol, and ESPECIALLY marijuana!</dea>
"Theft" is not a legal term but rather a colloquial term. Those who discuss law seriously find it more productive to use the legal terms such as "larceny," "grand theft auto," "armed robbery," and "copyright infringement" that have different sets of statutes and different sets of case law behind them, rather than some blanket term such as "theft."
Some legal dictionary may actually define "theft" along the lines of "any offense involving the unlawful taking of another's property." But now define "taking," and define "property." If the copyright in a work is in fact property, why don't copyright owners have to pay property tax?
But the fact remains that there is a fundamental difference in me restricting how someone else uses my system, and in someone else dictating how I use my system by a cyber attack.
If the "someone else" is your customers, and you hold a government-granted monopoly such as a cable television franchise, your customers may be able to convince a jury that imposing restrictions on all residential Internet access accounts is tantamount to a "cyber attack" on their freedom of speech.
JIT translation is RAM-hungry. "Translation" has a RAM advantage as well, which is useful on handheld devices with little RAM.
The blacklister provides information to various people who choose, on their own, to say "I do not like what you are doing, Mr. Spammer, and I will not allow you to use MY system to do it."
Two problems:
If you're doing something mickey-mouse
Then Disney will come after you for trademark[1] infringement.
[1] Disney owns no copyright on Mickey Mouse.
Though prevalence the concept works in any language that supports Serializable, the Prevayler(tm) brand implementation is for the Java(tm) platform.
By that logic you might as well assume that we will all have huge amounts of NV-RAM soon, and if that's true, wtf is the point of Prevayler again?
If an app dies, its RAM will be reclaimed by the OS and erased. Backing up data to some other form of storage is useful even with non-volatile RAM for several reasons, one of them being the ability to take a backup off-site.
If the recipient doesn't want it he can appraise the solicitor of that fact directly, or through a sort of preemptive notice (e.g. by putting up a sign).
How does the owner of an e-mail account put up such a sign? And how does the owner of an e-mail account "appraise the solicitor" without the solicitor adding the e-mail account to a list of accounts whose owners have "appraised the solicitor"?
ILLEGAL people
So what's wrong with legalizing people?
dial in over the TWX network.
Wasn't TWX called AOL until a few days ago? Was the TWX network a remote ancestor of Q-Link, the service that became America Online?
Not if you go to an engineering school with 10 men for every woman.
Games need bandwidth, not global bandwidth. This bandwidth can be provided by a LAN with 100BASE-TX switches to a gigabit backbone. Besides, some university IT departments (such as Rose-Hulman's) already have AUPs that ban connecting to an off-campus game server or opening a game server to off-campus connections without express written consent, granted only in cases where students are developing the game for a grade.
Assuming there's a way to detect how many simultaneous bundles an IA-64 CPU can handle, I see Microsoft preferring to charge different amounts for an OS that can support a different level processor.
And watch people stick a new processor in the motherboard and find that Windows now refuses to boot unless the user enters a credit card number.
Once multithreading trickles down to even the entry-level processors, how will PC vendors be able to afford the Windows licenses for PCs sold to home users?
I don't see that claimed anything about patented algorithms not making for serious apps.
I wasn't referring to patents per se. I was alluding to the flaw in the "recompile everything" solution that Gentoo fans like to repeat, the fact that not all programs can be recompiled. Proprietary apps cannot in general be recompiled unless the copyright owner feels that recompiling the app for another architecture and hiring additional technical support staff would increase his net earnings. In some cases, the publisher will recompile it for you for the price of another seat of license.
Here's where my comment about patents comes in: Not all programs even have a free replacement. For example, look at the GIMP vs. Photoshop debate, where the patents encumbering CMYK and color space conversion are the main barriers to improvement of free software to the point where the print world would consider it.
automagically 64-bit-optimize [] a fairly large number of existing apps [] (Like PostgreSQL, Apache, OpenOffice, XFree86, GIMP, etc)
I'll give you GIMP, as some of its filters could benefit from CPU improvements, but a few of the apps you said would improve on x86-64 are in fact disk-bound (OOo and PostgreSQL), RAM-bound (GIMP or anything else that deals with large data sets), network-bound (Apache and Mozilla), video-bound (XFree86), or even human-thought-bound (any program used interactively by authors of works), and can't be made significantly faster by increasing CPU speeds. Some apps (such as Apache) can't run in homes due to contractual restrictions on residential Internet access.
You could probably pull it off if you ran openMOSIX on the cluster, and the new multiprocessor VMWare under openMOSIX.
VMWare is proprietary and very expensive per seat. Windows Server is proprietary and very expensive per seat. The price of licensing such software would probably be more expensive than just upgrading to the next faster single core. Besides, the proprietary filters in Photoshop were written with a low-latency UMA multiprocessor in mind, not a comparatively high-latency NUMA cluster.
Why would they feel inclined to price an OS that supports multibundle IA-64 CPUs the same as an OS that supports a single IA-32 CPU?
For the same reason the Windows OS was priced the same for 486 (one execute unit), Pentium (one pipe and one half-pipe), Pentium II/III (one pipe and two half-pipes), Athlon, and Pentium 4.
Macs are a lot more common in homes than Sun machines. I can still find mass market proprietary educational software for Macintosh computers. Where can I find something like Reader Rabbit for Solaris OS on SPARC hardware?
ctrl-z only works for your last mistake - then it just redoes your mistake over
But can Ctrl+Z undo saving?
that would totally suck it big time to lose like 250 pages of work
Not if I keep each chapter in a separate file and save often.
becase your pet walked across your keyboard
Not likely if the screen saver has kicked in and locked the terminal. I don't think my cat could figure how to walk across my password.
A press release, quoted verbatim, can be said to come "straight from" the issuing company or companies, no matter which web site hosts it.
i consider SUN ultra's to be desktops.
Are they common in single-family homes in the United States? If not, the mainstream American press won't call them "desktops."
the whole 'PCs are cheaper than Macs' theory is gonna get a lot less credence.
There are low-end Macs, mid-range Macs, and high-end Macs. There are low-end Winboxes, mid-range Winboxes, and high-end Winboxes. However, there are sub-low-end Winboxes such as eMashit and Microtel PCs, but Apple makes no sub-low-end Macs.
Would Microsoft dare to return to the PowerPC and try to license Windows OS to Mac owners?
Add -m64 to you march flags then emerge -e world
The practical algorithm for color correction is patented in several jurisdictions, and the patent holders refuse to license the patents royalty-free. Gentoo can't emerge an app unless the app can be redistributed royalty-free. Do you claim that any application containing a patented algorithm is not a "serious APP"?
And when you want to rip your CD collection to mp3 (or ogg, or whatever), you're gonna want the fastest thing around, if you've got a decent collection.
Last time I checked, ripping Compact Disc Digital Audio to .ogg was I/O bound, where the speed of reading PCM audio from the CD limited the whole process. Without some sort of massively multibeam pickup technology, it won't get much faster because CD-ROM drive makers have already run up against the maximum speed at which a CD can rotate without shattering, which is why CD-ROM drives significantly faster than 48x peak haven't become popular. Careless handling of CDs in homes with kids, as well as CD crippling mechanisms, have forced CD audio extraction program authors to use compensations such as rereading sectors. But even if CD audio extraction throughput were to scale up with CPU power, another possible limiting factor is the human interaction factor of taking each CD out of the tray and putting in another one.
Yes, DVD transcoding uses a lot of CPU power, but nobody does that in the USA, right?
Athlon 64 can run 99 percent of Commodore 64 software in emulation, including the C=64 version of the Contiki OS. In addition, it can probably run almost all these other ports.
You want native? If the Athlon 64 processor and chipset can boot up as a normal x86, it can run Contiki for PC DOS.