It wouldn't kill OSS if the liability was limited to the purchase price. That's plenty of liability to keep commercial vendors interested in fixing flaws, and it doesn't hurt the little guy.
Do you have any evidence that these $50+ dollar filters at the site the parent poster linked to are higher quality than the ones you get from your phone company? The most complicated one of these things can get is a resistor, capacitor, and OpAmp. If you buyt *the best* of those, you're still only talking a couple dollars in components.
These things aren't complicated, and the most expensive parts are the enclosure and jacks.
Don't know if you ever maintained a PC with a SCSI bus, but the same thing happens with SCSI. You have to put a "terminator" on each unused SCSI port, or the bus stops working. The terminator apparently prevents signals from bouncing off the open port and reflecting back into the bus. I'm not an EE, but I figure it's probably the same principle at work with DSL filters.
It's not the same principle at all. A damned good thing too, or all the branches there are in your wiring would prevent DSL from ever working.
A DSL filter is exactly what it sounds like. It filters out certain frequencies from the signal. The frequencies that your DSL modem uses are not allowed to pass through the filter in either direction, which prevents you from hearing them on your phone, and prevents any noise that your phone might generate in those frequency ranges from interfering with your DSL signals. The problem is that noise can come from bad wiring too, which is why putting the filter and DSL modem in the line as early as possible gives you better signal. The only reason they give you filters for your phone jacks is because it's cheaper to send you a bunch of filters with RJ-11 jacks on them than to send a tech out to install the filter at the point of entry.
The only thing I can think of to explain the situation that you described would be a short in the jack that is relieved simply by plugging something in and moving the conductors a bit... That or tech support was covering for a screw-up on their end.
You don't need a filter on jacks that don't have a phone attached. Electrically, it doesn't make any sense.
Having lots of jacks and lots of junctions in your inside wiring will cause interference though. One bad junction on the non-filtered side of the wiring will wreck your DSL signal.
However, the telcos get really bitchy about you tapping into the box.
Funny, my box says "Customer Access" right on the front... Besides, it's part of my house. They could bitch all they want, but it belongs to me, as does the aerial wire between the pole and my roof. (And they're in perfect agreement that it belongs to me when something happens to it and it comes time to pay to have it fixed...)
I hate to tell you this, but a splitter is just a filter. Your service improvement is due to putting a single filter in front of all your inside wiring rather than putting filters on every single jack, but it's still just a filter. You get raw phone connection to the data terminals on the splitter, and a filtered connection on the phone terminals.
There's no reason to pay $57 for what your DSL provider gave you for free plus a fancy plastic enclosure. Just cut the RJ-11 jack off one of the filters they give you and wire up your own 'splitter' in a $2 junction box.
Now that those "Acceptable Use Policies" don't mean anything, I no longer have to bother reading them before clicking the checkbox... No more losing sleep worrying about getting sued when I write scripts that blatantly violate the AUPs either.
I can take the battery out of the machine entirely and it would be dead in six days. As LiIon batteries age, their self-discharge rate increases. The machine isn't using the power at all.
Your watch has a lithium-manganese battery rather than a lithium-ion battery. They sound the same, but they are completely different things. Those batteries are specifically designed to have incredibly low self discharge rates, while laptop batteries are designed for capacity and rapid charging. It's not really fair to compare the two.
I don't know what you've been doing wrong, but sleep mode is a function of the hardware on all the machines you listed. Short of flipping the wrong bit, the OS shouldn't matter at all. OS 9.2 and Linux both sleep perfectly on my powerbook, and on my Dual G4 450... Worked great on the original blue iBook I used to have too... If it wasn't working for you, you should have sent the machine back to Apple.
I can leave my powerbook asleep for 6 days before it runs out of battery. I can leave it off for.... 6 days before it runs out of battery. That tells me that the amount of electricity I'd be saving by shutting down instead of sleeping is too small to measure casually. Regardless of what you may think, the self-refresh mode of modern DRAM is very efficient, to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if you used more electricity booting up once then you do in sleep mode all day. A pair of AAs could probably refresh your computer's DRAM for a month or longer (depending on how much you have, of course).
This may not be the case on some PCs. Mac sleep mode is legendary for how good it is, and PC sleep mode is notorious for how bad it is... Some of my PCs leave the fans spinning in sleep mode, for example. Others work great. I make no arguments or excuses for shitty components.
In the end, their life is not endless party with coke and top models, but they make a realy decent living out of their work and still have their soul.
Are you saying that's what major label musician's lives are like? Well OK, but only if you take out 'endless'. For most bands. the party is over once the label calls in the loan that was their 'advance'.
Record labels are like loan sharks that get away with it.
Gaming consoles have basically passed PC's in performance, and especially in performance vs price.
For the bulk of PC gamers (most of them aren't hardcore or 'n00bs'), the PC is their platform of choice because they have one for some other reason already. The price of a console will never beat that. Besides, I'd be willing to bet that most of those 'knuckleheads' you speak of probably pirate their Windows to save a few hundred bucks to spend on GPU.
Vista would ensure a nice system that is known to work well and would limit your QA costs by limiting your hardware.
Doing something that cuts your QA costs isn't such a good move when it cuts your potential revenue by multiples of your entire budget.
If Vista uptake occurs at the same speed as XP uptake, writing a Vista Only game would make as much sense as writing a Linux Only game for quite a while. Microsoft has a chicken and egg problem. Game exclusivity could speed Vista adoption, but Vista adoption has to be accelerated to get game exclusivity. The only way out of the situation is either patience, or much *much* more likely, strongarming developers. I'm betting Xbox 360 development will be contingent on agreening to make the PC version of your 360 game for Vista only. If that's true, it will become one of the many reasons that, no matter how good it is, nobody should buy an Xbox.
(Moderation Hint: There is no trolling or flamebait in this comment. I'm not trying to raise tempers or draw flames; I'm being serious.)
However I can point out one that might not have been considered by the simulation: The registers. While tons o' registers sounds like nothing but a boon, you have to remeber that on any system you are likely to see today, you are going to be running a multi-tasking OS. Well, that of course means every time the OS switches tasks, all the registers need to be saved, so the task can resume properly when it switches back. Not a big deal if you are saving the 30 or so registers more processors have. Gets to be a little more problematic if you are talking a couple thousand, which it sounds like the Cell is.
When running HPTC tasks, processing units are reserved for exactly the reason you describe. Preemptive multi-tasking (if it's done at all, which isn't a given) is only done on a subset of the compute units (this may be a cluster node, a CPU, etc...) while the others are free to run the CPU bound task without worry of context switches. This is also the way the Cell architecture is intended to be used, which is why they can get away with having so many registers.
Incidentally, even in general purpose computing on modern operating systems, it isn't uncommon only to save a subset of the registers depending on what kind of context change is occuring for performance reasons.
Also, I think you are a little overly optimistic on memory speeds. For example the fastest desktop systems these days (which actually have faster RAM speeds than servers due to lack of error correction) on x86 get memory speends in the 5-6GB/sec range on a real computer, running a peak theoritical benchmark. For example on my system I get 4.8GB/sec, using DDR2 RAM rated to 5.3GB/sec at the speed it's running. You can get a little faster with a faster CPU and bus, but not much. That's on a bus with the theoritical max bandwidth of 10GB/sec (according to the test software at least).
Talking about quadrupling that, well that's a hell of a feat. Where you'd even get RAM that can do that is a good question. Currently the fastest DDR2 DIMMs on the market are about 8.5GB/sec theoritical in dual channel configs and they aren't cheap. So to achieve memory numbers like you are talking about you now need much faster RAM than is on the market.
RAM performance is largely a function of how much money you're willing to spend. The memory in commodity servers and your desktop computer is slow because it is designed as much for the low transistor count as it is for the speed. There is already MUCH faster memory in your desktop computer, but only a very small amount because of how much die space it takes up. The DRAM you use as main system memory is very cost efficient because bits are stored with a single transistor and a capacitor. This makes it slow, however, because the charge in the capacitor has to be refreshed, and the bits cannot be accessed while this is occuring. There are other alternatives, however. SRAM uses 6 transistors, and thus is signifigantly more expensive, but can be had at speeds in the hundreds of gigabits per second in multi-channel configurations.
I thought the article was about bullshit statistics. If you want to make a principled argument, that's fine, but don't pretend for a moment that it makes the BSA right. The're not wrong because they're defending copyright. They're wrong because they're flat out lying about the numbers in order to onfluence lawmakers.
The parents to your post aren't argumenting that the people pirating software are right; they're arguing that it doesn't have the effect that the BSA says it does.
That's not surprising. You picked the moble OS with the worst interface on the planet. Instead of being designed to be useable, it was designed to look like Windows.
In Palm OS the same operation is 4 or 5 button clicks including time entry (depending on if your alarm falls on the hour)... It has the option of being more, because there are three ways to do it (hotkeys, stylus, directional navigator) but 3 is all you need. Calendar Button, New, , Enter. I do it all the time with one hand without even looking at the screen.
Yeah, yeah, it doesn't have any eye-candy and looks the same as it did in 1997. So what. It *works*.
However, the first time they use it to identify a criminal, thus making every person in the database a potential suspect, it becomes a civil liberties issue.
But together these stories reflect something real and very scary for Sony: that since Rootkitgate or maybe E3
As a percentage of the population, practically nobody knows about the 'rootkit' thing (It wasn't even a rootkit, but we all call it that now ever since the telephone game changed it from 'uses rootkit technology' to 'rootkit'). Same goes for rumors like this. Most people don't follow day to day platform news.
Slashdot Mirror
It wouldn't kill OSS if the liability was limited to the purchase price. That's plenty of liability to keep commercial vendors interested in fixing flaws, and it doesn't hurt the little guy.
Do you have any evidence that these $50+ dollar filters at the site the parent poster linked to are higher quality than the ones you get from your phone company? The most complicated one of these things can get is a resistor, capacitor, and OpAmp. If you buyt *the best* of those, you're still only talking a couple dollars in components.
These things aren't complicated, and the most expensive parts are the enclosure and jacks.
Don't know if you ever maintained a PC with a SCSI bus, but the same thing happens with SCSI. You have to put a "terminator" on each unused SCSI port, or the bus stops working. The terminator apparently prevents signals from bouncing off the open port and reflecting back into the bus. I'm not an EE, but I figure it's probably the same principle at work with DSL filters.
It's not the same principle at all. A damned good thing too, or all the branches there are in your wiring would prevent DSL from ever working.
A DSL filter is exactly what it sounds like. It filters out certain frequencies from the signal. The frequencies that your DSL modem uses are not allowed to pass through the filter in either direction, which prevents you from hearing them on your phone, and prevents any noise that your phone might generate in those frequency ranges from interfering with your DSL signals. The problem is that noise can come from bad wiring too, which is why putting the filter and DSL modem in the line as early as possible gives you better signal. The only reason they give you filters for your phone jacks is because it's cheaper to send you a bunch of filters with RJ-11 jacks on them than to send a tech out to install the filter at the point of entry.
The only thing I can think of to explain the situation that you described would be a short in the jack that is relieved simply by plugging something in and moving the conductors a bit... That or tech support was covering for a screw-up on their end.
You don't need a filter on jacks that don't have a phone attached. Electrically, it doesn't make any sense.
Having lots of jacks and lots of junctions in your inside wiring will cause interference though. One bad junction on the non-filtered side of the wiring will wreck your DSL signal.
However, the telcos get really bitchy about you tapping into the box.
Funny, my box says "Customer Access" right on the front... Besides, it's part of my house. They could bitch all they want, but it belongs to me, as does the aerial wire between the pole and my roof. (And they're in perfect agreement that it belongs to me when something happens to it and it comes time to pay to have it fixed...)
I hate to tell you this, but a splitter is just a filter. Your service improvement is due to putting a single filter in front of all your inside wiring rather than putting filters on every single jack, but it's still just a filter. You get raw phone connection to the data terminals on the splitter, and a filtered connection on the phone terminals.
There's no reason to pay $57 for what your DSL provider gave you for free plus a fancy plastic enclosure. Just cut the RJ-11 jack off one of the filters they give you and wire up your own 'splitter' in a $2 junction box.
Now that those "Acceptable Use Policies" don't mean anything, I no longer have to bother reading them before clicking the checkbox... No more losing sleep worrying about getting sued when I write scripts that blatantly violate the AUPs either.
I can take the battery out of the machine entirely and it would be dead in six days. As LiIon batteries age, their self-discharge rate increases. The machine isn't using the power at all.
Your watch has a lithium-manganese battery rather than a lithium-ion battery. They sound the same, but they are completely different things. Those batteries are specifically designed to have incredibly low self discharge rates, while laptop batteries are designed for capacity and rapid charging. It's not really fair to compare the two.
I don't know what you've been doing wrong, but sleep mode is a function of the hardware on all the machines you listed. Short of flipping the wrong bit, the OS shouldn't matter at all. OS 9.2 and Linux both sleep perfectly on my powerbook, and on my Dual G4 450... Worked great on the original blue iBook I used to have too... If it wasn't working for you, you should have sent the machine back to Apple.
I'd be willing to bet that a signifigant portion of that less-than-one-watt is the inefficiency of the AC power supply.
I can leave my powerbook asleep for 6 days before it runs out of battery. I can leave it off for.... 6 days before it runs out of battery. That tells me that the amount of electricity I'd be saving by shutting down instead of sleeping is too small to measure casually. Regardless of what you may think, the self-refresh mode of modern DRAM is very efficient, to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if you used more electricity booting up once then you do in sleep mode all day. A pair of AAs could probably refresh your computer's DRAM for a month or longer (depending on how much you have, of course).
This may not be the case on some PCs. Mac sleep mode is legendary for how good it is, and PC sleep mode is notorious for how bad it is... Some of my PCs leave the fans spinning in sleep mode, for example. Others work great. I make no arguments or excuses for shitty components.
In the end, their life is not endless party with coke and top models, but they make a realy decent living out of their work and still have their soul.
Are you saying that's what major label musician's lives are like? Well OK, but only if you take out 'endless'. For most bands. the party is over once the label calls in the loan that was their 'advance'.
Record labels are like loan sharks that get away with it.
Gaming consoles have basically passed PC's in performance, and especially in performance vs price.
For the bulk of PC gamers (most of them aren't hardcore or 'n00bs'), the PC is their platform of choice because they have one for some other reason already. The price of a console will never beat that. Besides, I'd be willing to bet that most of those 'knuckleheads' you speak of probably pirate their Windows to save a few hundred bucks to spend on GPU.
Vista would ensure a nice system that is known to work well and would limit your QA costs by limiting your hardware.
Doing something that cuts your QA costs isn't such a good move when it cuts your potential revenue by multiples of your entire budget.
If Vista uptake occurs at the same speed as XP uptake, writing a Vista Only game would make as much sense as writing a Linux Only game for quite a while. Microsoft has a chicken and egg problem. Game exclusivity could speed Vista adoption, but Vista adoption has to be accelerated to get game exclusivity. The only way out of the situation is either patience, or much *much* more likely, strongarming developers. I'm betting Xbox 360 development will be contingent on agreening to make the PC version of your 360 game for Vista only. If that's true, it will become one of the many reasons that, no matter how good it is, nobody should buy an Xbox.
(Moderation Hint: There is no trolling or flamebait in this comment. I'm not trying to raise tempers or draw flames; I'm being serious.)
Bases are for wusses that use Arabic numerals.
Clearly you're not MCCCXXXVII.
... Without the black background, is Slashdot less '31337' now?
However I can point out one that might not have been considered by the simulation: The registers. While tons o' registers sounds like nothing but a boon, you have to remeber that on any system you are likely to see today, you are going to be running a multi-tasking OS. Well, that of course means every time the OS switches tasks, all the registers need to be saved, so the task can resume properly when it switches back. Not a big deal if you are saving the 30 or so registers more processors have. Gets to be a little more problematic if you are talking a couple thousand, which it sounds like the Cell is.
When running HPTC tasks, processing units are reserved for exactly the reason you describe. Preemptive multi-tasking (if it's done at all, which isn't a given) is only done on a subset of the compute units (this may be a cluster node, a CPU, etc...) while the others are free to run the CPU bound task without worry of context switches. This is also the way the Cell architecture is intended to be used, which is why they can get away with having so many registers.
Incidentally, even in general purpose computing on modern operating systems, it isn't uncommon only to save a subset of the registers depending on what kind of context change is occuring for performance reasons.
Also, I think you are a little overly optimistic on memory speeds. For example the fastest desktop systems these days (which actually have faster RAM speeds than servers due to lack of error correction) on x86 get memory speends in the 5-6GB/sec range on a real computer, running a peak theoritical benchmark. For example on my system I get 4.8GB/sec, using DDR2 RAM rated to 5.3GB/sec at the speed it's running. You can get a little faster with a faster CPU and bus, but not much. That's on a bus with the theoritical max bandwidth of 10GB/sec (according to the test software at least).
Talking about quadrupling that, well that's a hell of a feat. Where you'd even get RAM that can do that is a good question. Currently the fastest DDR2 DIMMs on the market are about 8.5GB/sec theoritical in dual channel configs and they aren't cheap. So to achieve memory numbers like you are talking about you now need much faster RAM than is on the market.
RAM performance is largely a function of how much money you're willing to spend. The memory in commodity servers and your desktop computer is slow because it is designed as much for the low transistor count as it is for the speed. There is already MUCH faster memory in your desktop computer, but only a very small amount because of how much die space it takes up. The DRAM you use as main system memory is very cost efficient because bits are stored with a single transistor and a capacitor. This makes it slow, however, because the charge in the capacitor has to be refreshed, and the bits cannot be accessed while this is occuring. There are other alternatives, however. SRAM uses 6 transistors, and thus is signifigantly more expensive, but can be had at speeds in the hundreds of gigabits per second in multi-channel configurations.
You aren't some kind of terrorist sympathizer, are you?
It's worse than that. He's (gasp) not funded by ad revenue.
We have to silence him immediatly, or he may pose a threat to our essential entertainment industry.
When did this become an argument about copyright?
I thought the article was about bullshit statistics. If you want to make a principled argument, that's fine, but don't pretend for a moment that it makes the BSA right. The're not wrong because they're defending copyright. They're wrong because they're flat out lying about the numbers in order to onfluence lawmakers.
The parents to your post aren't argumenting that the people pirating software are right; they're arguing that it doesn't have the effect that the BSA says it does.
That's not surprising. You picked the moble OS with the worst interface on the planet. Instead of being designed to be useable, it was designed to look like Windows.
In Palm OS the same operation is 4 or 5 button clicks including time entry (depending on if your alarm falls on the hour)... It has the option of being more, because there are three ways to do it (hotkeys, stylus, directional navigator) but 3 is all you need. Calendar Button, New, , Enter. I do it all the time with one hand without even looking at the screen.
Yeah, yeah, it doesn't have any eye-candy and looks the same as it did in 1997. So what. It *works*.
However, the first time they use it to identify a criminal, thus making every person in the database a potential suspect, it becomes a civil liberties issue.
Is it good for consumers if it means that players and media are removed from the market?
This issue, like most things, isn't as black and white as people around here seem to like to think.
But together these stories reflect something real and very scary for Sony: that since Rootkitgate or maybe E3
As a percentage of the population, practically nobody knows about the 'rootkit' thing (It wasn't even a rootkit, but we all call it that now ever since the telephone game changed it from 'uses rootkit technology' to 'rootkit'). Same goes for rumors like this. Most people don't follow day to day platform news.
Young people outnumber old people.
They may not vote right now, but there is some magic marginal tax rate line out there that, once crossed, will turn young people into voters.
Too bad the future doesn't include columnists looking back on 2005-2006 and creating a laundry list of all the crap they got wrong.