I'm not sure what you mean by "it will still show crap on whatever screen it's made of". Is that something like "all your base are belong to us"?
If you are talking about problems displaying SD programs on an HDTV, you're right if they just broadcast them in SD they look bad. But, many shows have been recorded on film and can make a really nice transfer for HDTV. The bigger problem is the 16:9 aspect ratio with material intended for 4:3.
HDNet sometimes shows Hogan's Heros episodes, where the old film was xferred to HDTV. The quality looks very nice, the content is another matter.
HDNet movies shows a lot of old classic movies, again tranferred from film. They look great in HD.
Actually, the original post does mix up profit & revenue. He mentions the 'revenue' at Apple is generated by the hardware. But, with 30M songs sold as of Jan '04, that's $29.7M of revenue. But, according to some claims, they lose money on that, generating no Profit.
As you point out, Napster's revenue is very small. But, in the context of the original argument, this would mean that even if their revenue grew, their loss would just keep growing because of the unprofitable business model.
User Mode Linux looks attractive.. In the past, I have used chroot jails to secure any network services that were externally accessible.
But, that was a pain in the ass to set up and update. The server machine was stripped down, for security reasons. So, I had to build the application & updates on a seperate development machine. Then, copy the environment over. It was a painful process.. I couldn't just use updated packages from the project or linux distro. Of course, this leads to not staying up to date on all the updates... which is very bad for security.
What would be nice is a self contained UML application image, where the whole basic OS is set up, and includes the desired application(s). Such as postfix, with Spamassassin. Updates would be created with this environment in mind.
I get the open mail relay stuff.. obviously spammers can abuse those to hide their tracks and avoid IP address filters & spam lists.
But, they say that spammers use open proxies too. Sure, you don't want to leave your proxy open for various reasons.. But, I didn't think spam was one of them. It's not like they're spamming through some webmail service or something. And, with the way the document is worded, mixing the MTA & proxy issues, it makes the doc less clear.
The distinction I made was between profitability and revenue.
Profitability = ( Revenue - Costs ) / Revenue
So, if the Mac group spends relatively little on advertising, their profit margin increases. By the way, marketing is a lot more than ads in Macworld.. there are all kinds of expenses related to getting the product out there.
> 1)MS Office for PCs? Included with almost every PC for nearly free
You clearly have no clue here. Office is included for free in exactly ZERO pc purchases. Some manufacturers include Microsoft Works with their PC's. But, that is not free either, it's merely bundled into the price of the PC.
But, the home user buying a Dell is not their big revenue generator either. It's selling high volume licenses to corporations that makes them the bulk of the Office money.
The Mac Office revenue is a very small percentage of the Windows Office revenue. Probably somewhere around the commonly quoted 5% share of the market that Macs have.
It may be profitable, because they have very low marketing expenses for Mac products (do they market them at all?).
But, I'm sure it's a rounding error in the revenue picture. In that realm, MS is dominated by the OS and Office money manking monopolies.
--
That's doubtful.. The OS and Office divisions are the cash cows for Microsoft. There is no way the Mac group is more profitable than the Office group.
-- More like "from the bread-and-butter-dept". Microsoft's Macintosh division is one of its most profitable, and a profit-making division at Microsoft is getting be something of a rarity what with the company loosing money through the nose in countless divisions. In fact, I believe there's only one division more profitable- the OS division.
Is that true? How would the system boot if all the files were encrypted? Minimally, it would need to load a stub that allowed it to access the filesystem and request authentication from the user.
Also, on the Windows system I checked, it was not a simple one-click operation. It was more like:
- Right Click object to encrypt - Select "Properties" from the popup menu - In the "General" tab, click the "Advanced..." button - In the Advanced Attributes dialog, select the option for "Encrypt contents to secure data".
Not exactly rocket science, but not obvious for your average Windows user.
This may qualify as a Quiet power supply.. But, anything with a fan is not silent.
I have been repeatedly disappointed by other power supplies that were advertised as quiet. I can control the noise in most other components:
- fanless video card - like the GeForce FX 5200 - quiet hard drive, like the Seagate Barracuda line, or one of the newer Maxtors with fluid bearings. - Quiet heat sink / fan. Zalman flower, or CNPS7000 - lots of surface area. Large/slow fan, or no fan at all. - Lower power CPU. Via C3 for low horsepower needs, Tualatin 0.13u P3 for midrange, Athlon 64 with "Cool n Quiet" to slow it down when not under load for high end. - Antec Sonata case - Advertised as quiet.. It's okay, but not great. Has rubber connectors on the hard drive trays to lessen vibration noise.
But the power supplies always end up being the loudest part of the system. With such a limited space to work with, I guess it's difficult to build something quiet.
I will skip this power supply, and go for a truly SILENT, fanless PSU, like one of these:
The link the the USPTO did not work for me, so I cannot see the dates on the patent. But, there were companies doing this exact same thing in hotel networks well before WiFi came around.
I don't really care if Mickey Mouse cartoons are protected for 200 years from their creation date (or indefinitely, as Disney will eventually pay off enough congressmen to get).
But, that should not drag every other piece of work along with it. To keep a copyright active, they should keep the default copyright mechanism they have today, for a short period of time, like 7-15 years. Then, require them to register the work for copyright extensions of 5-10 years. As it is now, they were gifted these huge copyright powers. They need to take some responsibility for the system needed to maintain that, and the bureaucracy to manage a legitimate copyright management system (i.e. fees for copyright renewals fund the bureaucracy, and copyright management systems).
This is a trivial task for big evil companies, like Disney, to keep copyright on their immensely valuable properties. And, it would ease the burden of copyright validation on the vast majority of other works.
That's the core problem here.. When Disney was lobbying to get copyrights extended again, most people said "so what?". It's not easy to show to 'random citizen' how this could effect him/her.
Compound that with the "new digital age" thinking that seems to be prevalent in congress, and we've got a problem. They all seem to think that America's best way to stay competitive is to create a lot of legal support for "Intellectual Property".
But, since it's the Disneys of the world that are in their ears, they don't think of anything beyond protecting Mickey Mouse from any exploitation.
> What all these papers have in common is that they find that increasing the pipeline depth past 20 stages increases performance.
Is that a typo, or am I misinterpreting the papers you liked above?
In all but the Intel paper, it looked to me like they were saying the optimal pipeline depth was somewhere between 6 and 20 (depending on workload).
In the introduction of the Intel paper, it says "Focusing on single stream performance". So, basically they are focusing on artificial benchmark performance.
You mean like the "Cool 'n Quiet" feature of the Athlon 64, where it slows down when not under load?
The Apple G5's do this, as well as most mobile CPU's. The VIA C3's and Transmeta CPU's also can do this.
I don't think the P4's have this capability. They will slow the system down when it reaches a temperature threshhold, to keep it from frying itself. Is that what you were referring to?
Hopefully Intel will catch up on this with their next processor release. It's a great feature for home servers, which are lightly loaded most of the time. Or, even for workstations.. I don't need a lot of CPU to browse the web and respond on slashdot.
Right on, dude.. I am waiting for the new C5P, which is about the size of a penny.. It has very low heat/power characteristics, and decent performance. If I could find a very small case that still allows a 3.5" HDD, it would be the perfect Linux server. Fanless operation, with a quiet Maxtor 250GB hard drive would make for a nice quiet system.
The dual processor reference board also had two 100Mbps Ethernet ports, and a DVI video port.. I want one!
Exactly.. All we have here is an older guy who got tired of the cold winters in the NorthEast. The station was nice enough, or valued him highly enough, to work with him and allow him to broadcast remotely.
This is not the same as the other trend of local stations outsourcing their news to same generic centralized national news network.. Eliminating any local/personal perspective and using the radio equivalent of USA Today to save a few bucks.
The fact that they hide this from their listeners is a bit questionable. But, it's not a big deal. The guy is a long time Bostonian, doing news specifically for Boston.. Do you also insist that he is the guy out investigating the stories on the streets? Is it disingenuous that someone else does the legwork, and the DJ reads the story as if HE figured it all out?
Obviously, the Socket 754 was a mistake... they are dropping it only months after introducing a new processor on it. So, those of us with our shiny new Athlon 64's have very limited upgrade potential. But, I can see the logic in moving to a dual channel memory design (but they should have decided this prior to release, not immediately after).
But, the Socket 939 / Socket 940 thing is even more baffling.. With the pin count only differing by one, there can't be too much difference between the two sockets. So, why drop the Socket 940?? What was the justification for this move???
Your point is valid, for the jump from Socket A to something better..
It does not explain the Socket 754, Socket 939, Socket 940 confusion. They are all for the same generation of processors. AMD is abandoning two socket/processor models only months after introducing them.
Not only is this bad for users, it's bad for AMD.. Most people are holding off on purchasing Athlon 64's because of this.
Obviously SCOX picked a company that they thought would do anything to avoid bad press or litigation. In the sensitive time before an IPO, this is the last thing they need. So, yes.. it's basically extortion.
These tactics may work, on companies that are vulnerable to FUD, Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.
This is why it's a bad move to pick Google.. They could hardly find a worse candidate. They are full of young, Linux savvy engineers, and their CEO is Eric Schmidt, who was top techie at Sun for many years, and then CEO at Novell - he definitely knows what's up both in Unix history and the SCOX licensing with Novell . The Uncertainty and Doubt areas are gone.. like most of us, they see the SCOX claims for the bullshit they are. The only question is whether the Fear about their successful IPO will win out. I could hardly blame them for settling quietly, but I hope they do not.
The fact that SCOX is now publicizing this suggests that Google is not going the 'settle quietly' route. If they were, we would be reading SCOX press releases about the great success of their licensing program.
Digital television is the new broadcast standard. It gives the broadcaster a 19.4Mbps data stream. An HDTV broadcast (either 1920x1080 interlaced, or 1280x720 progressive) is the common usage.
The use of that space is not specified. Most broadcasters use it for a single HD broadcast. CBS, for example, has a ton of HD shows. Almost all of their prime time programming, and mmuch of their sports programming (like the NFL playoffs and Superbowl) are in HD. Using the whole pipe, the HD video looks incredible.
Some broadcasters, have gone the other route, and choose to stuff as many lo-res SDTV streams into that channel as possible. These show up as sub-channels, e.g. 46-1, 46-2, 46-3, etc. The worst example of this is the PAX network. They gladly take the free channel allocated by the FCC, then say they have no interest in broadcasting HDTV. They actually want to re-sell space on their channel to let other people broadcast in the subchannels. They have come up with several other for-profit uses for the public's spectrum. Hopefully the FCC will bitch slap them.
-- There are a few other corner cases.. Like Fox. Reportedly because of equipment restrictions, they broadcast in "Enhanced Definition", not full HD. They broadcast a 480P (DVD resolution), but they are upgrading to 720P. And, some local broadcasters choose to change the network broadcast format. Some add a subchannel on top of the network 1080i feed, decreasing the bandwidth for the HD stream. Some programming looks okay like this. But, any fast action / sports scenes suffer.
There's enormous confusion about whether DVD video is progressive or interlaced. Here's the one true answer: Progressive-source video (such as from film) is usually encoded on DVD as interlaced field pairs that can be re-interleaved by a progressive player to recreate the original progressive video.
The video is encoded in interlaced form, for direct playback on the 99% of TV's that are standard NTSC SDTV's. The MPEG stream is flagged for progressive content, so a progressive DVD player can reconstruct the original source frames.
I playmost DVD's through my "MyHD PCI Card" which upscales to 720P or 1080i. It reports some information about the source stream, and every DVD shows up as "720x480i".
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what you mean by "it will still show crap on whatever screen it's made of". Is that something like "all your base are belong to us"?
If you are talking about problems displaying SD programs on an HDTV, you're right if they just broadcast them in SD they look bad. But, many shows have been recorded on film and can make a really nice transfer for HDTV. The bigger problem is the 16:9 aspect ratio with material intended for 4:3.
HDNet sometimes shows Hogan's Heros episodes, where the old film was xferred to HDTV. The quality looks very nice, the content is another matter.
HDNet movies shows a lot of old classic movies, again tranferred from film. They look great in HD.
Actually, the original post does mix up profit & revenue. He mentions the 'revenue' at Apple is generated by the hardware. But, with 30M songs sold as of Jan '04, that's $29.7M of revenue. But, according to some claims, they lose money on that, generating no Profit.
As you point out, Napster's revenue is very small. But, in the context of the original argument, this would mean that even if their revenue grew, their loss would just keep growing because of the unprofitable business model.
I just noticed that the first lawyer listed on this SCO document is "Brent O. Hatch", the son of Utah Senator Orrin Hatch.
User Mode Linux looks attractive.. In the past, I have used chroot jails to secure any network services that were externally accessible.
But, that was a pain in the ass to set up and update. The server machine was stripped down, for security reasons. So, I had to build the application & updates on a seperate development machine. Then, copy the environment over. It was a painful process.. I couldn't just use updated packages from the project or linux distro. Of course, this leads to not staying up to date on all the updates... which is very bad for security.
What would be nice is a self contained UML application image, where the whole basic OS is set up, and includes the desired application(s). Such as postfix, with Spamassassin. Updates would be created with this environment in mind.
I get the open mail relay stuff.. obviously spammers can abuse those to hide their tracks and avoid IP address filters & spam lists.
But, they say that spammers use open proxies too. Sure, you don't want to leave your proxy open for various reasons.. But, I didn't think spam was one of them. It's not like they're spamming through some webmail service or something. And, with the way the document is worded, mixing the MTA & proxy issues, it makes the doc less clear.
.
> It has little to do with marketing budgets
The distinction I made was between profitability and revenue.
Profitability = ( Revenue - Costs ) / Revenue
So, if the Mac group spends relatively little on advertising, their profit margin increases. By the way, marketing is a lot more than ads in Macworld.. there are all kinds of expenses related to getting the product out there.
> 1)MS Office for PCs? Included with almost every PC for nearly free
You clearly have no clue here. Office is included for free in exactly ZERO pc purchases. Some manufacturers include Microsoft Works with their PC's. But, that is not free either, it's merely bundled into the price of the PC.
But, the home user buying a Dell is not their big revenue generator either. It's selling high volume licenses to corporations that makes them the bulk of the Office money.
The Mac Office revenue is a very small percentage of the Windows Office revenue. Probably somewhere around the commonly quoted 5% share of the market that Macs have.
It may be profitable, because they have very low marketing expenses for Mac products (do they market them at all?).
But, I'm sure it's a rounding error in the revenue picture. In that realm, MS is dominated by the OS and Office money manking monopolies.
--
That's doubtful.. The OS and Office divisions are the cash cows for Microsoft. There is no way the Mac group is more profitable than the Office group.
--
More like "from the bread-and-butter-dept". Microsoft's Macintosh division is one of its most profitable, and a profit-making division at Microsoft is getting be something of a rarity what with the company loosing money through the nose in countless divisions. In fact, I believe there's only one division more profitable- the OS division.
Is that true? How would the system boot if all the files were encrypted? Minimally, it would need to load a stub that allowed it to access the filesystem and request authentication from the user.
Also, on the Windows system I checked, it was not a simple one-click operation. It was more like:
- Right Click object to encrypt
- Select "Properties" from the popup menu
- In the "General" tab, click the "Advanced..." button
- In the Advanced Attributes dialog, select the option for "Encrypt contents to secure data".
Not exactly rocket science, but not obvious for your average Windows user.
OS X 10.3 has a feature called "File Vault" that encrypts your home dir with 128 bit AES.. Maybe that's what he is referring to.
Of course, NTFS also allows for encrypted files.. Though, I've never seen any details about how good it is.
In OS X, it's a simple system preferences option to enable this feature.
This may qualify as a Quiet power supply.. But, anything with a fan is not silent.
I have been repeatedly disappointed by other power supplies that were advertised as quiet. I can control the noise in most other components:
- fanless video card - like the GeForce FX 5200
- quiet hard drive, like the Seagate Barracuda line, or one of the newer Maxtors with fluid bearings.
- Quiet heat sink / fan. Zalman flower, or CNPS7000 - lots of surface area. Large/slow fan, or no fan at all.
- Lower power CPU. Via C3 for low horsepower needs, Tualatin 0.13u P3 for midrange, Athlon 64 with "Cool n Quiet" to slow it down when not under load for high end.
- Antec Sonata case - Advertised as quiet.. It's okay, but not great. Has rubber connectors on the hard drive trays to lessen vibration noise.
But the power supplies always end up being the loudest part of the system. With such a limited space to work with, I guess it's difficult to build something quiet.
I will skip this power supply, and go for a truly SILENT, fanless PSU, like one of these:
http://www.deltatronic.de/int/power_supply.html
http://www.siliconacoustics.com/silpc.html
The link the the USPTO did not work for me, so I cannot see the dates on the patent. But, there were companies doing this exact same thing in hotel networks well before WiFi came around.
Find some slashdot fanboy in Ann Arbor, buy him a can 'o pringles, and set up a wireless link to you house.
/.'s acquisition, couldn't you find a house a little closer to civilization?
By the way, with assloads of money from
The Rovers are using vxworks... But the engineers could be using anything on their desktops.
I don't really care if Mickey Mouse cartoons are protected for 200 years from their creation date (or indefinitely, as Disney will eventually pay off enough congressmen to get).
But, that should not drag every other piece of work along with it. To keep a copyright active, they should keep the default copyright mechanism they have today, for a short period of time, like 7-15 years. Then, require them to register the work for copyright extensions of 5-10 years. As it is now, they were gifted these huge copyright powers. They need to take some responsibility for the system needed to maintain that, and the bureaucracy to manage a legitimate copyright management system (i.e. fees for copyright renewals fund the bureaucracy, and copyright management systems).
This is a trivial task for big evil companies, like Disney, to keep copyright on their immensely valuable properties. And, it would ease the burden of copyright validation on the vast majority of other works.
That's the core problem here.. When Disney was lobbying to get copyrights extended again, most people said "so what?". It's not easy to show to 'random citizen' how this could effect him/her.
Compound that with the "new digital age" thinking that seems to be prevalent in congress, and we've got a problem. They all seem to think that America's best way to stay competitive is to create a lot of legal support for "Intellectual Property".
But, since it's the Disneys of the world that are in their ears, they don't think of anything beyond protecting Mickey Mouse from any exploitation.
> What all these papers have in common is that they find that increasing the pipeline depth past 20 stages increases performance.
Is that a typo, or am I misinterpreting the papers you liked above?
In all but the Intel paper, it looked to me like they were saying the optimal pipeline depth was somewhere between 6 and 20 (depending on workload).
In the introduction of the Intel paper, it says "Focusing on single stream performance". So, basically they are focusing on artificial benchmark performance.
You mean like the "Cool 'n Quiet" feature of the Athlon 64, where it slows down when not under load?
The Apple G5's do this, as well as most mobile CPU's. The VIA C3's and Transmeta CPU's also can do this.
I don't think the P4's have this capability. They will slow the system down when it reaches a temperature threshhold, to keep it from frying itself. Is that what you were referring to?
Hopefully Intel will catch up on this with their next processor release. It's a great feature for home servers, which are lightly loaded most of the time. Or, even for workstations.. I don't need a lot of CPU to browse the web and respond on slashdot.
Right on, dude.. I am waiting for the new C5P, which is about the size of a penny.. It has very low heat/power characteristics, and decent performance. If I could find a very small case that still allows a 3.5" HDD, it would be the perfect Linux server. Fanless operation, with a quiet Maxtor 250GB hard drive would make for a nice quiet system.
The dual processor reference board also had two 100Mbps Ethernet ports, and a DVI video port.. I want one!
Exactly.. All we have here is an older guy who got tired of the cold winters in the NorthEast. The station was nice enough, or valued him highly enough, to work with him and allow him to broadcast remotely.
This is not the same as the other trend of local stations outsourcing their news to same generic centralized national news network.. Eliminating any local/personal perspective and using the radio equivalent of USA Today to save a few bucks.
The fact that they hide this from their listeners is a bit questionable. But, it's not a big deal. The guy is a long time Bostonian, doing news specifically for Boston.. Do you also insist that he is the guy out investigating the stories on the streets? Is it disingenuous that someone else does the legwork, and the DJ reads the story as if HE figured it all out?
But, Linux is not one single entity...
For the very small scale devices you mention, uClinux (microcrontroller linux) is probably more appropriate.
uClinux is used in everything from modems to DVD players.
What the hell was AMD thinking?
Obviously, the Socket 754 was a mistake... they are dropping it only months after introducing a new processor on it. So, those of us with our shiny new Athlon 64's have very limited upgrade potential. But, I can see the logic in moving to a dual channel memory design (but they should have decided this prior to release, not immediately after).
But, the Socket 939 / Socket 940 thing is even more baffling.. With the pin count only differing by one, there can't be too much difference between the two sockets. So, why drop the Socket 940?? What was the justification for this move???
Your point is valid, for the jump from Socket A to something better..
It does not explain the Socket 754, Socket 939, Socket 940 confusion. They are all for the same generation of processors. AMD is abandoning two socket/processor models only months after introducing them.
Not only is this bad for users, it's bad for AMD.. Most people are holding off on purchasing Athlon 64's because of this.
Obviously SCOX picked a company that they thought would do anything to avoid bad press or litigation. In the sensitive time before an IPO, this is the last thing they need. So, yes.. it's basically extortion.
These tactics may work, on companies that are vulnerable to FUD, Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.
This is why it's a bad move to pick Google.. They could hardly find a worse candidate. They are full of young, Linux savvy engineers, and their CEO is Eric Schmidt, who was top techie at Sun for many years, and then CEO at Novell - he definitely knows what's up both in Unix history and the SCOX licensing with Novell . The Uncertainty and Doubt areas are gone.. like most of us, they see the SCOX claims for the bullshit they are. The only question is whether the Fear about their successful IPO will win out. I could hardly blame them for settling quietly, but I hope they do not.
The fact that SCOX is now publicizing this suggests that Google is not going the 'settle quietly' route. If they were, we would be reading SCOX press releases about the great success of their licensing program.
Digital television is the new broadcast standard. It gives the broadcaster a 19.4Mbps data stream. An HDTV broadcast (either 1920x1080 interlaced, or 1280x720 progressive) is the common usage.
The use of that space is not specified. Most broadcasters use it for a single HD broadcast. CBS, for example, has a ton of HD shows. Almost all of their prime time programming, and mmuch of their sports programming (like the NFL playoffs and Superbowl) are in HD. Using the whole pipe, the HD video looks incredible.
Some broadcasters, have gone the other route, and choose to stuff as many lo-res SDTV streams into that channel as possible. These show up as sub-channels, e.g. 46-1, 46-2, 46-3, etc. The worst example of this is the PAX network. They gladly take the free channel allocated by the FCC, then say they have no interest in broadcasting HDTV. They actually want to re-sell space on their channel to let other people broadcast in the subchannels. They have come up with several other for-profit uses for the public's spectrum. Hopefully the FCC will bitch slap them.
-- There are a few other corner cases.. Like Fox. Reportedly because of equipment restrictions, they broadcast in "Enhanced Definition", not full HD. They broadcast a 480P (DVD resolution), but they are upgrading to 720P. And, some local broadcasters choose to change the network broadcast format. Some add a subchannel on top of the network 1080i feed, decreasing the bandwidth for the HD stream. Some programming looks okay like this. But, any fast action / sports scenes suffer.
Here is a FAQ entry from a DVD site:
There's enormous confusion about whether DVD video is progressive or interlaced. Here's the one true answer: Progressive-source video (such as from film) is usually encoded on DVD as interlaced field pairs that can be re-interleaved by a progressive player to recreate the original progressive video.
The video is encoded in interlaced form, for direct playback on the 99% of TV's that are standard NTSC SDTV's. The MPEG stream is flagged for progressive content, so a progressive DVD player can reconstruct the original source frames.
I playmost DVD's through my "MyHD PCI Card" which upscales to 720P or 1080i. It reports some information about the source stream, and every DVD shows up as "720x480i".