As far as I can tell, there are no laws against buying from allofmp3
If that's your only concern, if the only thing that stops you from doing something unethical is "it's illegal", then frankly I don't see much difference between you and the labels. Neither of you has a moral compass to speak of, your only concern is your own self-interest.
Artists might only get a fraction of the cover price of a CD through the major labels, but they don't get anything from allofmp3.com. There's no ethical difference between downloading commercial music from allofmp3 and downloading it illegally via a P2P network. If you don't want your money to go to the labels, then buy different music, or buy directly from the artist. If you don't know how, just type "audioblog" into Google's search box and follow the links.
We use Microsoft Windows Media Digital Rights Management software to make sure all the music you have is fast, safe and protected. For more information about Microsoft DRM, click here.
Won't play on any open systems or open source operating system, won't play in any open-source player, can't be burned to an audio CD, won't play in either of my MP3 players (only one of which is an iPod), won't even play on Windows 2000 unless I agree to let Microsoft install a rootkit called Windows Media Player 9 (Windows XP comes with Microsoft's rootkit pre-installed, which is another reason I'm sticking with Windows 2000 for my game console).
Since I don't have a Golden Ear, I'll stick with the honor-system DRM that iTMS uses, or buy physical CDs since they're often cheaper than iTMS for classical music, and there's a much better range available, and the great stuff I find on audioblogs is rarely available through label-driven digital music stores anyway.
For more information about Microsoft DRM, click here.
"how many times that software applications created the same problem? Lots. I wonder whether they've taken as aggressive steps as SonyBMG has when those vulnerabilities were discovered, or did they just post a patch on the Internet?"
Not only has Microsoft implemented a far worse design, they went up against the DoJ to keep that design in place, and have not only refused to actually back out the design flaw (having a mechanism whereby a document can execute unsandboxed code based only on information available to the ActiveX control that renders the document), but have made an allegedly safer version the core of a new API (.NET).
To quote John Brunner, "There is no difference, both are evil".
Whoever used "blur" instead of "unfocus" or "defocus" in Javascript was clearly a skilled practicioner of this kind of tomfoolery.
Yes, yes, if you defocus a lens the image blurs. That doesn't mean "blur" is the opposite of "focus" EVEN IN OPTICS, let alone where it's only being used as a metaphor. Oh, if any smartarse wants to make a comment about how they didn;t invent it (if indeed they didn't), I don't care. I don't care if Schroodleheim and Wurzelburg used "blur" in this context on page 451 of their seminal work on user interface design, or if it's even common slang at some lab or campus or prestigious project, it's a stupid bloody name.
One of the things you pay for from Intel is a gaurentee. If they claim a chip operates at speed X, they mean it.
That's not always the case. They have had to be pushed pretty hard into honoring that guarantee in the past. Remember the Pentium F00F bug?
I'm more interested in the question of how you can sell a Celeron as a Pentium and disguise it from the OS when the amount of cache is different in the two processors.
The problems with active content and the myriad associated exploits in Internet Explorer are that untrusted web pages from third parties provide a mechanism to "spoof" the security into running as trusted components. This doesn't apply to iTunes in any way, because iTunes only displays content from iTMS.
It does, however, apply to Windows Media Player and Realplayer... both of which use the inherently insecure Microsoft HTML Control to display untrusted content!
The cellphone companies have built their networks through the process of captialism
I guess "captialism" is another word for "government enforced monopolies"... on bandwidth, on protocols and interfaces (though software and other process patents), and in some cases subsidies and enforced franchises.
One major thing that make iTunes different from other music player apps is the Music Store integration, which operates as a limited web browser. On OSX it calls WebKit; on Windows either Apple built a custom minibrower or it calls Explorer. Does anyone know which, BTW?
As of the last time I checked into this, iTMS does not use HTML or Webkit: the things that look like they might be web pages in iTunes are actually laid out by other mechanisms.
Type Managers can include basic manipulation, but should not be a full blown editor.
A type manager is a browser interface optimised for a specific type of object.
There's no reason it can't conceptually allow arbitrarily complex operations on those objects, just because the basic interface is a browser. That's just a silly restriction.
I prefer open system software (which open source tends more often to be, though that's not automatically the case) because it gives me better accessibility.
Because no GUI is as accessible as a stream of text in a command line window, which I can manipulate and manage any way I want. The "accessibility" controls in Windows are a poor crutch next to that.
I use it, occasionally, but usually after I've gotten mail or a phone call that lets me know there's a reason to contact someone. It's just too intrusive to stay on all the time. So something that makes IM even more annoying is just, well, what do you expect?
Given that there's no way you're going to have a Quartz-Extreme-capable video card in a $100 laptop, odds are the only part of OS X that they'd end up using would be the part that's already Open Source.
If you're using a computer where someone else is responsible for making it work and keep working, you may be right, though I'm not at all impressed by Gnome... and I wouldn't expect Gnome to be usable on a $100 laptop anyway.
If you're not a geek and you're going to have to do something sane when something goes wrong (or even recognise that something's gone wrong), no.
But that's really irrelevant. Because I would even less expect OS X to be usable on a $100 laptop than I would Gnome. That's the first reason I think OS X is out of the question.
The whole point of this exercise is to come up with a computer [...] without "strings attached".
And that's the second... and more important... one. I agree entirely with your reasoning here.
Based on the reporting over at the register the densest you can go with these CPUs is 1 CPU per RU.
If Sun doesn't take advantage of this option, and doesn't license or sell the processors to someone who will, it'll remain purely theoretical in this case. That doesn't mean that performance/watt isn't a valid metric.
Though I'd rather they took advantage of it by slamming more Niagara chips into a single computer than by promoting the evil of blades.
My understanding is that each physical core has 4 virtual cores, 3 of the 4 are in effect stopped until the one currently running stalls.
That's how "hyperthreading" works, as I understand it, but I suspect you could also describe multiple register contexts that way... the main difference being the role of the OS scheduler in the process.
The Niagara uses Ultrasparc III type cores which have limited single thread performance.
So by "up to four tasks at once" I assume they mean "four register contexts per core" rather than something like hyperthreading?
More interesting is the Next Gen Rock CPU which will have highly parallel Rock CPUs.
But will they actually have better single-thread performance, or will they just support more concurrent threads? It's hard to see how you could resolve the "small register file" problem that register windows lay on optimisers... intel sidesteps it by applying massive amounts of silicon, but that's hardly an option here.
The Sparc architecture has always had a problem getting good straight-line performance, because of the way the register windows constrain the compiler by exposing a small register set to the optimiser while still having the large context switch overhead of a large register set. Sun has long used multiple register contexts and microthreading-like techniques supported by the OS to get good multitasking performance despite these shortcomings, so this is a natural extension of the Sparc family.
And, yes, I'm sure straight-line single-processor performance will be nothing exceptional. But don't knock the impact of lower power... if it uses half the power of a comparable dual-core Opteron then you can fit twice as many processors in a rack, just because of the cooling requirements.
I also wonder what "handling up to four tasks at once" means. This could simply mean they have four traditional Sparc register contexts per core. TFA doesn't go into detail there.
This is on older meme than Burning Chrome or even AIDS.
I think the oldest story I know that's based on a science-fictional approach to this general idea is "The Immortal", a short story (later collected in "The Immortals") by James Gunn.
Google says there was even a TV series based on the story.
My issue in this case is that Mac OS X _does_ have an fstab, is based on an OS that uses fstab, documents the behaviour of fstab, and actually behaves entirely differently to how the admin might expect and what the documentation says.
The documentation also describes nsutil, the netinfo hierarchy, and so on.
They haven't been scrupulous about removing old man pages or documenting which ones are legacy interfaces. But the man pages are still far more complete, consistent, and accurate than any Linux distro I have ever used... where some stuff is documented in man, some in info, some in HTML files in the source directory, some in random places in/usr/share, and some you pretty much have to go to the author's web site to figure out. Admittedly there's always been a confict between/usr/{share,}man and/usr/{share,}doc, and even BSD has had to let some stuff slip into info, but the way Linux comes together out of a karnel and packages and no core at all has just exacerbated the problem immensely.
This is where things turn sour for Apple... If apple allowed Dell to make their generic computers mac compatible and charged only for OS copies sold, then people would buy Dells with Windows and buy MacOS seperately (or copy it) and install it on the generic dell.
And why is this a problem? Whether Apple gets their fee for running Mac OS X on the Dell computer involved from Dell or from the person who buys Mac OS X retail and installs it themselves... they get paid just the same. In practice they would almost certainly get more from the guy who installed it on a generic Dell. The only way they would lose would be if the guy bought the "Upgrade" or "Mac Only" version and installed that on the Dell, but that's no different than the current situation.
MacOS is not and was not ever the only OS that ran on Apple clones.
Technically, no. In practice, though, there were no other operating systems that had any possibility of driving enough sales for the clone manufacturers to consider in their decisions. Running Windows NT or Linux on a Power PC that cost more for the same functionality than an x86-based clone has always been an impractical strategy.
Things are much more stable in the Powerbook, than the Linux desktop with the Nvidia graphics card (on which X.org crashes and freezes up the screen after 5 minutes of use).
Things are more stable in the Powerbook with the nVidia graphics card* than the Linux desktop with the nVidia graphics card?
Me, I find that XFree86 under FreeBSD has been more stable than my Mac mini, with the same ATI 9200 graphics chipset. Pity that the X11 user experience sucks and there's hardly any non-geek software for it.
* OK, maybe you have an ATI card in your Powerbook, it could go either way. Still, Apple's using THE SAME CARDS that generic PCs use.
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The labels aren't that smart. It won't work anyway.
The labels aren't smart enough to do something stupid?
Damn, and I thought I was cynical.
As far as I can tell, there are no laws against buying from allofmp3
If that's your only concern, if the only thing that stops you from doing something unethical is "it's illegal", then frankly I don't see much difference between you and the labels. Neither of you has a moral compass to speak of, your only concern is your own self-interest.
Artists might only get a fraction of the cover price of a CD through the major labels, but they don't get anything from allofmp3.com. There's no ethical difference between downloading commercial music from allofmp3 and downloading it illegally via a P2P network. If you don't want your money to go to the labels, then buy different music, or buy directly from the artist. If you don't know how, just type "audioblog" into Google's search box and follow the links.
We use Microsoft Windows Media Digital Rights Management software to make sure all the music you have is fast, safe and protected. For more information about Microsoft DRM, click here.
Won't play on any open systems or open source operating system, won't play in any open-source player, can't be burned to an audio CD, won't play in either of my MP3 players (only one of which is an iPod), won't even play on Windows 2000 unless I agree to let Microsoft install a rootkit called Windows Media Player 9 (Windows XP comes with Microsoft's rootkit pre-installed, which is another reason I'm sticking with Windows 2000 for my game console).
Since I don't have a Golden Ear, I'll stick with the honor-system DRM that iTMS uses, or buy physical CDs since they're often cheaper than iTMS for classical music, and there's a much better range available, and the great stuff I find on audioblogs is rarely available through label-driven digital music stores anyway.
For more information about Microsoft DRM, click here.
Geeze. Not only didn't you RTFA, you didn't RTFS.
"how many times that software applications created the same problem? Lots. I wonder whether they've taken as aggressive steps as SonyBMG has when those vulnerabilities were discovered, or did they just post a patch on the Internet?"
Not only has Microsoft implemented a far worse design, they went up against the DoJ to keep that design in place, and have not only refused to actually back out the design flaw (having a mechanism whereby a document can execute unsandboxed code based only on information available to the ActiveX control that renders the document), but have made an allegedly safer version the core of a new API (.NET).
To quote John Brunner, "There is no difference, both are evil".
Do you know the word "gullible" isn't in the dictionary?
Whoever used "blur" instead of "unfocus" or "defocus" in Javascript was clearly a skilled practicioner of this kind of tomfoolery.
Yes, yes, if you defocus a lens the image blurs. That doesn't mean "blur" is the opposite of "focus" EVEN IN OPTICS, let alone where it's only being used as a metaphor. Oh, if any smartarse wants to make a comment about how they didn;t invent it (if indeed they didn't), I don't care. I don't care if Schroodleheim and Wurzelburg used "blur" in this context on page 451 of their seminal work on user interface design, or if it's even common slang at some lab or campus or prestigious project, it's a stupid bloody name.
One of the things you pay for from Intel is a gaurentee. If they claim a chip operates at speed X, they mean it.
That's not always the case. They have had to be pushed pretty hard into honoring that guarantee in the past. Remember the Pentium F00F bug?
I'm more interested in the question of how you can sell a Celeron as a Pentium and disguise it from the OS when the amount of cache is different in the two processors.
The problems with active content and the myriad associated exploits in Internet Explorer are that untrusted web pages from third parties provide a mechanism to "spoof" the security into running as trusted components. This doesn't apply to iTunes in any way, because iTunes only displays content from iTMS.
It does, however, apply to Windows Media Player and Realplayer... both of which use the inherently insecure Microsoft HTML Control to display untrusted content!
Erm.
They may be properly speed-graded, but what about the cache?
Or are you saying these are Celerons that just happen to have 512K L2 cache?
The cellphone companies have built their networks through the process of captialism
I guess "captialism" is another word for "government enforced monopolies"... on bandwidth, on protocols and interfaces (though software and other process patents), and in some cases subsidies and enforced franchises.
It's certainly nothing related to "capitalism".
One major thing that make iTunes different from other music player apps is the Music Store integration, which operates as a limited web browser. On OSX it calls WebKit; on Windows either Apple built a custom minibrower or it calls Explorer. Does anyone know which, BTW?
As of the last time I checked into this, iTMS does not use HTML or Webkit: the things that look like they might be web pages in iTunes are actually laid out by other mechanisms.
Where did you find that information? The PDF at the website seems to be a completely different study.
Type Managers can include basic manipulation, but should not be a full blown editor.
A type manager is a browser interface optimised for a specific type of object.
There's no reason it can't conceptually allow arbitrarily complex operations on those objects, just because the basic interface is a browser. That's just a silly restriction.
I prefer open system software (which open source tends more often to be, though that's not automatically the case) because it gives me better accessibility.
Because no GUI is as accessible as a stream of text in a command line window, which I can manipulate and manage any way I want. The "accessibility" controls in Windows are a poor crutch next to that.
I use it, occasionally, but usually after I've gotten mail or a phone call that lets me know there's a reason to contact someone. It's just too intrusive to stay on all the time. So something that makes IM even more annoying is just, well, what do you expect?
Given that there's no way you're going to have a Quartz-Extreme-capable video card in a $100 laptop, odds are the only part of OS X that they'd end up using would be the part that's already Open Source.
Linux is just as easy to use as OS X (I use both)
... and more important ... one. I agree entirely with your reasoning here.
If you're using a computer where someone else is responsible for making it work and keep working, you may be right, though I'm not at all impressed by Gnome... and I wouldn't expect Gnome to be usable on a $100 laptop anyway.
If you're not a geek and you're going to have to do something sane when something goes wrong (or even recognise that something's gone wrong), no.
But that's really irrelevant. Because I would even less expect OS X to be usable on a $100 laptop than I would Gnome. That's the first reason I think OS X is out of the question.
The whole point of this exercise is to come up with a computer [...] without "strings attached".
And that's the second
Based on the reporting over at the register the densest you can go with these CPUs is 1 CPU per RU.
If Sun doesn't take advantage of this option, and doesn't license or sell the processors to someone who will, it'll remain purely theoretical in this case. That doesn't mean that performance/watt isn't a valid metric.
Though I'd rather they took advantage of it by slamming more Niagara chips into a single computer than by promoting the evil of blades.
My understanding is that each physical core has 4 virtual cores, 3 of the 4 are in effect stopped until the one currently running stalls.
That's how "hyperthreading" works, as I understand it, but I suspect you could also describe multiple register contexts that way... the main difference being the role of the OS scheduler in the process.
The Niagara uses Ultrasparc III type cores which have limited single thread performance.
So by "up to four tasks at once" I assume they mean "four register contexts per core" rather than something like hyperthreading?
More interesting is the Next Gen Rock CPU which will have highly parallel Rock CPUs.
But will they actually have better single-thread performance, or will they just support more concurrent threads? It's hard to see how you could resolve the "small register file" problem that register windows lay on optimisers... intel sidesteps it by applying massive amounts of silicon, but that's hardly an option here.
The Sparc architecture has always had a problem getting good straight-line performance, because of the way the register windows constrain the compiler by exposing a small register set to the optimiser while still having the large context switch overhead of a large register set. Sun has long used multiple register contexts and microthreading-like techniques supported by the OS to get good multitasking performance despite these shortcomings, so this is a natural extension of the Sparc family.
And, yes, I'm sure straight-line single-processor performance will be nothing exceptional. But don't knock the impact of lower power... if it uses half the power of a comparable dual-core Opteron then you can fit twice as many processors in a rack, just because of the cooling requirements.
I also wonder what "handling up to four tasks at once" means. This could simply mean they have four traditional Sparc register contexts per core. TFA doesn't go into detail there.
This is on older meme than Burning Chrome or even AIDS.
I think the oldest story I know that's based on a science-fictional approach to this general idea is "The Immortal", a short story (later collected in "The Immortals") by James Gunn.
Google says there was even a TV series based on the story.
My issue in this case is that Mac OS X _does_ have an fstab, is based on an OS that uses fstab, documents the behaviour of fstab, and actually behaves entirely differently to how the admin might expect and what the documentation says.
/usr/share, and some you pretty much have to go to the author's web site to figure out. Admittedly there's always been a confict between /usr/{share,}man and /usr/{share,}doc, and even BSD has had to let some stuff slip into info, but the way Linux comes together out of a karnel and packages and no core at all has just exacerbated the problem immensely.
The documentation also describes nsutil, the netinfo hierarchy, and so on.
They haven't been scrupulous about removing old man pages or documenting which ones are legacy interfaces. But the man pages are still far more complete, consistent, and accurate than any Linux distro I have ever used... where some stuff is documented in man, some in info, some in HTML files in the source directory, some in random places in
This is where things turn sour for Apple... If apple allowed Dell to make their generic computers mac compatible and charged only for OS copies sold, then people would buy Dells with Windows and buy MacOS seperately (or copy it) and install it on the generic dell.
And why is this a problem? Whether Apple gets their fee for running Mac OS X on the Dell computer involved from Dell or from the person who buys Mac OS X retail and installs it themselves... they get paid just the same. In practice they would almost certainly get more from the guy who installed it on a generic Dell. The only way they would lose would be if the guy bought the "Upgrade" or "Mac Only" version and installed that on the Dell, but that's no different than the current situation.
MacOS is not and was not ever the only OS that ran on Apple clones.
Technically, no. In practice, though, there were no other operating systems that had any possibility of driving enough sales for the clone manufacturers to consider in their decisions. Running Windows NT or Linux on a Power PC that cost more for the same functionality than an x86-based clone has always been an impractical strategy.
Things are much more stable in the Powerbook, than the Linux desktop with the Nvidia graphics card (on which X.org crashes and freezes up the screen after 5 minutes of use).
Things are more stable in the Powerbook with the nVidia graphics card* than the Linux desktop with the nVidia graphics card?
Me, I find that XFree86 under FreeBSD has been more stable than my Mac mini, with the same ATI 9200 graphics chipset. Pity that the X11 user experience sucks and there's hardly any non-geek software for it.
* OK, maybe you have an ATI card in your Powerbook, it could go either way. Still, Apple's using THE SAME CARDS that generic PCs use.