I don't think that this is an issue of bad research as much as it is one of bad writing. It seems pretty clear from some of the other comments that the author does understand that it's necessary to monitor everything in order to see if the people in question are surfing for pr0n, etc. Take for instance the quote:
"My biggest concern is that signing off on these proposals opens the field to allow monitoring of every keystroke and basically makes an individual's computer an open book," Judge Kozinski said. "I don't think its appropriate for us to be forcing employees to give up rights wholesale without showing any need. If we did this with telephones, people would be outraged."
The problem is one of bad writing. The author doesn't make it explicit that they judges are worried that everything they do is being monitored.
One issue that's potentially pretty scary about this is that judges need confidentiality. The are sometime required to seal documents, rule on the admissability of trade secrets, and generally deal with things that are supposed to be given strictly limited circulation. Putting monitors on their computers so that people back in Washington can see what they're doing has the potential to undermine the confidentiality of their work, and the implications of that are very serious indeed.
And when you choose "hacker" as your language, you can then select "!c3L4]\[[}!(" or "b0r|< b0r|< b0r|<". Not to mention all the times they change their front page for holidays. Somebody there definitely has a sense of humor and, equally importantly, isn't afraid to let the world know.
In case you didn't know contracts are very limiting - they prevent the artists from distributing their own music or someone else's music - and these contracts never expire.
The first part of that statement is true, but the second part is not. The contracts do expire; perpetual contracts are illegal. The problem is that the contracts are structured unfairly so that it's very difficult for artists to complete their half of the deal. Essentially, IIRC, the labels loan the musicians money to produce the albums, pay for promotion, etc. in the form of an advance against their royalties. But since the labels have considerable control over those costs, they can structure the contract so that the albums have to go platinum before the advance has been covered by the royalties. Unless the albums are unusually successful, the musicians wind up in debt to the studio at the end of their contract and are forced to repay the studio to get out of the contract or sign another one to repay their debts. It's not legally a perpetual contract any more than a sharecropper's was, but it generally has that result.
The thing is that a really successful band like Metallica isn't in that situation. They are selling enough copies that they can cover their advances. Equally importantly, they write their own songs, so they get separate royalties as writers that they can use to pay off their debts if they do have them. Metallica has even discussed going independent when their current contract expires, which they couldn't do if they had to re-sign. That's the reason that I picked them.
I think that it is mainly a question of getting the thing off of the ground. The music industry should be full of the dedicated types of people who could make this work. It's strange that nobody has stepped up to the plate (not even a any rich over-the-hill superstars).
I wouldn't look for the impetus to come from over the hill superstars. The real fight is going to come when an activist, highly successful, at the peak of their talent group/star finishes a contract. They'll have enough clout to make true independence work: capital to fund the operation, demand to get some economies of scale, leverage to force distributors to pay attention to them, and a very strong motivation to set up a system that gives the lions' share of the profits to artists.
Imagine that, to pick a band completely not at random, that Metallica decided to tell their current distributor to go to hell. They've already suggested interest in using the web to distribute their music, and they obviously have some idea of what is possible using the web. They also clearly have enough demand for their next CD to force some distributor to accept it. If they decided that they really wanted to give the finger to the music industry, they could probably convince a bunch of other musicians to join them in some kind of Co-op pressing and distributing system. It's just a matter of A) making a business case to some big star that they're better off doing things themselves and B) making a political case to them that they can say screw you to the big labels by sucking other artists away. I'm sure that there are at least one or two major stars who hate the big labels enough to want to destroy them, and presenting a do it yourself label as a way of doing so might be a good way of recruiting. It might take only one or two to really get the ball rolling.
I know exactly what you mean. I was once involved in making some stock footage of doing chemistry for news clips. It was pretty pathetic. The camera people wanted me to do some things involving interesting colored liquids (colored things look better on TV) but they didn't have to have any relationship to what we actually do in the lab every day. It was done purely to look interesting, not to have any relationship to reality.
And, if you read the FAQ, you'll find out that Netrek is exactly where the Ogg part came from. To quote:
An 'Ogg' is a tactical maneuver from the network game 'Netrek' that has entered common usage in a wider sense. From the definition:
3. To do anything forcefully, possibly without consideration of the drain on future resources. "I guess I'd better go ogg the problem set that's due tomorrow." "Whoops! I looked down at the map for a sec and almost ogged that oncoming car."
At the time Ogg was starting out, most personal computers were i386s and the i486 was new. I remember thinking about the algorithms I was considering, "Woah, that's heavyweight. People are going to need a 486 to run that..." While the software ogged the music, there wasn't much processor left for anything else.
Pretty clear evidence that Netrek was the origin of the name.
Are you sure that you're using an up to date version of Oggenc? I know that my old version (beta1, IIRC) was painfully slow, but that a newer one (beta4) was about as fast as lame (about 2.5x on my PIII 500) and produces good sound quality at 128 kbit/s. This is confirmed by what they say on theirweb site. They made substantial progress with beta4 and strongly reccomend that you upgrade if you're using anything older than that.
Why restrict yourself to one distribution, particularly if you're going to start out by installing on an older computer? One of the best things about Linux is that you can get distributions dirt cheap. Go to a place like Linux Mall and get a bunch. You can even get multi-disk sets containing several distributions packaged together specifically so you can try out different ones and pick your favorite. Of course if you have a fast network connection and a CD burner, you could even download the ISO images and burn them yourself instead of paying $2 per CD.
If you want, you can set up your partition scheme with a separate/home directory that doesn't get reformatted with each new distribution so that your settings are preserved from one distribution to another.
The big message, though, is not to take our word for which distro is best for you; find out for yourself. But don't forget to pay full price for the one you decide you like after you've made your decision. You'll get manuals, support, and help keep the maker of your chosen distro in business so that you can keep using it in the future.
Here's a compromise for those who want to patent emergent solutions: useful GeneticAlg output should be allowed to be patented, but only if a human can also understand it; that includes the means and the ends. That's only fair, since patents were meant to reward human ingenuity in the first place, not some multi-million dollar darwin cluster breeding the shape of a square peg into a round hole.
This is wrong for several reasons. Patents were not invented to "reward human ingenuity"; they were invented to promote the development of useful arts. The original goal of patents was to encourage inventors to disclose their discoveries rather than keep them secret. The inventor was given a limited term monopoly as an inducement but at the price of publishing his methods. That way other people would eventually be able to benefit from the invention and it wouldn't be lost when its inventor died. Understanding exactly how it works is completely secondary. And, of course, publishing the idea is one very good way of helping to figure out how it works; even if the original inventor doesn't understand it, the chances are good that somebody else will be able to figure it out and develop it further. That's an argument in favor of allowing patents of non-understood ideas.
More importantly, requiring that software patents be understood applies a much stronger standard to them than other fields. People in other fields patent things that they have little or no coherent understanding of all the time in other fields. Chemical engineering is a great example of this. There are lots and lots of chemical processes that are understood poorly if at all. I'm not sure if anyone really understands a lot of forms of heterogeneous catalysis, for instance, and most forms are certainly patented before people understand them clearly. People know as a matter of experience that following certain recipies will produce the results they want, but exactly how those procedures work is anyone's guess. Asking software to adhere to the higher standard that the inventor be able to explain exactly how it works is unfair.
That's not to say that I'd necessarily run right out and use an algorithm whose operating principles were not clearly understood! After all, if you're not really sure how it arrives at its results, you'll never be sure that it will always arrive at the right result. But you're unlikely to gain anything by preventing people from patenting non-understood algorithms. All you'll accomplish is to stifle the chance that somebody will learn how they work and thus how they can be made to work better.
So if a computer is able to determine the algorithm, How can it be argued that this is not something that someone trained in the art would not come up with?
Actually, it sounds as though a substantial part of the cleverness of their system is that it focuses on areas that are notoriously difficult for people to come up with good answers. They mention specifically that they've looked mostly at areas that are viewed as being black arts- i.e. areas where the most reliable approach for human inventors is trial and error. That means that essentially nothing in those fields is obvious, even to experts in the field, so just about everything is patentable.
The real question is whether they're going to try to pantent the idea of running a computer program to generate patentable ideas. That meta-patent would be the really valuable idea to come from this research.
According to the article, at least, the mission was run past the National Academy of Science. NAS said that it had the potential to make unique scientific contributions and was worth funding. Anyone who looks at what they want to do can see that it has some very powerful potential for various types of environmental monitoring. It makes you wonder if the people who want to kill it are afraid of what the science it will produce will say.
If the first edition is the Old Testament, and the second edition is the New Testament, then the third -might- be called the Book of Mormon...then what would be the fourth edition?
No, no, no. The third edition should be The Glorious Koran, not The Book of Mormon. Anyway, you can figure out the title for the fourth edition after it comes out, not before the third edition is released.
I love reading books, but I can tell you that there's one thing that I would love to ditch their physical form if the alternative were as readable. I live in a studio apartment, and the physical space that the books require is a huge annoyance. I actually have to stuff a bunch of my books in boxes in a closet because I'm out of space on my bookshelf. I'd love to be able to get that space back. I'd also love to be able to put named bookmarks at all of my favorite and/or most referenced passages, have hyperlinks from the index to the sections mentioned, and all of the other potential advantages of switching to electronic format.
What I don't want, though, is a digital form that will cause eye strain, require an expensive new electronic gadget that doesn't do anything else, and/or restrict me to viewing my books on a single reader. I've read some on my Palm IIIx and it's OK, but it's not ideal. I'd really like something with a bigger, higher contrast and higher resolution screen. Adding typical PDA functions to the thing would be easy and probably enough to convince me to buy it. As long, as I said, as it will let me take exerpts for web pages, lend my copy to a friend, and transfer my book to a new reader when a better format comes out.
The imutable law of supply and demand will force the companies to model their business around our requirements.
Wrong. The law of supply and demand presumes the availablility of alternate suppliers. Since copyright gives suppliers an inherent monopoly, they have an upper hand in the market.
Take textbooks as an example. If you're taking a class that requires a certain textbook, you must deal with the publisher of that textbook or not take the class. Since the publisher has complete control over the form in which the book is released, it can choose to release the book only in a limited use form that expires after the end of the term. You either buy that form or you can't have the book you need to take your class.
Something very similar holds in other areas of publishing. A very popular author could choose to release his books only in rentable format. Since there's no perfect substitute for that author, people are going to have a very strong incentive to rent instead of buy. And if the big publishers collude- refusing as a group to release except in rentable format, and closing the specifications so that they're the only ones who can produce files that can be read on commercially available e-books- there won't be much choice left.
Again, a free market only works when buyer and seller have free choice. Monopoly sellers prevent free choice, ruining the free market. Copyright grants a monopoly, so the market in books is inherently not free.
My mistake for replying to a reply, rather than taking a quick glance at the article. Since this is being presented on xxx.lanl.gov, that means that he's basically putting out a preprint. I don't see it mentioned anywhere, but it may actually have been submitted for review somewhere.
I guess that the original poster (who made the remark about not submitting to peer review) is unfamiliar with the way that physicists do things these days. They now put articles that are still under review (or even very preliminary results that aren't ready for formal review yet) on preprint servers like xxx.lanl.gov so that people can read them ASAP with the understanding that they're still preliminary. The authors aren't avoiding review; they're just getting the news out quickly through normal channels.
When apparently new phenomena are observed who do you submit your work to for review before publishing?
Just because a phenomenon is new doesn't mean that nobody except for its discoverer is qualified to look at it. There are plenty of people in the same general area of experimental physics who are fully qualified to judge whether he's adequately controlled for experimental variables, done proper experimental design, fully considered alternative explanations within currently accepted physical law, etc. Most of the time that somebody discovers something new it turns out that the real explanation is a flaw in their experimental controls, data analysis, etc. and not a genuinely novel phenomenon. Getting other people who know what they're doing to doublecheck your results is a good way of catching that kind of error. That's why peer review exists. Somebody who trumpets his discovery before having others double-check his methodology is doing something highly questionable.
Now, if there were no other options around, or the book renters decided to destroy all other ways of reading, that would be a baaaaaaadddd thing, but since other ways already exist and people are already used to owning books (or borrowing) this will be a big hoohaa about nothing.
But how long do you think that things will stay that way? If enough people wind up buying devices that allow them to rent books, then pretty soon publishers will stop offering books any other way. People who want to read books will be stuck; they'll be forced to buy readers that support only renting or do without entirely. Remember that copyright gives an absolute legal monopoly over the production of the work in question, so authors and publishers will have the power to force that decision.
That's the big point. Once limited use is a viable option for a substantial readership, publishers will start to make it the only option. It's important for readers to stand up now, while permanent ownership of a copy is still available. Don't buy limited use readers and limited use copies, or pretty soon limited use formats will be all that's available.
But space, licensing, support, these are all real concerns -- power too.
Assuming that disks are non-local, power is probably not the really big concern. After all, faster processors made on the same process are going to consume more power, require more cooling, etc. in rough proportion to their speed. Since processors and disks are easily the biggest primary power consumers in a box without a big graphics card, that means that power consumption is going to scale reasonably closely with processor speed.
Getting back to the choice of lots of wimpy processors or a few powerful ones, ISTR that the rule of thumb is that more processors is better if interprocessor communication is limiting and faster processors is better if communication is not limiting. That seems counter to naive intuition- if interprocessor communication is important it seems like you'd want to minimize the number of processors- but turns out to be correct because communication is so slow compared to number crunching. In communications intensive tasks, fast processors just wind up idling a lot waiting for high latency communications. I'm not sure where rendering fits in, but if it doesn't require fast local disks to be efficient that suggests that it's not particularly communications intensive and is probably best suited by faster processors.
I'm not sure that you're correct. Assume, for a moment, that the 5% MHz advantage only translates into a 2% advantage in rendering speed, but costs $33. That still means that it's worth spending the extra money if the complete system costs more than $1650 for a uniprocessor system of $3300 for a dual processor system. Considering that a rendering box is probably going to have a serious motherboard, case, lots of disks, fast memory, etc., those prices don't look unreasonable. Factor in a 2% reduction in installation and support costs, a 2% reduction in space requirements, etc. and maybe it's actually worth it. If you're using commercial rendering software with an expensive per-instance license cost, using the fastest available processor looks very smart.
It's rather silly in a case like this to look at just the price of the processor, disk, etc. You have to look at the price of the whole system and decide what kind of tradeoffs you need to make. Is $33 worth it for a 5% increase in processor speed? That depends on how much the whole system costs; if the system costs more than about $700 then the $33 is less than 5% of the system price and it may be worth it to pay more for the extra speed.
The case when this really kicks in is with expensive proprietary software licenses. I've seen various programs that I might want to use in my work that have license fees in the thousands of dollars. In some cases that's the price per box, but in others there's actually a per-CPU license. If you're running somthing that costs $5000 per CPU, it makes sense to spend some fairly serious cash on getting the fastest possible processor.
2. AFAIK, ripping to ogg is a 2 step process, save the track as a wav, then encode to ogg. This is 5 times slower than modern CD to mp3 rippers.
Ripping to mp3 is also a two step process (first to wav and then to mp3), it's just that the programs hide the extra step. And the speed difference is a tradeoff. You trade slower encoding speed for a better encoding; at a given kbit/s and Ogg should sound better than an mp3. This is true even with differen mp3 encoders. Different encoders have different speeds and there's generally a tradeoff between encoding speed and final quality.
That's true. But if you can make (numbers completely made up) a 96 kbit/s Ogg file that sounds as good as a 128 kbit/s mp3 file there will be a real motivation for people to switch formats. It'll be that much faster to trade over the net, and you'll be able to store 1/3 more songs in the same space. That's not quite world peace and an end to hunger, but it's nice. That's the real advantage of a more efficient codec.
1. By giving away source and charging for binaries, the result is that the technical elite who can compile source will get free as in beer software, while the masses will have to pay. How can they be convinced that this is fair for them?
By looking at the prices. Those companies may be allowed to charge for the software, but there are limits on just how much they can get away with charging. You can get a RedHat boxed set for $30, which includes not just the OS proper but also a large suite of applications, games, and other goodies. That's a pretty good deal compared to Windows. And the price should be kept down to reasonable levels because the GPL ensures that the barrier to entry is very low. When anyone who wants can burn the CDs and sell them for as much money as they can get away with, the amount that they can get away with is necessarily limited.
2. Most traditional closed source companies (as well as in most industries) charge for the product and then provide support for free, and feel obligated to provide customer service. (Unfortunately this isn't always true today, but it was the traditional ideal.) How would everyday users accept the idea of receiving a free product and then having to pay to get it to work without feeling swindled?
I think that this is less of a problem than you'd think. As you correctly point out, the actual level of service that most companies now offer to their ordinary customers is pretty pathetic. Most people I know who run Windows don't ask Microsoft for support when they have a problem; instead they ask their computer savvy friend for help. My guess is that they'll do pretty much the same thing when they decide to give Free Software a try, and they may be very happy with the results. There are already lots of Linux Users Groups out there who are interested in helping newbies with their computers (though their goal tends to be more one of making generally computer savvy people who are unfamiliar with Linux into Linux gurus, rather than helping newbies with every little problem). If Free Software takes off in a big way those groups should get bigger and more able to provide help.
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I don't think that this is an issue of bad research as much as it is one of bad writing. It seems pretty clear from some of the other comments that the author does understand that it's necessary to monitor everything in order to see if the people in question are surfing for pr0n, etc. Take for instance the quote:
The problem is one of bad writing. The author doesn't make it explicit that they judges are worried that everything they do is being monitored.
One issue that's potentially pretty scary about this is that judges need confidentiality. The are sometime required to seal documents, rule on the admissability of trade secrets, and generally deal with things that are supposed to be given strictly limited circulation. Putting monitors on their computers so that people back in Washington can see what they're doing has the potential to undermine the confidentiality of their work, and the implications of that are very serious indeed.
And when you choose "hacker" as your language, you can then select "!c3L4]\[[}!(" or "b0r|< b0r|< b0r|<". Not to mention all the times they change their front page for holidays. Somebody there definitely has a sense of humor and, equally importantly, isn't afraid to let the world know.
The first part of that statement is true, but the second part is not. The contracts do expire; perpetual contracts are illegal. The problem is that the contracts are structured unfairly so that it's very difficult for artists to complete their half of the deal. Essentially, IIRC, the labels loan the musicians money to produce the albums, pay for promotion, etc. in the form of an advance against their royalties. But since the labels have considerable control over those costs, they can structure the contract so that the albums have to go platinum before the advance has been covered by the royalties. Unless the albums are unusually successful, the musicians wind up in debt to the studio at the end of their contract and are forced to repay the studio to get out of the contract or sign another one to repay their debts. It's not legally a perpetual contract any more than a sharecropper's was, but it generally has that result.
The thing is that a really successful band like Metallica isn't in that situation. They are selling enough copies that they can cover their advances. Equally importantly, they write their own songs, so they get separate royalties as writers that they can use to pay off their debts if they do have them. Metallica has even discussed going independent when their current contract expires, which they couldn't do if they had to re-sign. That's the reason that I picked them.
I wouldn't look for the impetus to come from over the hill superstars. The real fight is going to come when an activist, highly successful, at the peak of their talent group/star finishes a contract. They'll have enough clout to make true independence work: capital to fund the operation, demand to get some economies of scale, leverage to force distributors to pay attention to them, and a very strong motivation to set up a system that gives the lions' share of the profits to artists.
Imagine that, to pick a band completely not at random, that Metallica decided to tell their current distributor to go to hell. They've already suggested interest in using the web to distribute their music, and they obviously have some idea of what is possible using the web. They also clearly have enough demand for their next CD to force some distributor to accept it. If they decided that they really wanted to give the finger to the music industry, they could probably convince a bunch of other musicians to join them in some kind of Co-op pressing and distributing system. It's just a matter of A) making a business case to some big star that they're better off doing things themselves and B) making a political case to them that they can say screw you to the big labels by sucking other artists away. I'm sure that there are at least one or two major stars who hate the big labels enough to want to destroy them, and presenting a do it yourself label as a way of doing so might be a good way of recruiting. It might take only one or two to really get the ball rolling.
I know exactly what you mean. I was once involved in making some stock footage of doing chemistry for news clips. It was pretty pathetic. The camera people wanted me to do some things involving interesting colored liquids (colored things look better on TV) but they didn't have to have any relationship to what we actually do in the lab every day. It was done purely to look interesting, not to have any relationship to reality.
And, if you read the FAQ, you'll find out that Netrek is exactly where the Ogg part came from. To quote:
Pretty clear evidence that Netrek was the origin of the name.
Are you sure that you're using an up to date version of Oggenc? I know that my old version (beta1, IIRC) was painfully slow, but that a newer one (beta4) was about as fast as lame (about 2.5x on my PIII 500) and produces good sound quality at 128 kbit/s. This is confirmed by what they say on theirweb site. They made substantial progress with beta4 and strongly reccomend that you upgrade if you're using anything older than that.
Why restrict yourself to one distribution, particularly if you're going to start out by installing on an older computer? One of the best things about Linux is that you can get distributions dirt cheap. Go to a place like Linux Mall and get a bunch. You can even get multi-disk sets containing several distributions packaged together specifically so you can try out different ones and pick your favorite. Of course if you have a fast network connection and a CD burner, you could even download the ISO images and burn them yourself instead of paying $2 per CD. If you want, you can set up your partition scheme with a separate /home directory that doesn't get reformatted with each new distribution so that your settings are preserved from one distribution to another.
The big message, though, is not to take our word for which distro is best for you; find out for yourself. But don't forget to pay full price for the one you decide you like after you've made your decision. You'll get manuals, support, and help keep the maker of your chosen distro in business so that you can keep using it in the future.
This is wrong for several reasons. Patents were not invented to "reward human ingenuity"; they were invented to promote the development of useful arts. The original goal of patents was to encourage inventors to disclose their discoveries rather than keep them secret. The inventor was given a limited term monopoly as an inducement but at the price of publishing his methods. That way other people would eventually be able to benefit from the invention and it wouldn't be lost when its inventor died. Understanding exactly how it works is completely secondary. And, of course, publishing the idea is one very good way of helping to figure out how it works; even if the original inventor doesn't understand it, the chances are good that somebody else will be able to figure it out and develop it further. That's an argument in favor of allowing patents of non-understood ideas.
More importantly, requiring that software patents be understood applies a much stronger standard to them than other fields. People in other fields patent things that they have little or no coherent understanding of all the time in other fields. Chemical engineering is a great example of this. There are lots and lots of chemical processes that are understood poorly if at all. I'm not sure if anyone really understands a lot of forms of heterogeneous catalysis, for instance, and most forms are certainly patented before people understand them clearly. People know as a matter of experience that following certain recipies will produce the results they want, but exactly how those procedures work is anyone's guess. Asking software to adhere to the higher standard that the inventor be able to explain exactly how it works is unfair.
That's not to say that I'd necessarily run right out and use an algorithm whose operating principles were not clearly understood! After all, if you're not really sure how it arrives at its results, you'll never be sure that it will always arrive at the right result. But you're unlikely to gain anything by preventing people from patenting non-understood algorithms. All you'll accomplish is to stifle the chance that somebody will learn how they work and thus how they can be made to work better.
The real question is whether they're going to try to pantent the idea of running a computer program to generate patentable ideas. That meta-patent would be the really valuable idea to come from this research.
According to the article, at least, the mission was run past the National Academy of Science. NAS said that it had the potential to make unique scientific contributions and was worth funding. Anyone who looks at what they want to do can see that it has some very powerful potential for various types of environmental monitoring. It makes you wonder if the people who want to kill it are afraid of what the science it will produce will say.
No, no, no. The third edition should be The Glorious Koran, not The Book of Mormon. Anyway, you can figure out the title for the fourth edition after it comes out, not before the third edition is released.
I love reading books, but I can tell you that there's one thing that I would love to ditch their physical form if the alternative were as readable. I live in a studio apartment, and the physical space that the books require is a huge annoyance. I actually have to stuff a bunch of my books in boxes in a closet because I'm out of space on my bookshelf. I'd love to be able to get that space back. I'd also love to be able to put named bookmarks at all of my favorite and/or most referenced passages, have hyperlinks from the index to the sections mentioned, and all of the other potential advantages of switching to electronic format.
What I don't want, though, is a digital form that will cause eye strain, require an expensive new electronic gadget that doesn't do anything else, and/or restrict me to viewing my books on a single reader. I've read some on my Palm IIIx and it's OK, but it's not ideal. I'd really like something with a bigger, higher contrast and higher resolution screen. Adding typical PDA functions to the thing would be easy and probably enough to convince me to buy it. As long, as I said, as it will let me take exerpts for web pages, lend my copy to a friend, and transfer my book to a new reader when a better format comes out.
Wrong. The law of supply and demand presumes the availablility of alternate suppliers. Since copyright gives suppliers an inherent monopoly, they have an upper hand in the market.
Take textbooks as an example. If you're taking a class that requires a certain textbook, you must deal with the publisher of that textbook or not take the class. Since the publisher has complete control over the form in which the book is released, it can choose to release the book only in a limited use form that expires after the end of the term. You either buy that form or you can't have the book you need to take your class.
Something very similar holds in other areas of publishing. A very popular author could choose to release his books only in rentable format. Since there's no perfect substitute for that author, people are going to have a very strong incentive to rent instead of buy. And if the big publishers collude- refusing as a group to release except in rentable format, and closing the specifications so that they're the only ones who can produce files that can be read on commercially available e-books- there won't be much choice left.
Again, a free market only works when buyer and seller have free choice. Monopoly sellers prevent free choice, ruining the free market. Copyright grants a monopoly, so the market in books is inherently not free.
My mistake for replying to a reply, rather than taking a quick glance at the article. Since this is being presented on xxx.lanl.gov, that means that he's basically putting out a preprint. I don't see it mentioned anywhere, but it may actually have been submitted for review somewhere.
I guess that the original poster (who made the remark about not submitting to peer review) is unfamiliar with the way that physicists do things these days. They now put articles that are still under review (or even very preliminary results that aren't ready for formal review yet) on preprint servers like xxx.lanl.gov so that people can read them ASAP with the understanding that they're still preliminary. The authors aren't avoiding review; they're just getting the news out quickly through normal channels.
Just because a phenomenon is new doesn't mean that nobody except for its discoverer is qualified to look at it. There are plenty of people in the same general area of experimental physics who are fully qualified to judge whether he's adequately controlled for experimental variables, done proper experimental design, fully considered alternative explanations within currently accepted physical law, etc. Most of the time that somebody discovers something new it turns out that the real explanation is a flaw in their experimental controls, data analysis, etc. and not a genuinely novel phenomenon. Getting other people who know what they're doing to doublecheck your results is a good way of catching that kind of error. That's why peer review exists. Somebody who trumpets his discovery before having others double-check his methodology is doing something highly questionable.
Homer: Lisa! Go to your room!
Lisa: But why?
Homer: Because in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics.
But how long do you think that things will stay that way? If enough people wind up buying devices that allow them to rent books, then pretty soon publishers will stop offering books any other way. People who want to read books will be stuck; they'll be forced to buy readers that support only renting or do without entirely. Remember that copyright gives an absolute legal monopoly over the production of the work in question, so authors and publishers will have the power to force that decision.
That's the big point. Once limited use is a viable option for a substantial readership, publishers will start to make it the only option. It's important for readers to stand up now, while permanent ownership of a copy is still available. Don't buy limited use readers and limited use copies, or pretty soon limited use formats will be all that's available.
Assuming that disks are non-local, power is probably not the really big concern. After all, faster processors made on the same process are going to consume more power, require more cooling, etc. in rough proportion to their speed. Since processors and disks are easily the biggest primary power consumers in a box without a big graphics card, that means that power consumption is going to scale reasonably closely with processor speed.
Getting back to the choice of lots of wimpy processors or a few powerful ones, ISTR that the rule of thumb is that more processors is better if interprocessor communication is limiting and faster processors is better if communication is not limiting. That seems counter to naive intuition- if interprocessor communication is important it seems like you'd want to minimize the number of processors- but turns out to be correct because communication is so slow compared to number crunching. In communications intensive tasks, fast processors just wind up idling a lot waiting for high latency communications. I'm not sure where rendering fits in, but if it doesn't require fast local disks to be efficient that suggests that it's not particularly communications intensive and is probably best suited by faster processors.
I'm not sure that you're correct. Assume, for a moment, that the 5% MHz advantage only translates into a 2% advantage in rendering speed, but costs $33. That still means that it's worth spending the extra money if the complete system costs more than $1650 for a uniprocessor system of $3300 for a dual processor system. Considering that a rendering box is probably going to have a serious motherboard, case, lots of disks, fast memory, etc., those prices don't look unreasonable. Factor in a 2% reduction in installation and support costs, a 2% reduction in space requirements, etc. and maybe it's actually worth it. If you're using commercial rendering software with an expensive per-instance license cost, using the fastest available processor looks very smart.
It's rather silly in a case like this to look at just the price of the processor, disk, etc. You have to look at the price of the whole system and decide what kind of tradeoffs you need to make. Is $33 worth it for a 5% increase in processor speed? That depends on how much the whole system costs; if the system costs more than about $700 then the $33 is less than 5% of the system price and it may be worth it to pay more for the extra speed.
The case when this really kicks in is with expensive proprietary software licenses. I've seen various programs that I might want to use in my work that have license fees in the thousands of dollars. In some cases that's the price per box, but in others there's actually a per-CPU license. If you're running somthing that costs $5000 per CPU, it makes sense to spend some fairly serious cash on getting the fastest possible processor.
Ripping to mp3 is also a two step process (first to wav and then to mp3), it's just that the programs hide the extra step. And the speed difference is a tradeoff. You trade slower encoding speed for a better encoding; at a given kbit/s and Ogg should sound better than an mp3. This is true even with differen mp3 encoders. Different encoders have different speeds and there's generally a tradeoff between encoding speed and final quality.
That's true. But if you can make (numbers completely made up) a 96 kbit/s Ogg file that sounds as good as a 128 kbit/s mp3 file there will be a real motivation for people to switch formats. It'll be that much faster to trade over the net, and you'll be able to store 1/3 more songs in the same space. That's not quite world peace and an end to hunger, but it's nice. That's the real advantage of a more efficient codec.
By looking at the prices. Those companies may be allowed to charge for the software, but there are limits on just how much they can get away with charging. You can get a RedHat boxed set for $30, which includes not just the OS proper but also a large suite of applications, games, and other goodies. That's a pretty good deal compared to Windows. And the price should be kept down to reasonable levels because the GPL ensures that the barrier to entry is very low. When anyone who wants can burn the CDs and sell them for as much money as they can get away with, the amount that they can get away with is necessarily limited.
I think that this is less of a problem than you'd think. As you correctly point out, the actual level of service that most companies now offer to their ordinary customers is pretty pathetic. Most people I know who run Windows don't ask Microsoft for support when they have a problem; instead they ask their computer savvy friend for help. My guess is that they'll do pretty much the same thing when they decide to give Free Software a try, and they may be very happy with the results. There are already lots of Linux Users Groups out there who are interested in helping newbies with their computers (though their goal tends to be more one of making generally computer savvy people who are unfamiliar with Linux into Linux gurus, rather than helping newbies with every little problem). If Free Software takes off in a big way those groups should get bigger and more able to provide help.