As a lifelong resident of "the northern hemisphere" I can say that there's no need to "bundle up warmly!" to see the atmosphere burn. It's only winter according to the calendar. It's really fall. It's 4am here, and the temps just now dipped below freezing. For those whose idea of "the northern hemisphere" is Georgia (the US version, that is), let me explain:
Above 50F, no special precautions are needed. Between 30 and 50, a sweater, light coat, or other provision is recommended but not required. Between 0 and 30, a coat is recommended or required, depending on wind and one's metabolism. Between -40 and 0, "bundle up warmly" is a damn good idea. I've only been in -40 degree weather once, but it sucked. At that point, you don't bundle up warmly, you just try not to leave the house. Which is good, since tractors (and probably cars too) get real pissy at those temps, and want tons of ether before they'll start.
That's my "wimpy city folk" rant for the day. Thank you for your participation.
Hm. That domain isn't on the whitelist for the email address I give out to likely-to-deluge-me-with-spam outfits. Such as ebay. So maybe I got it. Maybe not.
I keep hearing about the "death of email" because of spam. It's really not hard. Pay for a respectable email address and don't give it to *anyone*. Create forwarding addresses that you give out. Apply whitelists to the address(es) you use for commerce. Apply blacklists (or actual spam filters) to the addresses you use for friends, family, etc. Every few weeks I go through the ~1000 emails that got filtered out on the odd chance they're not spam, and delete them. It doesn't take an hour a day - it takes more like an hour a month.
You're almost right. Copyright exists to benefit the public by making incentives for producers to produce. Money is the incentive. When a producer is not making money on something, it should be released into the public domain. An easy way to effect this is as follows:
The term of copyrights is 1 (one) year.
The price of securing a 1 (one) year copyright is $1 (one dollar).
One-year extensions to existing copyrights may be purchased.
Each extension costs twice as much as the previous year's copyright.
Suppose I create a story about widgets. I pay my $1 and nobody can sell my story but me. I sell my story 10 times for $100, so I figure it's worth $2 next year. Next year only 5 people want the story, and I get $50. I'm still ahead, so I renew for two more years, costing $12, and sell $20 worth of widget stories. Now, I can either pay $16 for another year, or I can let go of my copyright and see how many copies I can sell without copyright protection. Since my widget story has little value, it is released into the public domain quickly.
Suppose Disney creates Mickey mouse. They also pay their $1. However, because they're Disney and can afford to do so, they buy 20 years of protection right off the bat. It costs them about $2million, which they make in a year. 19 years of profit - how sweet is that? Disney's still making millions a year off of Mickey, so they figure another year at $2m isn't bad. The 22nd year costs $4m, which is getting up near the break-even point. Soon Disney will release Mickey, continue using and making money from it, and will have benefitted the public good by letting the rest of us finally draw cute mice without getting sued by attack lawyers.
The system is simple and effective. Producers are compensated for high-value inventions and are persuaded but not forced to release these inventions to the public. Individuals can also protect their works cheaply - 5 years costs under $50. Read Cringley's column today about treating IP as a fading asset, and it will become even more clear why this is a good way to solve the problem of copyright terms.
> The idea is that you will be able to order your laptop with anything at all engraved on the surface: your name, a logo, a picture of your kids, whatever.
Now *that* might push me over the edge and get me to buy a Tibook. I know you all think I'm joking, but how wicked-cool would that be? They'd have to get rid of that stupid glowing apple logo thing, but I'd pay $100 if I could get a magic-eye picture of Tux lounging on an iceberg engraved into the lid. Wouldn't you?
I don't even notice unless an app is using over 100M (technically, 100,000KB, but who's counting?)
But it sure would be nice if Windows would notice I have gobs of RAM lying around and start using it for something productive like caching the disk subsystem, rather than the other way around. There is no excuse for a system with >512M of free RAM paging to disk! What ass-backwards VM got stuck into Windows, anyway?
The 75GXPs and to some extent the 60GXPs suffered higher-than-normal failure rates, but these were unrelated to higher areal density. The drives used glass platters and load/unload technology which was apparently not up to the task yet.
Read your MTBF ratings - hard drives are getting better and better. The Seagate drive (admittedly, SCSI) I bought almost 2 years ago claimed 1.2 million hours (over 100 years 24/7). I've seen about 500,000 hours quoted for mainstream IDE drives - about 50 years. Figure that those numbers are under optimal conditions, so divide by 10. Now you've got an "adjusted" MTBF of about 5 years.
Put the drives in a RAID5 array (or an array that allows >1 simultaneous failure if you're really paranoid) in a properly-cooled cabinet in a properly-cooled room. Spinup the drives and read them every month (cat the contents to/dev/null) to let the drives' autocorrection take effect and to check for failed drives. Let the RAID array rebuild if necessary.
When the price of the drives you are using reaches about $50, the drives are at the end of their product lifetime - buy a year's worth of spares and when they're gone copy the data to a new array as above using newer technology (such as serial ATA) and larger drives. Repeat ad nauseum.
Alternately, keep the arrays spinning and use AFS or similar software to replicate volumes across multiple servers. This will protect you from single-drive failures in each array, and multi-drive failures in one array. Keep your individual AFS servers on separate power.
A note about power: BAD POWER KILLS COMPUTERS. Don't skimp on power. Make sure your circuitry can handle the load. Install good power conditioning equipment. Install good battery backups and/or generators. Don't put all your servers on one circuit.
In short, data archiving isn't hard. It's just expensive and time-consuming. Ask yourself what your data is worth and what failures you need it to be able to withstand (one dead drive? 5 dead drives? 1 dead server? Lightning strike? Earthquake?) and build appropriately.
"Movie and recording studios, among others, say the law is necessary to stop pirating of intellectual property, which is made easy when the material is in digital format."
100 comments and nothing about networking with Natalie Portman's clothes? Have I been away too long and the trolls have left, or have they just picked a new topic? I've noticed the Soviet Russia posts (you guys need to move on - you've run out of jokes) but I can't believe the trolling community has unanimously voted on a defunct political entity as their grist for the month.
1. Spend $10.00 (plus tax) to go to a rennovated theatre and play a game that you already own at home for a limited time, but you're good at it and know you'll do great
2. Spend $10.00 (plus tax) to go to a rennovated theatre and play a game that is not availible through any other legal channel, knowing you've never played it before (unless you've gone before) and aren't sure what you're in for, so you might stink in public at something new
I think you're asking the wrong questions. Would you rather
1) spend $1000+ per year keeping your hardware top-notch or 2) spend $10 every now and then for a quick game?
The people asking this set of questions are the ones they're targeting.
Microsoft was prepared to lose as much money as a company like AMD or Nvidia is worth (their current market cap is around $2billion). Now they just released a statement saying they're prepared to lose *more* than that. Microsoft doesn't cede victory to anyone. The PS2 is older and slower and is still outselling the X-box many times over yet Microsoft haven't even blinked.
I for one am loving the PS2/Xbox battle. Microsoft, for all their success, is a young upstart compared to Sony, which has been playing the same game far longer than Microsoft has. Sony almost killed Sega and is kicking Nintendo's ass - they're not about to let some newcomer start playing in their console market. Microsoft though is pretty big too and they play to win. Always.
Will Microsoft learn from their mistakes come time for PS3 v. Xbox2 and come to dominate? Will Sony have learned Microsoft's weaknesses and exploit them to the fullest? Coming to a TV near you, the Sony/Microsoft joint venture: the multi-billion-dollar game, Cutthroat Business.
Scary huh? Worse than "has never played", has never touched a PS2. Worse yet, she proceeds to kick the next guy's ass. And the next (who complains it's the controller's fault). And then, after switching controllers and opponents, loses the first match, wins the second, and ties (two swordthrusts both connect at the exact same instant) the third. I didn't think you *could* tie in that game. We don't let her play anymore.
That would depend on one's employment contract, now wouldn't it?
It's not theft, as long as (as the poster mentioned) the system is setup to only let you use otherwise-unused bandwidth. So, it's not breaking any laws, and other causes for termination would have to be in a contract. Which everyone should read. Twice. Nay, 3 times. And then send to a lawyer.
You were so good with that one - lemme ask you a hard question: Why, when I click on a blocked image in Mozilla and click "view image" do I not in fact see the image? If it were up to me (and it's not 'cause I don't know nearly enough C) I'd make it so hitting view image loads the image in place. And where's the "unblock image" rather than "unblock images from this server" option?
It's not "how long until the typical PC can store the LOC?", it's "how long ago's LOC can the typical PC store?"
How big was the LoC 5 years ago? Under a few hundred gig, I'll bet. Today's LoC is (or so I read on Slashdot so it must be true) about 13TB. So how long will it take for desktops to reath 13T? Well, at their current ~40%/yr increase, about 13-14 years. At which point the LoC will undoubtedly have swollen to about another 13-14 years worth of PC evolution. But I don't think *anyone* thinks hard drives will continue to scale for almost 15 years. The superparamagnetic effect has been looming for the past 5 years or so and lord knows how much money has managed to push it off a few more years, but we're rapidly approaching the point where the amount of energy difference between a N and a S magnetic domain is the same as the amount of thermal energy present - presto, a random collection of bits.
Maybe materials science will surprise us once again. The road started with MR (magnetoresistive), then GMR (giant magnetoresistive) and something else whose TLA I can't remember. Then Pixie Dust, and now Pixie Dust2 (5 layers rather than 3) pushing 80Gb/sq. in (if memory serves). A 3-platter design using 3.5" platters with a 1" hole for the servo could pack just over 500GB in. Now figure buying them for $200 - suddenly ripping your DVDs to disc doesn't seem quite so stupid. My mind rebels at the thought of 5T of RAID5 storage in a 3U rack, with 2 hot-spares. I also cringe at the thought of formatting that. Or fscking.
> MPEG-4 would give a LOT smaller file sizes than MPEG-2 at the same quality.
Not with a Celeron/400 behind it! That sucker won't even play back good MPEG4 videos, let alone record to it in realtime. I calculated it would take the equivalent of about dual AXP1900s to manage a realtime 640x480 mpeg4 recording. At least using divx5 - there may be faster codecs out there.
I'm not sure why he had to have a standalone box to do it. With RF input devices, the machine can stay in a different room, feeding its video through some coax to the TV. This lets him use whatever hardware's lying around. $100 for a good video capture card + $200 for hard drives gives a quarter gig of video. My recordings tend to be about 2.6G/hr, so that's about 80 hours of TV. Something faster than a duron/600 will be able to encode using I-frames for lower filesizes. Set the box up to transcode overnight to mpeg4, and you're up to hundreds of hours of TV.
So *that*'s how you get friends and foes and freaks and whatnot! There's a button that does it. I've been blocking images from Slashdot for so long (trust me, you're saving more money not feeding me the bits than you're losing not feeding me the ads!) it didn't even occur to me there might be *useful* images! I'll have to remember that.
Now, can anyone explain what a "freak" is in the Slashdot context? And I've already come up with all the lame jokes along the lines of "it refers to the readership" thankyouverymuch.
Hey article-boy! We're not talking about mainframes that were built 30 years ago and still running. We're talking about the concept of a mainframe, and the new ones built yesterday that will run 30-year-old software because they're that backward-compatible.
Now, go spend as much time reading as you just spent posting silliness - it's a good short intro full of cool stuff. *My* computer at least insists on stopping working when I unplug CPUs, break DRAM chips, and unplug the box it's in. So I think computers that don't are pretty durn cool.
Actually, I think the opposite. In theory I buy products because of advertising, which pays for shows so I'll watch the ads. If instead I'm the one paying for a show, there better not be any ads. I hear there are something like 2 million regular Farscape viewers. For less than a buck apiece we can completely fund the show - it costs more than that to rent the DVDs, let alone get a brand new show made!
Now, the real trick would be to get something like this setup with enough support behind it to buy copyrights and such to the shows they're funding so there's a lasting benefit to the viewers.
Farscape and well-fed children are not substitutes, in an economic sense. Each satisfy a unique need on the part of the donator.
Thus, while you may be correct that donating to a feed-the-children charity will make one feel better about one's self, that does not imply that donating to a feed-the-children charity INSTEAD of donating to a save-the-Farscape charity will make one feel MORE good. The law of diminishing utility implies that donating some money to save Farscape and some to save children will make a person MOST happy overall.
Or, buy used CDs. The damn things are virtually indestructable; if they're really bad you can get them buffed out. A good CD drive will read through anything short of a knife cut in the media layer, and then it's straight to .
Going out to buy CDs has some pretty nasty latency, but the bandwidth is pretty good. A $50 CPU and $100 CDROM should be able to run through at about 5Mbit ripping, normalizing, and encoding at high quality.
Environmental defects (a meteoric dust particle crashlands on a few dozen traces) per chip decrease as chips decrease in size. Manufacturing defects per chip increase as chips decrease in size. What the overall effect is depends on the manufacturing plant in question, the chip design in question, and probably the geologic stability of the continent as a whole during critical manufacturing steps.
The original poster is correct: smaller traces => faster chips | lower power.
Slashdot Mirror
As a lifelong resident of "the northern hemisphere" I can say that there's no need to "bundle up warmly!" to see the atmosphere burn. It's only winter according to the calendar. It's really fall. It's 4am here, and the temps just now dipped below freezing. For those whose idea of "the northern hemisphere" is Georgia (the US version, that is), let me explain:
Above 50F, no special precautions are needed.
Between 30 and 50, a sweater, light coat, or other provision is recommended but not required.
Between 0 and 30, a coat is recommended or required, depending on wind and one's metabolism.
Between -40 and 0, "bundle up warmly" is a damn good idea.
I've only been in -40 degree weather once, but it sucked. At that point, you don't bundle up warmly, you just try not to leave the house. Which is good, since tractors (and probably cars too) get real pissy at those temps, and want tons of ether before they'll start.
That's my "wimpy city folk" rant for the day. Thank you for your participation.
Hm. That domain isn't on the whitelist for the email address I give out to likely-to-deluge-me-with-spam outfits. Such as ebay. So maybe I got it. Maybe not.
I keep hearing about the "death of email" because of spam. It's really not hard. Pay for a respectable email address and don't give it to *anyone*. Create forwarding addresses that you give out. Apply whitelists to the address(es) you use for commerce. Apply blacklists (or actual spam filters) to the addresses you use for friends, family, etc. Every few weeks I go through the ~1000 emails that got filtered out on the odd chance they're not spam, and delete them. It doesn't take an hour a day - it takes more like an hour a month.
You're almost right. Copyright exists to benefit the public by making incentives for producers to produce. Money is the incentive. When a producer is not making money on something, it should be released into the public domain. An easy way to effect this is as follows:
The term of copyrights is 1 (one) year.
The price of securing a 1 (one) year copyright is $1 (one dollar).
One-year extensions to existing copyrights may be purchased.
Each extension costs twice as much as the previous year's copyright.
Suppose I create a story about widgets. I pay my $1 and nobody can sell my story but me. I sell my story 10 times for $100, so I figure it's worth $2 next year. Next year only 5 people want the story, and I get $50. I'm still ahead, so I renew for two more years, costing $12, and sell $20 worth of widget stories. Now, I can either pay $16 for another year, or I can let go of my copyright and see how many copies I can sell without copyright protection. Since my widget story has little value, it is released into the public domain quickly.
Suppose Disney creates Mickey mouse. They also pay their $1. However, because they're Disney and can afford to do so, they buy 20 years of protection right off the bat. It costs them about $2million, which they make in a year. 19 years of profit - how sweet is that? Disney's still making millions a year off of Mickey, so they figure another year at $2m isn't bad. The 22nd year costs $4m, which is getting up near the break-even point. Soon Disney will release Mickey, continue using and making money from it, and will have benefitted the public good by letting the rest of us finally draw cute mice without getting sued by attack lawyers.
The system is simple and effective. Producers are compensated for high-value inventions and are persuaded but not forced to release these inventions to the public. Individuals can also protect their works cheaply - 5 years costs under $50. Read Cringley's column today about treating IP as a fading asset, and it will become even more clear why this is a good way to solve the problem of copyright terms.
> The idea is that you will be able to order your laptop with anything at all engraved on the surface: your name, a logo, a picture of your kids, whatever.
Now *that* might push me over the edge and get me to buy a Tibook. I know you all think I'm joking, but how wicked-cool would that be? They'd have to get rid of that stupid glowing apple logo thing, but I'd pay $100 if I could get a magic-eye picture of Tux lounging on an iceberg engraved into the lid. Wouldn't you?
*laugh*
I don't even notice unless an app is using over 100M (technically, 100,000KB, but who's counting?)
But it sure would be nice if Windows would notice I have gobs of RAM lying around and start using it for something productive like caching the disk subsystem, rather than the other way around. There is no excuse for a system with >512M of free RAM paging to disk! What ass-backwards VM got stuck into Windows, anyway?
The 75GXPs and to some extent the 60GXPs suffered higher-than-normal failure rates, but these were unrelated to higher areal density. The drives used glass platters and load/unload technology which was apparently not up to the task yet.
/dev/null) to let the drives' autocorrection take effect and to check for failed drives. Let the RAID array rebuild if necessary.
Read your MTBF ratings - hard drives are getting better and better. The Seagate drive (admittedly, SCSI) I bought almost 2 years ago claimed 1.2 million hours (over 100 years 24/7). I've seen about 500,000 hours quoted for mainstream IDE drives - about 50 years. Figure that those numbers are under optimal conditions, so divide by 10. Now you've got an "adjusted" MTBF of about 5 years.
Put the drives in a RAID5 array (or an array that allows >1 simultaneous failure if you're really paranoid) in a properly-cooled cabinet in a properly-cooled room. Spinup the drives and read them every month (cat the contents to
When the price of the drives you are using reaches about $50, the drives are at the end of their product lifetime - buy a year's worth of spares and when they're gone copy the data to a new array as above using newer technology (such as serial ATA) and larger drives. Repeat ad nauseum.
Alternately, keep the arrays spinning and use AFS or similar software to replicate volumes across multiple servers. This will protect you from single-drive failures in each array, and multi-drive failures in one array. Keep your individual AFS servers on separate power.
A note about power: BAD POWER KILLS COMPUTERS. Don't skimp on power. Make sure your circuitry can handle the load. Install good power conditioning equipment. Install good battery backups and/or generators. Don't put all your servers on one circuit.
In short, data archiving isn't hard. It's just expensive and time-consuming. Ask yourself what your data is worth and what failures you need it to be able to withstand (one dead drive? 5 dead drives? 1 dead server? Lightning strike? Earthquake?) and build appropriately.
Nah. It just means it's not breaking and entering. Mere tresspassing. Aren't laws great?
"Movie and recording studios, among others, say the law is necessary to stop pirating of intellectual property, which is made easy when the material is in digital format."
Unlike a VCR, which is a bitch to use.
"from the they're-just-waiting-for-gaiman dept."
Sounds like you missed your calling - you should be a Slashdot editor!
100 comments and nothing about networking with Natalie Portman's clothes? Have I been away too long and the trolls have left, or have they just picked a new topic? I've noticed the Soviet Russia posts (you guys need to move on - you've run out of jokes) but I can't believe the trolling community has unanimously voted on a defunct political entity as their grist for the month.
I think you're asking the wrong questions. Would you rather
1) spend $1000+ per year keeping your hardware top-notch or
2) spend $10 every now and then for a quick game?
The people asking this set of questions are the ones they're targeting.
Microsoft was prepared to lose as much money as a company like AMD or Nvidia is worth (their current market cap is around $2billion). Now they just released a statement saying they're prepared to lose *more* than that. Microsoft doesn't cede victory to anyone. The PS2 is older and slower and is still outselling the X-box many times over yet Microsoft haven't even blinked.
I for one am loving the PS2/Xbox battle. Microsoft, for all their success, is a young upstart compared to Sony, which has been playing the same game far longer than Microsoft has. Sony almost killed Sega and is kicking Nintendo's ass - they're not about to let some newcomer start playing in their console market. Microsoft though is pretty big too and they play to win. Always.
Will Microsoft learn from their mistakes come time for PS3 v. Xbox2 and come to dominate? Will Sony have learned Microsoft's weaknesses and exploit them to the fullest? Coming to a TV near you, the Sony/Microsoft joint venture: the multi-billion-dollar game, Cutthroat Business.
--
Whose cuisine will reign supreme?
Scary huh? Worse than "has never played", has never touched a PS2. Worse yet, she proceeds to kick the next guy's ass. And the next (who complains it's the controller's fault). And then, after switching controllers and opponents, loses the first match, wins the second, and ties (two swordthrusts both connect at the exact same instant) the third. I didn't think you *could* tie in that game. We don't let her play anymore.
That would depend on one's employment contract, now wouldn't it?
It's not theft, as long as (as the poster mentioned) the system is setup to only let you use otherwise-unused bandwidth. So, it's not breaking any laws, and other causes for termination would have to be in a contract. Which everyone should read. Twice. Nay, 3 times. And then send to a lawyer.
Aaah. Thanks.
You were so good with that one - lemme ask you a hard question: Why, when I click on a blocked image in Mozilla and click "view image" do I not in fact see the image? If it were up to me (and it's not 'cause I don't know nearly enough C) I'd make it so hitting view image loads the image in place. And where's the "unblock image" rather than "unblock images from this server" option?
It's not "how long until the typical PC can store the LOC?", it's "how long ago's LOC can the typical PC store?"
How big was the LoC 5 years ago? Under a few hundred gig, I'll bet. Today's LoC is (or so I read on Slashdot so it must be true) about 13TB. So how long will it take for desktops to reath 13T? Well, at their current ~40%/yr increase, about 13-14 years. At which point the LoC will undoubtedly have swollen to about another 13-14 years worth of PC evolution. But I don't think *anyone* thinks hard drives will continue to scale for almost 15 years. The superparamagnetic effect has been looming for the past 5 years or so and lord knows how much money has managed to push it off a few more years, but we're rapidly approaching the point where the amount of energy difference between a N and a S magnetic domain is the same as the amount of thermal energy present - presto, a random collection of bits.
Maybe materials science will surprise us once again. The road started with MR (magnetoresistive), then GMR (giant magnetoresistive) and something else whose TLA I can't remember. Then Pixie Dust, and now Pixie Dust2 (5 layers rather than 3) pushing 80Gb/sq. in (if memory serves). A 3-platter design using 3.5" platters with a 1" hole for the servo could pack just over 500GB in. Now figure buying them for $200 - suddenly ripping your DVDs to disc doesn't seem quite so stupid. My mind rebels at the thought of 5T of RAID5 storage in a 3U rack, with 2 hot-spares. I also cringe at the thought of formatting that. Or fscking.
> MPEG-4 would give a LOT smaller file sizes than MPEG-2 at the same quality.
Not with a Celeron/400 behind it! That sucker won't even play back good MPEG4 videos, let alone record to it in realtime. I calculated it would take the equivalent of about dual AXP1900s to manage a realtime 640x480 mpeg4 recording. At least using divx5 - there may be faster codecs out there.
I'm not sure why he had to have a standalone box to do it. With RF input devices, the machine can stay in a different room, feeding its video through some coax to the TV. This lets him use whatever hardware's lying around. $100 for a good video capture card + $200 for hard drives gives a quarter gig of video. My recordings tend to be about 2.6G/hr, so that's about 80 hours of TV. Something faster than a duron/600 will be able to encode using I-frames for lower filesizes. Set the box up to transcode overnight to mpeg4, and you're up to hundreds of hours of TV.
So *that*'s how you get friends and foes and freaks and whatnot! There's a button that does it. I've been blocking images from Slashdot for so long (trust me, you're saving more money not feeding me the bits than you're losing not feeding me the ads!) it didn't even occur to me there might be *useful* images! I'll have to remember that.
Now, can anyone explain what a "freak" is in the Slashdot context? And I've already come up with all the lame jokes along the lines of "it refers to the readership" thankyouverymuch.
Hey article-boy! We're not talking about mainframes that were built 30 years ago and still running. We're talking about the concept of a mainframe, and the new ones built yesterday that will run 30-year-old software because they're that backward-compatible.
Now, go spend as much time reading as you just spent posting silliness - it's a good short intro full of cool stuff. *My* computer at least insists on stopping working when I unplug CPUs, break DRAM chips, and unplug the box it's in. So I think computers that don't are pretty durn cool.
>> 20G should be enough for anyone!
/media/audio.
Until, that is, you take a look at du -h
Let's hear it for Pixie Dust! Come on Toshiba, I want a 40G 1.8" drive from you guys by year's end.
Actually, I think the opposite. In theory I buy products because of advertising, which pays for shows so I'll watch the ads. If instead I'm the one paying for a show, there better not be any ads. I hear there are something like 2 million regular Farscape viewers. For less than a buck apiece we can completely fund the show - it costs more than that to rent the DVDs, let alone get a brand new show made!
Now, the real trick would be to get something like this setup with enough support behind it to buy copyrights and such to the shows they're funding so there's a lasting benefit to the viewers.
Because:
Farscape and well-fed children are not substitutes, in an economic sense. Each satisfy a unique need on the part of the donator.
Thus, while you may be correct that donating to a feed-the-children charity will make one feel better about one's self, that does not imply that donating to a feed-the-children charity INSTEAD of donating to a save-the-Farscape charity will make one feel MORE good. The law of diminishing utility implies that donating some money to save Farscape and some to save children will make a person MOST happy overall.
Your box is too loud? So buy a P4 - that should give you less heat to dissipate. Oh, wait.
Buy the quiet HSF or suffer in !silence.
Or, buy used CDs. The damn things are virtually indestructable; if they're really bad you can get them buffed out. A good CD drive will read through anything short of a knife cut in the media layer, and then it's straight to .
Going out to buy CDs has some pretty nasty latency, but the bandwidth is pretty good. A $50 CPU and $100 CDROM should be able to run through at about 5Mbit ripping, normalizing, and encoding at high quality.
Environmental defects (a meteoric dust particle crashlands on a few dozen traces) per chip decrease as chips decrease in size. Manufacturing defects per chip increase as chips decrease in size. What the overall effect is depends on the manufacturing plant in question, the chip design in question, and probably the geologic stability of the continent as a whole during critical manufacturing steps.
The original poster is correct: smaller traces => faster chips | lower power.