Except that Microsoft, with their huge pile of cash, might take the same route that Sony does and sell the boxes as loss leaders and attempt to recoup the money in game licensing fees... The end result being that you'll get a whole lot more for your money.
That, plus it'll be hardware and an OS dedicated to one task, gaming, rather than a general purpose machine with support for things that you might never need to use the machine for. And, hopefully since Microsoft will apparantly maintain full control of the hardware and the software, the machine will be a bit more reliable than what we're used to seeing come from them.
Of course that article might have contradicted everything i just speculated, but it's slashdotted, so i can't find out otherwise!:)
If you want to go produce movies, go produce movies. There's nothing holding you back from it. Buy a camera. Write a script. Hire some actors. Shoot your movie. Edit it down. Post it on a website somewhere. Promote it. There's no way the MPAA is interfereing with you creating movies. They just have more money than you.
Same goes for music. If you want to start a band, go start a band. Buy some instruments. Write some songs. Rehearse. Play some shows. Record some CD's. Promote yourself.
You might be confronted by some label people... here's the trick that most people here seem to have forgotten. You don't need to sign the contract they put in front of you. There's no guns to your head. Fuck the RIAA, you say? Then go at it on your own... It's really that easy for you, and for any other band.
For all the complaints here, people forget that no one ever made the bands sign on with the major lables. They crawled over one another to sign the dotted line... They knew the consequences of their actions, yet they did it anyways....
And for some reason $15 a CD is too expensive... 10 years ago tapes were $8.00. So, adjusting for inflation, a higher quality, non-degradable recording, $15 seems about right.
Well, it all boils down to the same argument as for mp3's/napster.... who's decision should it be as to how to promote a piece of IP? The creators or the users? I think it should be the creators decision.
$5 for a script that would have taken you 20 minutes to write is a pretty good deal, considering in all likelyhood that you get paid much more that $15/hour. That person just saved you a nice chunk of time so that you can continue being productive and work on your $50/hour project.
Yes, i admit my numbers are just numbers picked out of the air... But they seem reasonable.
But if we assume my numbers are correct for this argument, yes, autodesk didn't spend $6,000,000 to generate the $600,000 in revenues. But they were deprived of the other $5,400,000 by pirates who chose to earn their livings by using their software and not paying for it. If you figure they all would have bought it rather than using a cheaper/inferior product, then those really are just LOST sales.
The idea that companies will base their business strategies around selling support for their software (witness all the Linux companies) is kind of scary. Why? What incentive do they have to create high quality, easy to use applications? None. An easy to use or configure application means that their sole source of revenue is effectively dried up.
That's probably the biggest thing going for commercial apps. Companies expect to earn their money selling a product that doesn't require much support. There's actually money to be made as a result of the development process itself.
Well, the principal of the action is wrong, regardless. But it's senseless to think that anyone can perfectly contain anything... So therefore it's most appropriate to go after the largest exploiter.
No... because it's incredibly tedious to mass produce CD-R's (on the scale of 1,000's of copies) where as it's relatively simple to let 1,000's of people download a song from you. If people ONLY relied on CD-R's to pirate music, then piracy would not really be as much of a blip on the map to the RIAA as it is today.
1 - Yes, copyprotection just sucks. It's a HUGE inconveinence to legitamate users. I remember when some Mac software (mostly, 4D) was distributed on floppy disks that counted how many times you installed it. If you reached the limit (5, in the case of 4D) you were pretty much out of luck until they sent you new disks. Dongles also pretty much suck if you're using more than 2 or 3 pieces of software that require them.
2 - Advertising is only of use when it returns more revenues than a given advertising campaign costs. The argument for piracy increasing sales goes away when the users of a piece of software NEED that software anyways.
Say AutoCAD sells 10,000 copies per year for $3000 each. That's $30,000,000 in revenues. Now say that each year there are 20,000 more copies pirated. And of those 20,000, 18,000 are just playing with it, eventually deleting it, or relegating it to their unused software collection. 2,000 (10%) actually use the software on a day to day basis. Of those 2,000, 10% actually pay for it when they get the money.
In the end, 18,000 of those copies were just throwaways. They stood to gain nothing from those users because they simply wouldn't have purchased the software anyways.
But with the other 2,000 users. They all use the software on a day to day basis in their lines of work. If you call that advertising, they just spent $6,000,000 ($3000 * 2000) in order to gain $600,000 in sales ($3000 * 200). That's not an effective "advertising campaign", no matter how you look at it.
For music, it's even worse, because at least when you buy software, you get things like manuals and tech support. Music doesn't require any of those. And not many people seem to be overly concerned with the quality of MP3's... Around here, at least, it seems that there's a 50-50 split on whether 128 kbps creates a discenably different sound. But most sites agree that 256 kbps definetly makes it challenging to hear the differnce.
As bandwidth increases and user's local storage increases, it won't be unforseeable to have uncompressed AIFF files traded back and forth on the net just as mp3's are today. And there's no argument about quality loss... Musicians will be forced to sit back and see which ones of their fans will actually pay them for the goods which they're taking from them.
Compare that to your work place. No matter how cool your boss seems, if they turned to you and said "Hey, times are tight. I'd really like to keep you around, but I'm not sure if you're really valuable enough to keep. Could you just put in maybe 4 weeks at no pay? If i decide to keep you, i'll pay you for that time, but i let you go, i'll owe you nothing." Are you going to stick around that there?
Lost revenues aren't expenses. They're just revenues that never appeared. Hence, it doesn't need to be reported.
In some cases, people try to make justifiable arguments about pirating software like "I could never afford AutoCAD, so i stole it" or "i'd never buy, so i got a copy, and got good and then i bought it". Those are one thing. Illegal copies of windows are another.
When you buy a computer with Windows on it, you SHOULD be paying for your copy of Windows. Charges of price gouging/monopoly whatevers aside, if you on't want to pay for what software you're using, you shouldn't be using it. This isn't like empty seats at the theatre. It's more like people sneaking into your movies. Obviously those people are stealing from you, because they're getting what you're selling without paying for it.
Why does it matter who's first? The first to get somewhere does not mean they'll be the first to succeed. It just means they were the first to get there. And if you look at the history of computing, someone else always got wherever anyone was going "first", but then for some reason it's almost always Microsoft that steps in and does it second and reaps the rewards after soemone else has already established that there is a demand in the market.
Remember that, as more and more companies scramble over themselves in an attempt to be "first!"
They should be concentrating on making rock-solid products, not just first products in their segemnet, otherwise they'll just be paving the roads for whatever company comes after them with a more polished product.
I don't think that there are any viablity concerns with Connectix's product. It's not like it's a windows emulator, where companies might not want to invest serious money into a program that might be broken with the next set up application releases. It emulates hardware that's already on the market. If it plays the games, no ones going to NOT buy it because they're afraid that Connectix won't be around in 6 months to support it. This isn't ERP software!!
Sony's probably realized that the current PC hardware can handle "older" Play Station titles, but it'll still be a few years before the PC can challenge the Play Station 2. Just used the lawsuit as a set of stall tactics until they were near ready to start delivering the Playstation 2.
Umm... SGI either has or is in the process of selling it's Cray unit to (I think it's called) Terra something or other. Terra's buying the hardware, IP, and name and resuming business as Cray. It's kind of wierd how the transaction worked, but the Cray name is too important to go away.
It might be 1% of the market as a whole, but it's the most valuable segement (high-end servers) which both Intel and Microsoft are trying to get into with their respective products (Itanium and Win 2000-64).
It must annoy them to no end that compaq is already competing in that space, given the hundreds of millions/billions of dollars that they've spent in an attempt to compete in that 1% of the market.
Now this was the benchmark that Ellison was saying "Beat us and we'll give you cash" on, yet when MS did it, he didn't pay *grin*
He specified a time limit and a test, both of which Microsoft didn't adhere to:
Microsoft came in with their results a month or two after Oracles deadline (Oracle could make whatever deadline they wanted, since they were sponsoring the test) AND they performed different queries that got the same results, which decreased the time it took, but was not what the test was about... No references on this, but I'm sure it's still available somewhere on either Microsofts or Oracles web site...
Especially the time limit thing, I mean, given Moore's law, in 20 years I'll be able to beat any of Oracles posted scores using Filemaker Pro.... Will they then owe me a million dollars as well??
Like the way that Compaq bought out DEC has been pushing and supporting the Alpha platform? I'm sure Intels really happy about that one... and with Compaq and Microsoft deciding to cease development of NT for Alpha, Compaq has decided, again, to push Linux pretty hard on the Alpha platform... that definetly won points with Microsoft, I'm sure.
Yes, Dell has always jumped when Microsoft and/or Intel said jump, but Compaq is a VERY powerful company which doesn't mind stepping on toes when it needs to. That they've decided against the Crusoe for now just means that their main customers (BIG business) probably wouldn't be very interested in the chips... Just like software, this is a version 1.0 chip. When 2.01 comes out, maybe they'll take a look, but it's just TOO NEW to know what's reality and what's marketing.
This kind of corporate behavior may be typical but it is not right. Using private eyes to spy on the competition is a bad thing anyway you look at it.
To quote skinny puppy, who probably sampled it from somewhere else... It's a dog eat dog world, and from where I stand, there's just not enough damn dogs. When you're talking big business, it's no longer about making money, it's full-on corporate warfare. Any leg up on the competition is a good thing.
Oracle does make a good database product, correct. Sun makes a great operating system and boxes to run it on. They both do amazing jobs at marketing their products. But that doesn't matter when Microsoft launches their FUD campaigns and other tactics against each of them (breaking licensing agreements, et al)...
Microsoft plays dirty. Their competitors play dirty. Not saying one's right and the others wrong. I'm just saying that it's how they play...
Yep. Just ask all those Mac and Linux users how they felt about Melissa, ILoveYou, et al...
Haven't heard of a Linux virus as of yet, but I'm not very dilegent about checking the security sites... And the worst thing I've heard happening to the Mac in a LONG time was the QuickTime autostart worm... but all that needed to happen was for users to set the quicktime not to automatically launch programs on CD's.
As far as Windows goes... by your reckoning, it should be the most secure? No... I know, I know... it's not secure because it's not open source....
I have no idea if it's possible with Crusoe, but I would love an SMP box based on Transmeta chips. As far as I know, it's not possible with the current crusoe's, due to the cache or memory logic being on the chip itself. Someone around her probably knows for sure though.
I guarantee 8 or 16 Crusoe 700s will beat any two PIII 8xxs (1GHz PIII is not certified for SMP). Depending on the OS... Since 90% of the world is Win 9x, and MOST (not all, i know) of the market for SMP machines consists of servers, a cheap, low volume 8 or 16 way SMP platform wouldn't really be that commercially viable.
Of course, for various reasons, the consumer market is anti-smp. Intel would rather sell you one super-expensive chip than two cheap chips.
You'd add an incredible about of cost at the motheboard level by making it capable of handling 16 CPU's... When you're looking for performance, I'd think that people would be better off with fewer more expensive higher performance parts rather than many cheaper slower parts....
You could bring the RAID analogy into this, but RAID has been revised to mean Independant, not Inexpensive....
Lastly, of course 8 or 16 crusoes will beat 2 PIII's... but once you've added up the rest of the costs, I'd bet that the pricing would level out once you got past 4 or 8 chips in a box... Or else the Intel machine would take off in comparison to the Transmeta box...
But since we're talking speed, why not just get a dual alpha and be done with it?
No... An ISP is different. They ONLY provide bandwidth and storage space, where as a site owner uses the ISP for said bandwidth. Thanks to the safe harbor thing, the RIAA can not go after the people that are hosting MP3Board, just mp3board themselves.
It's one thing, I think, to link to another website. It's another thing to link to a file directly on another website. To the end user, it's the same experience. Click on link. Download begins. That's what they seem to be doing... They're not just saying, "hey, you can find that song somewhere on this site".
If a site owner isn't responsible for the content which they provide, who should be? They're creating hard links directly to other peoples material. If they don't want to be held liable for it, they shouldn't have linked to it. Again, this is not a case where they link to another site's page that has links to pirated mp3's. They link directly to the mp3's, bypassing the site altogether.
I was under the interpretation that he meant that an operating system would have to add SPECIFIC support for this technology, where as I was implying that support already exists.
If the chip is implemented somewhere beyond the memory controller and reports to it the amount of usable memory, then everything stays the same, except you get to use either more memory, or depending on the cost, systems could be built cheaper because they wouldn't require as much physical memory. Unfortunately around here, that would make technologies such as Rambus much more feasible.
Yes, the technology will not and can not stop the use of swap files, but it still can lead to more usable memory in a system.
Compression CANNOT guarantee anything better than 1:1 ratio - it is ENTIRELY dependent on the data.
Nothing in life is guaranteed, you're right. But most of the plain old ASCII text files on my hard drive compress 75-90%, depending on length.
For data compression in memory to succeed, you MUST have an option to cache the "extra" memory to a swapfile incase the prediction logic fails and you run out of physical ram. If you do not, you will tank your system, bigtime.
Well, it's not like IBM's mandating the removal of virtual memory or swap files in order for this to work. That's what it's there fore, to catch whatever won't fit in RAM.
Sorry, but I'm very leery of any "memory compression" - it requires OS support to function. Period. You aren't going to just plug in a miracle DIMM and make it work. I hope IBM is opening the spec (it looks like they are) and that OS development people quickly embrace this, or their hardware will take a nosedive in the market.
Not so. Just look at connectix' RAM doubler on the Mac. It was a 300 to 400k extension that DID effectively double a systems memory, with a 3% to 5% slowdown, and NO extra help from apple. If the compressions now done in hardware, I'd expect 0% slowdown, and still no requirement that each OS explicitly support it. So long as it's built in at the chipset level, as long as the OS can communicate with the memory controller, everything should work fine, right?
What this means to you is DO NOT send us email about illegal activities you are planning. This only implicates us and forces us to inform the authorities. Yes, we will do that. We have a moral obligation to report crimes and do not encourage such activities.
Maybe you should look around for a new privacy statement, or at least delete that paragraph from it, being that you often seem to encourage illegal activities when it comes to Napster...
You probably can't be profitable at $15/month with the amount of bandwidth you'd need to transfer all the mp3s. To serve say 100,000 streams at 56kpbs would take 5.6 Gbps line. That's a few $100,000/month just in bandwidth.
I don't know how much that much bandwidth costs, but if you're serving 100,000 users and taking in $15 per user per month, that's $1.5 million per month that you're bringing in... I'd HOPE that that's enough money to supply the bandwidth needed... and besides that, 100,000 people are not all going to be logged in simultaneously downloading... You'd probably need 1/5 to 1/10 the bandwidth, if that makes it easier....
But forget about the idea of a $15/month subscription service... you've got radio for free... If you want to actually choose which songs you hear and when you hear them, you need to pay for the priveledge, and $15 isn't really that much. Besides that, if you paid your $15, and listen to 50 bands that month, how does the money get divied out? you could argue that the bands see about that in royalties, but it doesn't factor in any of the costs that the labels paid out in the first place....
The distributor may be in trouble if he is pinned down, but certainly not the downloader.
This may be a very technical defense, but I believe it's a pretty solid one. Anyone see a loophole in it?
The loophole is, is that no one is going after anyone for being the recievers of copywritten files. They're (the RIAA, Metalica, Dre) going after people that are making those files available for download. So, as you said, the distributor could get in trouble, and as reality is working so far, it is the distributors who are getting banned from the services, and NOT the recievers.
However, the way that Napster is set up, once you download a file from a "distributor", that file then becomes available to other people, so unless you're quick to move it to another directory, you too become a distributor and can therefore face whatever penalties are being handed out.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that Microsoft, with their huge pile of cash, might take the same route that Sony does and sell the boxes as loss leaders and attempt to recoup the money in game licensing fees... The end result being that you'll get a whole lot more for your money.
:)
That, plus it'll be hardware and an OS dedicated to one task, gaming, rather than a general purpose machine with support for things that you might never need to use the machine for. And, hopefully since Microsoft will apparantly maintain full control of the hardware and the software, the machine will be a bit more reliable than what we're used to seeing come from them.
Of course that article might have contradicted everything i just speculated, but it's slashdotted, so i can't find out otherwise!
If you want to go produce movies, go produce movies. There's nothing holding you back from it. Buy a camera. Write a script. Hire some actors. Shoot your movie. Edit it down. Post it on a website somewhere. Promote it. There's no way the MPAA is interfereing with you creating movies. They just have more money than you.
Same goes for music. If you want to start a band, go start a band. Buy some instruments. Write some songs. Rehearse. Play some shows. Record some CD's. Promote yourself.
You might be confronted by some label people... here's the trick that most people here seem to have forgotten. You don't need to sign the contract they put in front of you. There's no guns to your head. Fuck the RIAA, you say? Then go at it on your own... It's really that easy for you, and for any other band.
For all the complaints here, people forget that no one ever made the bands sign on with the major lables. They crawled over one another to sign the dotted line... They knew the consequences of their actions, yet they did it anyways....
And for some reason $15 a CD is too expensive... 10 years ago tapes were $8.00. So, adjusting for inflation, a higher quality, non-degradable recording, $15 seems about right.
Well, it all boils down to the same argument as for mp3's/napster.... who's decision should it be as to how to promote a piece of IP? The creators or the users? I think it should be the creators decision.
$5 for a script that would have taken you 20 minutes to write is a pretty good deal, considering in all likelyhood that you get paid much more that $15/hour. That person just saved you a nice chunk of time so that you can continue being productive and work on your $50/hour project.
Yes, i admit my numbers are just numbers picked out of the air... But they seem reasonable.
But if we assume my numbers are correct for this argument, yes, autodesk didn't spend $6,000,000 to generate the $600,000 in revenues. But they were deprived of the other $5,400,000 by pirates who chose to earn their livings by using their software and not paying for it. If you figure they all would have bought it rather than using a cheaper/inferior product, then those really are just LOST sales.
The idea that companies will base their business strategies around selling support for their software (witness all the Linux companies) is kind of scary. Why? What incentive do they have to create high quality, easy to use applications? None. An easy to use or configure application means that their sole source of revenue is effectively dried up.
That's probably the biggest thing going for commercial apps. Companies expect to earn their money selling a product that doesn't require much support. There's actually money to be made as a result of the development process itself.
Well, the principal of the action is wrong, regardless. But it's senseless to think that anyone can perfectly contain anything... So therefore it's most appropriate to go after the largest exploiter.
No... because it's incredibly tedious to mass produce CD-R's (on the scale of 1,000's of copies) where as it's relatively simple to let 1,000's of people download a song from you. If people ONLY relied on CD-R's to pirate music, then piracy would not really be as much of a blip on the map to the RIAA as it is today.
1 - Yes, copyprotection just sucks. It's a HUGE inconveinence to legitamate users. I remember when some Mac software (mostly, 4D) was distributed on floppy disks that counted how many times you installed it. If you reached the limit (5, in the case of 4D) you were pretty much out of luck until they sent you new disks. Dongles also pretty much suck if you're using more than 2 or 3 pieces of software that require them.
2 - Advertising is only of use when it returns more revenues than a given advertising campaign costs. The argument for piracy increasing sales goes away when the users of a piece of software NEED that software anyways.
Say AutoCAD sells 10,000 copies per year for $3000 each. That's $30,000,000 in revenues. Now say that each year there are 20,000 more copies pirated. And of those 20,000, 18,000 are just playing with it, eventually deleting it, or relegating it to their unused software collection. 2,000 (10%) actually use the software on a day to day basis. Of those 2,000, 10% actually pay for it when they get the money.
In the end, 18,000 of those copies were just throwaways. They stood to gain nothing from those users because they simply wouldn't have purchased the software anyways.
But with the other 2,000 users. They all use the software on a day to day basis in their lines of work. If you call that advertising, they just spent $6,000,000 ($3000 * 2000) in order to gain $600,000 in sales ($3000 * 200). That's not an effective "advertising campaign", no matter how you look at it.
For music, it's even worse, because at least when you buy software, you get things like manuals and tech support. Music doesn't require any of those. And not many people seem to be overly concerned with the quality of MP3's... Around here, at least, it seems that there's a 50-50 split on whether 128 kbps creates a discenably different sound. But most sites agree that 256 kbps definetly makes it challenging to hear the differnce.
As bandwidth increases and user's local storage increases, it won't be unforseeable to have uncompressed AIFF files traded back and forth on the net just as mp3's are today. And there's no argument about quality loss... Musicians will be forced to sit back and see which ones of their fans will actually pay them for the goods which they're taking from them.
Compare that to your work place. No matter how cool your boss seems, if they turned to you and said "Hey, times are tight. I'd really like to keep you around, but I'm not sure if you're really valuable enough to keep. Could you just put in maybe 4 weeks at no pay? If i decide to keep you, i'll pay you for that time, but i let you go, i'll owe you nothing." Are you going to stick around that there?
Lost revenues aren't expenses. They're just revenues that never appeared. Hence, it doesn't need to be reported.
In some cases, people try to make justifiable arguments about pirating software like "I could never afford AutoCAD, so i stole it" or "i'd never buy, so i got a copy, and got good and then i bought it". Those are one thing. Illegal copies of windows are another.
When you buy a computer with Windows on it, you SHOULD be paying for your copy of Windows. Charges of price gouging/monopoly whatevers aside, if you on't want to pay for what software you're using, you shouldn't be using it. This isn't like empty seats at the theatre. It's more like people sneaking into your movies. Obviously those people are stealing from you, because they're getting what you're selling without paying for it.
Why does it matter who's first? The first to get somewhere does not mean they'll be the first to succeed. It just means they were the first to get there. And if you look at the history of computing, someone else always got wherever anyone was going "first", but then for some reason it's almost always Microsoft that steps in and does it second and reaps the rewards after soemone else has already established that there is a demand in the market.
Remember that, as more and more companies scramble over themselves in an attempt to be "first!"
They should be concentrating on making rock-solid products, not just first products in their segemnet, otherwise they'll just be paving the roads for whatever company comes after them with a more polished product.
I don't think that there are any viablity concerns with Connectix's product. It's not like it's a windows emulator, where companies might not want to invest serious money into a program that might be broken with the next set up application releases. It emulates hardware that's already on the market. If it plays the games, no ones going to NOT buy it because they're afraid that Connectix won't be around in 6 months to support it. This isn't ERP software!!
Sony's probably realized that the current PC hardware can handle "older" Play Station titles, but it'll still be a few years before the PC can challenge the Play Station 2. Just used the lawsuit as a set of stall tactics until they were near ready to start delivering the Playstation 2.
My opinion.
Umm... SGI either has or is in the process of selling it's Cray unit to (I think it's called) Terra something or other. Terra's buying the hardware, IP, and name and resuming business as Cray. It's kind of wierd how the transaction worked, but the Cray name is too important to go away.
It might be 1% of the market as a whole, but it's the most valuable segement (high-end servers) which both Intel and Microsoft are trying to get into with their respective products (Itanium and Win 2000-64).
It must annoy them to no end that compaq is already competing in that space, given the hundreds of millions/billions of dollars that they've spent in an attempt to compete in that 1% of the market.
Now this was the benchmark that Ellison was saying "Beat us and we'll give you cash" on, yet when MS did it, he didn't pay *grin*
He specified a time limit and a test, both of which Microsoft didn't adhere to:
Microsoft came in with their results a month or two after Oracles deadline (Oracle could make whatever deadline they wanted, since they were sponsoring the test) AND they performed different queries that got the same results, which decreased the time it took, but was not what the test was about... No references on this, but I'm sure it's still available somewhere on either Microsofts or Oracles web site...
Especially the time limit thing, I mean, given Moore's law, in 20 years I'll be able to beat any of Oracles posted scores using Filemaker Pro.... Will they then owe me a million dollars as well??
Like the way that Compaq bought out DEC has been pushing and supporting the Alpha platform? I'm sure Intels really happy about that one... and with Compaq and Microsoft deciding to cease development of NT for Alpha, Compaq has decided, again, to push Linux pretty hard on the Alpha platform... that definetly won points with Microsoft, I'm sure.
Yes, Dell has always jumped when Microsoft and/or Intel said jump, but Compaq is a VERY powerful company which doesn't mind stepping on toes when it needs to. That they've decided against the Crusoe for now just means that their main customers (BIG business) probably wouldn't be very interested in the chips... Just like software, this is a version 1.0 chip. When 2.01 comes out, maybe they'll take a look, but it's just TOO NEW to know what's reality and what's marketing.
This kind of corporate behavior may be typical but it is not right. Using private eyes to spy on the competition is a bad thing anyway you look at it.
To quote skinny puppy, who probably sampled it from somewhere else... It's a dog eat dog world, and from where I stand, there's just not enough damn dogs. When you're talking big business, it's no longer about making money, it's full-on corporate warfare. Any leg up on the competition is a good thing.
Oracle does make a good database product, correct. Sun makes a great operating system and boxes to run it on. They both do amazing jobs at marketing their products. But that doesn't matter when Microsoft launches their FUD campaigns and other tactics against each of them (breaking licensing agreements, et al)...
Microsoft plays dirty. Their competitors play dirty. Not saying one's right and the others wrong. I'm just saying that it's how they play...
Yep. Just ask all those Mac and Linux users how they felt about Melissa, ILoveYou, et al...
Haven't heard of a Linux virus as of yet, but I'm not very dilegent about checking the security sites... And the worst thing I've heard happening to the Mac in a LONG time was the QuickTime autostart worm... but all that needed to happen was for users to set the quicktime not to automatically launch programs on CD's.
As far as Windows goes... by your reckoning, it should be the most secure? No... I know, I know... it's not secure because it's not open source....
I have no idea if it's possible with Crusoe, but I would love an SMP box based on Transmeta chips.
As far as I know, it's not possible with the current crusoe's, due to the cache or memory logic being on the chip itself. Someone around her probably knows for sure though.
I guarantee 8 or 16 Crusoe 700s will beat any two PIII 8xxs (1GHz PIII is not certified for SMP).
Depending on the OS... Since 90% of the world is Win 9x, and MOST (not all, i know) of the market for SMP machines consists of servers, a cheap, low volume 8 or 16 way SMP platform wouldn't really be that commercially viable.
Of course, for various reasons, the consumer market is anti-smp. Intel would rather sell you one
super-expensive chip than two cheap chips.
You'd add an incredible about of cost at the motheboard level by making it capable of handling 16 CPU's... When you're looking for performance, I'd think that people would be better off with fewer more expensive higher performance parts rather than many cheaper slower parts....
You could bring the RAID analogy into this, but RAID has been revised to mean Independant, not Inexpensive....
Lastly, of course 8 or 16 crusoes will beat 2 PIII's... but once you've added up the rest of the costs, I'd bet that the pricing would level out once you got past 4 or 8 chips in a box... Or else the Intel machine would take off in comparison to the Transmeta box...
But since we're talking speed, why not just get a dual alpha and be done with it?
No... An ISP is different. They ONLY provide bandwidth and storage space, where as a site owner uses the ISP for said bandwidth. Thanks to the safe harbor thing, the RIAA can not go after the people that are hosting MP3Board, just mp3board themselves.
It's one thing, I think, to link to another website. It's another thing to link to a file directly on another website. To the end user, it's the same experience. Click on link. Download begins. That's what they seem to be doing... They're not just saying, "hey, you can find that song somewhere on this site".
If a site owner isn't responsible for the content which they provide, who should be? They're creating hard links directly to other peoples material. If they don't want to be held liable for it, they shouldn't have linked to it. Again, this is not a case where they link to another site's page that has links to pirated mp3's. They link directly to the mp3's, bypassing the site altogether.
In the hopes that you get this, let me clarify:
I was under the interpretation that he meant that an operating system would have to add SPECIFIC support for this technology, where as I was implying that support already exists.
If the chip is implemented somewhere beyond the memory controller and reports to it the amount of usable memory, then everything stays the same, except you get to use either more memory, or depending on the cost, systems could be built cheaper because they wouldn't require as much physical memory. Unfortunately around here, that would make technologies such as Rambus much more feasible.
Yes, the technology will not and can not stop the use of swap files, but it still can lead to more usable memory in a system.
Compression CANNOT guarantee anything better than 1:1 ratio - it is ENTIRELY dependent on
the data.
Nothing in life is guaranteed, you're right. But most of the plain old ASCII text files on my hard drive compress 75-90%, depending on length.
For data compression in memory to succeed, you MUST have an option to cache the "extra" memory to a swapfile incase the prediction logic fails and you run out of physical ram. If you do not, you will tank your system, bigtime.
Well, it's not like IBM's mandating the removal of virtual memory or swap files in order for this to work. That's what it's there fore, to catch whatever won't fit in RAM.
Sorry, but I'm very leery of any "memory compression" - it requires OS support to function. Period. You aren't going to just plug in a miracle DIMM and make it work. I hope IBM is opening the spec (it looks like they are) and that OS development people quickly embrace this, or their hardware will take a nosedive in the market.
Not so. Just look at connectix' RAM doubler on the Mac. It was a 300 to 400k extension that DID effectively double a systems memory, with a 3% to 5% slowdown, and NO extra help from apple. If the compressions now done in hardware, I'd expect 0% slowdown, and still no requirement that each OS explicitly support it. So long as it's built in at the chipset level, as long as the OS can communicate with the memory controller, everything should work fine, right?
What this means to you is DO NOT send us email about illegal activities you are planning. This only implicates us and forces us to inform the authorities. Yes, we will do that. We have a moral obligation to report crimes and do not encourage such activities.
Maybe you should look around for a new privacy statement, or at least delete that paragraph from it, being that you often seem to encourage illegal activities when it comes to Napster...
You probably can't be profitable at $15/month with the amount of bandwidth you'd need to transfer all the mp3s. To serve say 100,000
streams at 56kpbs would take 5.6 Gbps line. That's a few $100,000/month just in bandwidth.
I don't know how much that much bandwidth costs, but if you're serving 100,000 users and taking in $15 per user per month, that's $1.5 million per month that you're bringing in... I'd HOPE that that's enough money to supply the bandwidth needed... and besides that, 100,000 people are not all going to be logged in simultaneously downloading... You'd probably need 1/5 to 1/10 the bandwidth, if that makes it easier....
But forget about the idea of a $15/month subscription service... you've got radio for free... If you want to actually choose which songs you hear and when you hear them, you need to pay for the priveledge, and $15 isn't really that much. Besides that, if you paid your $15, and listen to 50 bands that month, how does the money get divied out? you could argue that the bands see about that in royalties, but it doesn't factor in any of the costs that the labels paid out in the first place....
The distributor may be in trouble if he is pinned down, but certainly not the downloader.
This may be a very technical defense, but I believe it's a pretty solid one. Anyone see a loophole in it?
The loophole is, is that no one is going after anyone for being the recievers of copywritten files. They're (the RIAA, Metalica, Dre) going after people that are making those files available for download. So, as you said, the distributor could get in trouble, and as reality is working so far, it is the distributors who are getting banned from the services, and NOT the recievers.
However, the way that Napster is set up, once you download a file from a "distributor", that file then becomes available to other people, so unless you're quick to move it to another directory, you too become a distributor and can therefore face whatever penalties are being handed out.