Well generally the ram and swapping would apply, but in my case my home box is somewhat more monstrous than the work box. At work it's just an athlon 650 (oc'ed to 700, bah), 256mb ram, ibm deskstar hd, all in wonder Radeon, yadda yadda. At home i've got a Celeron 566 @ 900mhz now, 512mb ram, 4 x 40gb raid-0 ide stripe (70mb/sec sequential), and an Asus GeForce2 GTS. So when I say my home box feels slower than my work box, i'm pretty sure the peripherals aren't to blame. It's definitely the CPU.
They say the tape stores uncompressed data, of which 30 mins would take up 75gb. If this is true, then the D-VHS deck needs to write about 40mb/second, and a 2h tape would hold 300gb.
Either they're full of crap, or this machine's gonna be converted into the world's cheapest, largest, fastest tape backup system yet.
We all wish. The problem is that numbers are simply a marketing tool. My favorite example is the Pentium 4, starting at 1.5 Ghz, yet in benchmarks it is no faster than a P3-1000. Sure, _we_ all know that, but those senior IT/IS wiseguys don't, they just look at the number and say "This chip is 1.5 times faster than the P3-1000, and it's a Pentium-4, which should be in itself much better than the older Pentium-3. Let's buy this overpriced bitch." That's how things work. That's why every single PC at my place of work is Intel-powered (except mine of course:)
Now I don't hold any grudge against Intel nor AMD, I have an Athlon at work and a Celeron at home and I think they both have a place in the market, but comparing them is like apples to oranges. The numbers mean very little. This Athlon (old slow slot-A core) runs at 700mhz, while my home PC runs at 850mhz. Some benchmarks say they're equivalent, others make my Celeron glisten in the spotlight. You just can't trust any number, not the mhz, not the MIPS crap, not even the independent benchmarks. The only true benchmark is your own feeling. Does this Athlon feel faster than my Celeron at home ? Yes it does. I don't know why, but it just does. That's all I need to know.
But why would anyone willingly participate in SDMI besides the RIAA's own incestful corporate offspring ? They can't vaporize every single MP3 encoder out there, if manufacturers continue producing non-SDMI compliant audio players then people will continue downloading non-SDMI compliant music. And even if SDMI-watermarking becomes popular and widespread (perhaps with pay-per-Napster), someone out there will reverse it and release a 1-click SDMI-remover for us old-school MP3-CD people to use. Copy protection has, and always will be a complete waste of time. Software can be patched, hardware can be bypassed.
If stupid ole' RIAA is too slow in finalizing SDMI, then fsck it. The manufacturers don't need approval from the RIAA to produce their hardware. If they're fearing lawsuits, I'm thinking that all the hardware manufacturers surely have more legal firepower than the RIAA's vaporous swiss bank assets. If someone with minimal authority was threatening MY company, you can be damned sure I'd stomp all over that obstacle before my business starts sinking into debt.
Since AOL is suing spammers, we should then sue AOL because the users are much more affected than the ISP. Sure they suck down more bandwidth at the source, but it's the users' rights that are being violated and their time greatly wasted as well. If AOL scores a buck from spammers, then I want my share of that buck for being one of the end victims.
Although compressing the data might seem like a good idea, in practice you will curse day and night unless you take certain precautions. Using a compressed filesystem will save you plenty of space, but you will pay in the form of cpu usage. Decompressing data on-the-fly is costly, and in the case of database operations, it can be downright nasty. A simple workaround might be to store the main data (indexes) on an uncompressed filesystem, and leave only the larger blob fields in a separate table stored compressed, that way you could still do lightning fast searches and selects, only slowing down to grab the memos when absolutely required.
Simple. If they want to charge people who link to their site, then just don't link. Then nobody will be able to find their site unless they remember the URL. Greed backfires.
Cyrix vs StrongARM is an uneven battle, because the Cyrix chips are x86-based while the StrongARM are not. This means there is a huge wealth of compatible chipsets and software available for the Cyrix, allowing for a shortened design timeframe and in the end a more robust, tried-and-tested gamut of peripherals and supporting hardware. Just like the Motorola's immortal 680x0 line of cpu's that powered everything from high-end graphic calculators to macs to gaming consoles to automated home thermostats. More and more embedded devices are x86 based, featuring many borrowed items from traditional desktop PCs. Just take a peek at all those iopener/tivo hacking sites. It's all x86-familiar hardware that's easily upgradable and replaceable, often using those Cyrix M2 cpus (which suck but get the job done). This upcoming VIA cpu is no exception.
Legal use of the tv card ? To watch tv streams, DUH! Heck, I originally bought my first tv tuner to use my Playstation on the pc instead of fighting for the family tv set. Same thing can apply for a DVD console and/or VCR, although it's puzzling why someone would want to pay more for a true DVD deck when they can get a dvd-rom drive for loads less. Bah, americans!
Unless major conceptual redesigning takes place in the graphics acceleration field, there won't be an upper limit to performance. There will always be the demand for 'more' pixels and 'more' polygons. Even once we hit photorealistic real-time imagery that fools the human eye, there will still be a need for increasing GPU power because there is no limit to scene complexity. Example : fast forward to 2010, Nvidia has the GeForce 42 with 2 gigs of onboard memory and an integrated air-conditioner. The card has enough boom to render an entire feature-length movie starring Bruce Willis and Spamela Anderson in 4-zillion polygons each. Well what if someone wanted to render a whole crowd of virtual hi-rez humans in one scene, that person would need even more crunching power. Lather, rinse, repeat. There just isn't any expected end to the polygon-race.
I used to have only my trusty cell phone until recently when I moved into a new apartment and was required to have a landline hooked up for the stupid door intercom (which, wouldn't you know, is operated by Uncle Bell), otherwise I would have stuck with just the cell. With their newfound mass popularity, cell phones are cheaper than ever and so it the airtime. Buying the hardware is cheaper than the installation fees for a landline, and you can get a very nice cell for less than the cost of a basic LCD display desk phone. The only thing that's tricky with a cell is dial-up net access, but the advent of broadband greatly alleviates this little hitch. I still harass the building management every month when I pay the rent, begging them to get rid of the old crappy intercom and get a better cheaper cell-friendly system. It costs me about 30$ (canadian) for a landline that serves nearly no purpose except to unlock the front door for the pizza guy and to crank up my stats on mp3.com *wink*. Once again, Bell sucks!
I don't quite understand why you'd need drivers for it. Even the windows drivers are redundant and simply serve to prevent bluescreens when hot-swapping drives, otherwise the thing just runs natively with the onboard bios. Although I haven't tried installing Linux on my main pc since I've installed the FastTrak, I wouldn't mind some details on this topic if you're saying I won't be able to run linux at all until they resolve this.
I have to second this guy.. the sweetest thing would be one of those cheesy Dell machines your favorite government worker brings home because they've been replaced with new gear. The older models were super-quiet since they had no fan on the cpu, just a monster heat sink and an air duct. Slap in a dvd decoder card and drive, you're all set. And if you're complaining about the load times, well.. uhh.. tough! That's the price to pay for avoiding a costly consumer dvd deck.
Well yes that would be nice, although unenforceable because there will always be that horrendous plagiarist who simply does a text replace on all names and places then rereleases the book as his own. Just like that loser who kept copying your notes in high school. There are losers everywhere and no law will ever be clear enough to expose them all.
Once again, France complains that this will hurt the french language. Well i'm a native french quebecer and I hate France for being such loudmouthed fools. "Vee are deestingwished! Vee are beeooteefull!" It's an interesting little tidbit that France French (vs Quebec French) is the bastardized accent while the Quebec dialect is the original accent. According to ancient retardology (and please forgive my lack of details, I used to sleep through history class), some lard-assed french monarch decided that his upper-class fellowship should have a distinguished language from the common folk. That's when they started talking funny with their noses up so damned high. Well I'm a crappy storyteller but France has always been doing these stupid things to try and stand out, to be "better" and more glamorous than the rest of the world. They talk funny, they wear silly hats, they're about 10 years behind everyone technology-wise (think Minitel), and the women don't shave. Of course that shaving bit has nothing to do with the topic, but my point is that France is doing the opposite of everyone else just because they've always loved being the center of attention, whether it's by passing a stupid law or just by broadcasting a game show involving jello and livestock. Just like today's pre-teen generation, they can't just sit down and be normal for one moment, and this is just another demonstration of that trait.
I hate to say this, but IMHO you'd be better off selling the thing and using the money to buy a bunch of IDE drives and an ATA/Raid card (or just mod a cheap Promise Ultra100). Put that in your favorite P133 and load up NT or Linux. You'll probably even have a bit of cash left to buy Jolt and Guinness.
Perhaps there should be a distinction between "derivative work" and "inspired work", in the sense that derivative work literally borrows items from other authors such as characters, plotlines, etc.. whereas inspired work is simply what it sounds like : stuff you dreamt of after reading or seeing someone else's work, which doesn't borrow any tangible concept from that other author although the style or setting might be similar. This is how copyright law is "supposed" to work although it rarely does. In an ideal world, someone who makes a mod featuring the real X-Men would need to seek permission to use the X-Men characters and sounds, else he/she/it would get beaten to a bloody pulp and fed to the dobermans. In that same ideal world, someone who makes a mod that looks and feels a bit like an X-Men adventure yet doesn't employ the comics' characters and has its own original cast would be perfectly legal and immune from retarded greedy corporations and their equally retarded greedy lawyers.
Certainly you can _make_ any mod with any borrowed characters or plotlines or anything, but you can't _distribute_ it without proper permissions and/or licensing, even if you're giving it away for free, because in essence it's based on someone else's copyrighted work. It's not because you're not charging for the product that makes you any less responsible for the intellectual property and original ownership. Creating a movie/game/tv based mod (or any other derivative work) means using someone else's imagery, sounds or storylines to enhance your own. In doing so, you're playing with the borrowed content's reputation at some point. For example if you make a mod about the X-Files and your mod sucks, well some retarded fucks are going to distort that into believing that the X-Files tv series sucks (well it kinda does suck, but that's just my personal opinion). At that point you're damaging the real X-Files and are open to lawsuits to compensate their (estimated) losses, so copyright law prefers to avoid all that bullshit and just disallow anyone from using content without prior permission.
What if a blind person obtained this e-book and asked an interpreter to read it for them ? Blind people have the right to hear stories too. Of course the interpreter would be tempted to assassinate said blind person because it would take hours of boring reading to finish the book, but this can and will certainly apply to more pertinent books.
In this age where new technologies try to bridge certain physical and even psychological handicaps, Adobe certainly isn't putting their good foot forward with this absurd restriction.
What's preventing me from copyrighting my own name and suing anyone who dares say my name aloud without my permission ? This is the kind of stupidity these absurd licenses support and encourage, fueling the imminent popular desire for revolution and retribution against the big corporations. A megacorporation isn't a sentient being, people are sentient beings (for the most part). People should be defining the rules, not "artificial entities".
In these absurd hypercapitalist rape cases, couldn't we just take hostages, blow up the building, execute their CEO and call it self-defense ? Because that's exactly what they're trying to do with GPL software.
"Your software is better. We'll copy it, stick our name on it, make a proprietary fileformat, then sue you for copyright infringement because you never patented your software. Oh look, you have no money to defend yourselves.. boo hoo game over. And to make sure you don't come back, we'll hire a bunch of hookers for the senators so they sign in a new anticonstitutional law that backs our fraud up. Have a nice day."
Just shove that text into an ISO 9002 certified english-to-bullshit translator and you've got what's on every IT corporation's lawyer's lips.
What happens if a certain painter or professional photographer decides to put up his own copyrighted works for display ? It then becomes illegal for Microsoft (or anyone besides the artist) to redistribute that content, else they open up to a delicious onslaught of one-way lawsuits. Would such content-creators be now required to post a legal license on their MSN Community's welcome page before letting anyone peek at their images ? Very touchy matter IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that I encourage such anarchistic methods of revenge
Well I sure do. How's about a nice return-envelope full of dog poo ? If we can't kill spammers, we can at least make them eat $&!+.
Well generally the ram and swapping would apply, but in my case my home box is somewhat more monstrous than the work box. At work it's just an athlon 650 (oc'ed to 700, bah), 256mb ram, ibm deskstar hd, all in wonder Radeon, yadda yadda. At home i've got a Celeron 566 @ 900mhz now, 512mb ram, 4 x 40gb raid-0 ide stripe (70mb/sec sequential), and an Asus GeForce2 GTS. So when I say my home box feels slower than my work box, i'm pretty sure the peripherals aren't to blame. It's definitely the CPU.
They say the tape stores uncompressed data, of which 30 mins would take up 75gb. If this is true, then the D-VHS deck needs to write about 40mb/second, and a 2h tape would hold 300gb.
Either they're full of crap, or this machine's gonna be converted into the world's cheapest, largest, fastest tape backup system yet.
We all wish. The problem is that numbers are simply a marketing tool. My favorite example is the Pentium 4, starting at 1.5 Ghz, yet in benchmarks it is no faster than a P3-1000. Sure, _we_ all know that, but those senior IT/IS wiseguys don't, they just look at the number and say "This chip is 1.5 times faster than the P3-1000, and it's a Pentium-4, which should be in itself much better than the older Pentium-3. Let's buy this overpriced bitch." That's how things work. That's why every single PC at my place of work is Intel-powered (except mine of course :)
Now I don't hold any grudge against Intel nor AMD, I have an Athlon at work and a Celeron at home and I think they both have a place in the market, but comparing them is like apples to oranges. The numbers mean very little. This Athlon (old slow slot-A core) runs at 700mhz, while my home PC runs at 850mhz. Some benchmarks say they're equivalent, others make my Celeron glisten in the spotlight. You just can't trust any number, not the mhz, not the MIPS crap, not even the independent benchmarks. The only true benchmark is your own feeling. Does this Athlon feel faster than my Celeron at home ? Yes it does. I don't know why, but it just does. That's all I need to know.
But why would anyone willingly participate in SDMI besides the RIAA's own incestful corporate offspring ? They can't vaporize every single MP3 encoder out there, if manufacturers continue producing non-SDMI compliant audio players then people will continue downloading non-SDMI compliant music. And even if SDMI-watermarking becomes popular and widespread (perhaps with pay-per-Napster), someone out there will reverse it and release a 1-click SDMI-remover for us old-school MP3-CD people to use. Copy protection has, and always will be a complete waste of time. Software can be patched, hardware can be bypassed.
Why upgrade your existing coffee maker when you could just add a second one (or more) ?
:)
Alternately you could convert everyone to Jolt Cola
If stupid ole' RIAA is too slow in finalizing SDMI, then fsck it. The manufacturers don't need approval from the RIAA to produce their hardware. If they're fearing lawsuits, I'm thinking that all the hardware manufacturers surely have more legal firepower than the RIAA's vaporous swiss bank assets. If someone with minimal authority was threatening MY company, you can be damned sure I'd stomp all over that obstacle before my business starts sinking into debt.
Since AOL is suing spammers, we should then sue AOL because the users are much more affected than the ISP. Sure they suck down more bandwidth at the source, but it's the users' rights that are being violated and their time greatly wasted as well. If AOL scores a buck from spammers, then I want my share of that buck for being one of the end victims.
Although compressing the data might seem like a good idea, in practice you will curse day and night unless you take certain precautions. Using a compressed filesystem will save you plenty of space, but you will pay in the form of cpu usage. Decompressing data on-the-fly is costly, and in the case of database operations, it can be downright nasty. A simple workaround might be to store the main data (indexes) on an uncompressed filesystem, and leave only the larger blob fields in a separate table stored compressed, that way you could still do lightning fast searches and selects, only slowing down to grab the memos when absolutely required.
Simple. If they want to charge people who link to their site, then just don't link. Then nobody will be able to find their site unless they remember the URL. Greed backfires.
Cyrix vs StrongARM is an uneven battle, because the Cyrix chips are x86-based while the StrongARM are not. This means there is a huge wealth of compatible chipsets and software available for the Cyrix, allowing for a shortened design timeframe and in the end a more robust, tried-and-tested gamut of peripherals and supporting hardware. Just like the Motorola's immortal 680x0 line of cpu's that powered everything from high-end graphic calculators to macs to gaming consoles to automated home thermostats. More and more embedded devices are x86 based, featuring many borrowed items from traditional desktop PCs. Just take a peek at all those iopener/tivo hacking sites. It's all x86-familiar hardware that's easily upgradable and replaceable, often using those Cyrix M2 cpus (which suck but get the job done). This upcoming VIA cpu is no exception.
Legal use of the tv card ? To watch tv streams, DUH! Heck, I originally bought my first tv tuner to use my Playstation on the pc instead of fighting for the family tv set. Same thing can apply for a DVD console and/or VCR, although it's puzzling why someone would want to pay more for a true DVD deck when they can get a dvd-rom drive for loads less. Bah, americans!
Unless major conceptual redesigning takes place in the graphics acceleration field, there won't be an upper limit to performance. There will always be the demand for 'more' pixels and 'more' polygons. Even once we hit photorealistic real-time imagery that fools the human eye, there will still be a need for increasing GPU power because there is no limit to scene complexity. Example : fast forward to 2010, Nvidia has the GeForce 42 with 2 gigs of onboard memory and an integrated air-conditioner. The card has enough boom to render an entire feature-length movie starring Bruce Willis and Spamela Anderson in 4-zillion polygons each. Well what if someone wanted to render a whole crowd of virtual hi-rez humans in one scene, that person would need even more crunching power. Lather, rinse, repeat. There just isn't any expected end to the polygon-race.
I used to have only my trusty cell phone until recently when I moved into a new apartment and was required to have a landline hooked up for the stupid door intercom (which, wouldn't you know, is operated by Uncle Bell), otherwise I would have stuck with just the cell. With their newfound mass popularity, cell phones are cheaper than ever and so it the airtime. Buying the hardware is cheaper than the installation fees for a landline, and you can get a very nice cell for less than the cost of a basic LCD display desk phone. The only thing that's tricky with a cell is dial-up net access, but the advent of broadband greatly alleviates this little hitch. I still harass the building management every month when I pay the rent, begging them to get rid of the old crappy intercom and get a better cheaper cell-friendly system. It costs me about 30$ (canadian) for a landline that serves nearly no purpose except to unlock the front door for the pizza guy and to crank up my stats on mp3.com *wink*. Once again, Bell sucks!
I don't quite understand why you'd need drivers for it. Even the windows drivers are redundant and simply serve to prevent bluescreens when hot-swapping drives, otherwise the thing just runs natively with the onboard bios. Although I haven't tried installing Linux on my main pc since I've installed the FastTrak, I wouldn't mind some details on this topic if you're saying I won't be able to run linux at all until they resolve this.
I have to second this guy.. the sweetest thing would be one of those cheesy Dell machines your favorite government worker brings home because they've been replaced with new gear. The older models were super-quiet since they had no fan on the cpu, just a monster heat sink and an air duct. Slap in a dvd decoder card and drive, you're all set. And if you're complaining about the load times, well.. uhh.. tough! That's the price to pay for avoiding a costly consumer dvd deck.
Well yes that would be nice, although unenforceable because there will always be that horrendous plagiarist who simply does a text replace on all names and places then rereleases the book as his own. Just like that loser who kept copying your notes in high school. There are losers everywhere and no law will ever be clear enough to expose them all.
And now I shall watch my karma hit rock bottom.
Once again, France complains that this will hurt the french language. Well i'm a native french quebecer and I hate France for being such loudmouthed fools. "Vee are deestingwished! Vee are beeooteefull!" It's an interesting little tidbit that France French (vs Quebec French) is the bastardized accent while the Quebec dialect is the original accent. According to ancient retardology (and please forgive my lack of details, I used to sleep through history class), some lard-assed french monarch decided that his upper-class fellowship should have a distinguished language from the common folk. That's when they started talking funny with their noses up so damned high. Well I'm a crappy storyteller but France has always been doing these stupid things to try and stand out, to be "better" and more glamorous than the rest of the world. They talk funny, they wear silly hats, they're about 10 years behind everyone technology-wise (think Minitel), and the women don't shave. Of course that shaving bit has nothing to do with the topic, but my point is that France is doing the opposite of everyone else just because they've always loved being the center of attention, whether it's by passing a stupid law or just by broadcasting a game show involving jello and livestock. Just like today's pre-teen generation, they can't just sit down and be normal for one moment, and this is just another demonstration of that trait.
I hate to say this, but IMHO you'd be better off selling the thing and using the money to buy a bunch of IDE drives and an ATA/Raid card (or just mod a cheap Promise Ultra100). Put that in your favorite P133 and load up NT or Linux. You'll probably even have a bit of cash left to buy Jolt and Guinness.
Perhaps there should be a distinction between "derivative work" and "inspired work", in the sense that derivative work literally borrows items from other authors such as characters, plotlines, etc.. whereas inspired work is simply what it sounds like : stuff you dreamt of after reading or seeing someone else's work, which doesn't borrow any tangible concept from that other author although the style or setting might be similar. This is how copyright law is "supposed" to work although it rarely does. In an ideal world, someone who makes a mod featuring the real X-Men would need to seek permission to use the X-Men characters and sounds, else he/she/it would get beaten to a bloody pulp and fed to the dobermans. In that same ideal world, someone who makes a mod that looks and feels a bit like an X-Men adventure yet doesn't employ the comics' characters and has its own original cast would be perfectly legal and immune from retarded greedy corporations and their equally retarded greedy lawyers.
Certainly you can _make_ any mod with any borrowed characters or plotlines or anything, but you can't _distribute_ it without proper permissions and/or licensing, even if you're giving it away for free, because in essence it's based on someone else's copyrighted work. It's not because you're not charging for the product that makes you any less responsible for the intellectual property and original ownership. Creating a movie/game/tv based mod (or any other derivative work) means using someone else's imagery, sounds or storylines to enhance your own. In doing so, you're playing with the borrowed content's reputation at some point. For example if you make a mod about the X-Files and your mod sucks, well some retarded fucks are going to distort that into believing that the X-Files tv series sucks (well it kinda does suck, but that's just my personal opinion). At that point you're damaging the real X-Files and are open to lawsuits to compensate their (estimated) losses, so copyright law prefers to avoid all that bullshit and just disallow anyone from using content without prior permission.
What if a blind person obtained this e-book and asked an interpreter to read it for them ? Blind people have the right to hear stories too. Of course the interpreter would be tempted to assassinate said blind person because it would take hours of boring reading to finish the book, but this can and will certainly apply to more pertinent books.
In this age where new technologies try to bridge certain physical and even psychological handicaps, Adobe certainly isn't putting their good foot forward with this absurd restriction.
What's preventing me from copyrighting my own name and suing anyone who dares say my name aloud without my permission ? This is the kind of stupidity these absurd licenses support and encourage, fueling the imminent popular desire for revolution and retribution against the big corporations. A megacorporation isn't a sentient being, people are sentient beings (for the most part). People should be defining the rules, not "artificial entities".
In these absurd hypercapitalist rape cases, couldn't we just take hostages, blow up the building, execute their CEO and call it self-defense ? Because that's exactly what they're trying to do with GPL software.
"Your software is better. We'll copy it, stick our name on it, make a proprietary fileformat, then sue you for copyright infringement because you never patented your software. Oh look, you have no money to defend yourselves.. boo hoo game over. And to make sure you don't come back, we'll hire a bunch of hookers for the senators so they sign in a new anticonstitutional law that backs our fraud up. Have a nice day."
Just shove that text into an ISO 9002 certified english-to-bullshit translator and you've got what's on every IT corporation's lawyer's lips.
What is the sound of shit happening ?
What happens if a certain painter or professional photographer decides to put up his own copyrighted works for display ? It then becomes illegal for Microsoft (or anyone besides the artist) to redistribute that content, else they open up to a delicious onslaught of one-way lawsuits. Would such content-creators be now required to post a legal license on their MSN Community's welcome page before letting anyone peek at their images ? Very touchy matter IMHO.