If the "criminal" hasn't commited a crime yet, but it might be aiding a crime. Could be an undercover cop too, trying to find out where all the drug hangouts. Cops are known for cluelessness.
On the other hand, telling the person to "go away" maybe considered criminal? You are telling him or her that you don't have any so they can easily look elsewhere - OK, that's stretching the point.
There doesn't seem to be a whole lot stopping anyone else from making their own database.
Right now, I don't see anything on whether the software that manages the data is "open source". AFIAK, the database data isn't really subject to the open source debate, so not really subject to "open source" theology.
Just because I use open source software doesn't mean that all the data I create with it should automatically be freely available to anyone.
I believe a totally public scan code dB would be great though. And make a totally independent and transparent front-end so that crap:(cat input is translated before the request is sent, so the database site isn't subject to cease-and-desist because the software isn't on the site.
I agree, I guess I would have a problem with people telling me what I have to look at. If slashdot didn't have the points moderation system, I wouldn't read or post at all, as there are too many garbage posts and too much noise.
Frankly, I only have time to read about 10 posts per thread, and to make those worth my time I want them to be good ones with good information or interesting perspectives. I trust human moderators to do a decent enough of a job, so basically everything that's 2 points and above has someone behind it saying it's probably worth reading. For the heavily posted threads, I might choose to read at 4 or 5, and this reduces the amount of error, and usually there are two or three people that find value in the post.
It isn't censorship because I can choose to read it or not read, and I can choose what I read, which is the basic point. Nothing is deleted at anyone's say-so. I've seen enough flamebaits and trolls and disgusting posts that I've decided not to wade in the sewer.
You don't see me telling someone not to read what level you want.
You've got Teletubbies and... umm... ummm... well, try it for yourself and see how hard it is:)
Well, that leaves us with PBS. Oops, scratch the nature shows.:) I imagine even comedic depictions of accidents and violence is out too.
I agree, trying to raise pacifists in a rude society (USA) is difficult and might possibly be unhealthy in terms of the possibility of being victimized. Heck, they'll either get victimized or think they are victims when they start school.
Life's tough. You have to be tough on some level to live through it. I'm not saying desensitize yourself or your children, but they have to grow up and learn the truth someday.
How about the fact that AMD's yeild during the K6 eras was around 25%?
That's a total rumor as far as I can tell, I have never seen that yield claim substantiated anywhere. I think in an article in Wired or some computer/game mag that the president of AMD denied that was the yeild and said it was definitely better than that.
Yields are always "state secrets", same with newer fab processes, so we never really know what the yield is on any plant, company, chip or process.
Oh, say the recall of the 1.13 GHz P3? It couldn't pass the Linux kernel compile test for all its worth. It also required a special BIOS to load up special microcode that it needed to be even remotely stable. Note that it was quickly recalled for a re-tape and re-mask.
MMX speed up 3D? I don't remember anyone marketing it as that, at best, it sped up multimedia, such as audio and some video functions, and codecs that used floating point math weren't widely used either. MMX was only integer when I checked the instruction set. IIRC, Floating point 3D became used more widely when the Pentium came out, as well as the fact that the 486DX's had them too, not.
IIRC, Alpha didn't have SIMD instructions per se, but it did have most of the functions that MMX had, right from the start, circa 1991, due to having extensive byte manipulation methods and having 64 bit registers. I don't recall seeing SIMD add, subtract or multiply functions in the instruction set until MVI was introduced, I have never used it. That mostly only added add, subract and multiply, min, max as well as a couple more byte shuffling instructions.
IIRC, Intel also had a hard time meeting demands for nearly entire quarters - a reason that Gateway and such lowered their resistance to AMD chips. AMD is definitely giving them a run for the money, and I will admit that neither company is perfect, and different chips are usually better at different things.
Sharing copyrighted music was until rather recently only illegal if there was a profit involved
I think I forgot about that, but the case I can think of was related to software. I don't know how similar it is. It was pretty much a loophole because they didn't think of people doing wholesale copying without a profit motive, something that didn't happen until the BBS days IIRC.
Now, copying for others without a profit only limits your liability.
I believe the Berne Convention was the treaty that did that in, or at least started that change, signed in 1976 I believe.
Amidst all the confusion in that post, all I can say is, huh?
Sharing copyrighted music in the form of copying has been illegal for a long, long time. Sharing using Napster means that they are making a work available for copying.
Yes, there will always be some someone copying someone else's work without owning a proper copy, there is no way to end it. There are ways to reduce the amount of wholesale ripoffs that use the net, and it is within their rights to do some of it.
I am not saying that the fascists in the RIAA or MPAA are doing a good thing, but there's a limit to all things, at both ends.
In any case, the file format is "open" in the sense that it is not secret, but there *are* patent restrictions on it.
Are there any patent restricitions other than the Fraunhoffer encoder? I haven't heard about it.
AFAIK the Fraunhoffer encoder is the *only* proprietary thing about it, and Fraunhoffer *already* tried to crack down on its use. The encoder is only a human-psycho-acoustic model for stuffing the best bits into the file. Build your own psycho-acoustic model and encoder and you are set, AFIAK. Maybe you know more about the math than I do, but that's long been my impression.
I support a move to make a totally free audio format, but in my opinion, the only reason corporate pressure will be applied to removing MP3 is to move us to much more *closed* formats rather than try to milk the MP3 for cash, because they want to milk some closed format for even more cash.
Also, I was wrong on something else you didn't notice, I think it's an ISO standard, not IEEE, part of the MPEG-1 standard. Remember that? MPEG-1 Layer 3? The ISO reference code has some of Fraunhoffer's work and that's how these encoders got out in the first place, the reference code was freely available.
I'll admit that just about everyone uses a toolkit on top of X windows for programming (for me, that's MESA, the OpenGL-like-yet-trying-not-to-say-open-GL-for-trad emark-concerns-3D-toolkit.
The term for this is "masochism". Like someone should finance their own pain and torture. I would encourage you to remove your rose colored glasses.
Um, flamebait?
OK, we are working from rumors, which are very unconfirmed at best and rarely have anything to do with the final product once we see it.
That's also the kind of thing that makes people suspicious of a magazine, you wonder if they gloss over or downplay problems in products which their makers advertise in their magazine. There are two extremes to be working from. Yeah, if Motor Trend repeatedly slams Ford or one of its products, I don't see a point in advertising with them. But in my opinion, these are sites that praise Apple at every possible opportunity. Yeah, lets hurt our fans.
Can Apple put a real dollar figure on their losses? Are they really loosing anything if a certain tidbit leaks out? It's not as if these sites are trying to do damage, and I really question the assumption that any real damage is done.
They are fan run sites that try to keep up the interest in the company's products. So Jobs can't surprise as many people when he announces something. He's got fans that would applaud any move he makes, and the "average" consumer wouldn't know any better either way.
The FILE FORMAT itself is an open standard, adopted by IEEE, IIRC.
Fraunhaufer had the original encoder. That's where the stickiness is. You can get non-proprietary encoder, which LAME is now. Maybe they renamed the program now it is its own encoder.
All the encoder really is is a piece of software that decides which parts of the signal should be represented in the compressed file.
The format decoders are totally free of proprietary IP and patents, IIRC. Some are shareware, freeware, GPL, although some are totally closed source payware, but no decoder pays royalties to read the format itself. Some might to use someone else's code tree though.
There is a significant difference. SDMI enabled formats are definitely proprietary in every way and are far worse in this respect.
...if some of Metalica's lawyers are the alma matter of Harvard. I'm sorry, I don't know Latin so I don't even know if that's the proper word use.
Hmm.. Lawyer suing his old law school? Can universities revoke diplomas and degrees once handed out?:)
Not that I like napster except as a civil disobedience tool against the RIAA, as well as a way to sample songs, but I have never used it. I don't support copyright infringement. Sharing or loaning a CD to a friend is legal, but making hundreds of copies and distributing them to anyone that wants them is not, and I believe unethical if it weren't for some of the RIAA's actions.
It is about control. CSS was one of the restrictions placed by the studios before they'd agree to use the new format.
They wanted to enforce the idea that you had to sign an agreement to be able to make a player, so that the Macrovision and region coding demands are complied with, and CSS is such a bullying method that if you break the contract, they can revoke your encryption key on future discs, making your company's players worthless.
You do have a point. There is no perfect way to stop fraud. To me, remarking chips is easier than putting forth the effort to reverse engineer the BIOS, but once it's done, patching the BIOS should be simple, but I think the issue is that the remarkers would have to also be in the motherboard business or find a lot of crooked retailers that are willing to patch every board BIOS they sell. I think that part is hard, as the retailers are kind of working on plausible deniability or ignorance.
I honestly see AMD as trying to do something right. Maybe if the bus clock is locked (they don't make any with over 200MHz do they)?
Do you have multiple accounts? You can't moderate and post in the same thread, I tried once, it just revoked my moderation. You might not have noticed the revocation, or maybe it did work. It could be that someone else backed you up? Or does posting as Anonymous Coward allow this?
I do understand your point, using hick cursing language to raise yourself from scum to dirt is always in poor taste to me.
You haven't looked at these chips? They laser engrave the markings on the chips to a certain depth that is supposed to be hard to remark. The frauds do some slick tricks to remove and re-engrave the chips.
There's a lot of money in fraudulent overclocking since they can take a midrange chip, overclock it by 20-30% and make a hundred or so dollars on it, and it takes some amount of knowledge to expose some frauds.
The best alternative I see is getting the BIOS to query the chip to get the rated speed and also to show the working speed.
I think it should be mentioned that the USSR effort in WWII was extremely poorly managed at best. Many times units were shipped the wrong ammunition. The only reason they held the Germans off were because the Germans weren't all that well supplied either for their situation and that the Soviets had a huge population to work with, putting them in front of the German slaughtering system in the hopes of hurting a few of them. I think the mortality ratio was on a 10:1 for the soldiers, Russian to German, the soviets lost something like half the 50 million figure for the cost of WWII.
In my opinion, the super power was always a peasant nation. Yeah, they had some nice stuff for a while and managed to hold off Western influence for 70 years, but they have also made calculated attempts to keep out any and all western influence or even real facts. The USSR system was about lies and half truths, far more so than I have ever seen in the West. Even then, they had decades to recover from the war, and they have, but since then they have also made some very poor decisions that would rarely happen in a capitalist system. Communisim is about changing the economy to fit the political system, at the expense of the economics. Capitalism tends to change the political system to its own benifit, at the expense of the political system.
Personally, I prefer having the wealth to feed everyone rather than using the same power to uphold a stupid political party.
I don't think so. I think their calculations are based on what is sold, not how many people look but then go somewhere else. It is to find out how many people would buy at a certain price, for three different prices. They can figure out based on volumes sold at each price and eventually pick a price that gives them the most sales at the most margin possible.
You trust Amazon's "list" prices, which are basically MSRPs? They're usually inflated, and sometimes completely bogus.
I don't shop at Amazon, but for the most part list prices for DVDs are well known. If you want to say that the list prices are inflated by the studio, that's up to you. I don't think Amazon inflates the list prices of DVDs.
If one buys DVDs at buy.com, stay away from the free shipping deals. It seems once they announce free shipping, the prices on everything increases by 3$. Depending on how many suckers they find, they could stand to profit more from those that buy more than one disc.
Personally, if the disc is already released, buy from DVD Planet. They don't dick with prices, having consistent 30% discounts for many years, no SRP fudging and $2.50 flat rate shipping.
They might with CDs, I have found list prices that varied on those by as much as 5$, depending on who you buy it from. For what I was trying to buy, something out of production, the stated list price didn't matter as no one had it anymore. At at least one place the list price was inflated to make the 30% markdown cost more than the normal discount at other places...
I don't like the idea of being given random prices to see how much I'll pay. When I go somewhere, I want to have a stable price that isn't dependent on a rand() statement or what's already in my computer.
To me, the worst part is that no one is told what is going on.
Intels got chips out there now that use a fraction more power than the Crusoe yet sustain much better performance.
Huh? Is there a Pentium III that I don't know about? The Crusoe was said to consume a watt or so at full power. I keep hearing about complaints that the CPUs on current laptops are having huge heat problems at the CPU, and that sounds like an order of magnitude more than 1 watt.
Hmmmm.... I don't know how S.T.A.R.T. and such are written. The ABM treaty was signed with the U.S.S.R. In case you haven't noticed, that government doesn't officially exist anymore, and I haven't heard of any attempt to re-ratify the treaties with the new government.
For some odd reason ABM technology is pretty difficult to perfect, although ships with the AEGIS system (such as theTiconderoga cruiser class and Arleigh Burke destroyer class) can shoot down surface to surface and surface to air missiles quite easily. I think it has something to do with the speed and altitude of the flight of one of these things.
Another issue to consider is that there are plenty of missle silos that could go under rogue control, as illustrated with the Kursk incident, the Russian military isn't well maintained, and the Kursk was the prize of the Russian navy, now think about some silo that few know about... As some missles have MIRV capabilities to possibly take out a state (or two), I'd want some way of preventing a successful flight of these things.
I doubt that the nuclear stockpile will reduce all that significantly, right now it is supposedly at half of the peak, but I don't expect that the US or anyone else are willing to totally give them up for quite some time.
Slashdot Mirror
If the "criminal" hasn't commited a crime yet, but it might be aiding a crime. Could be an undercover cop too, trying to find out where all the drug hangouts. Cops are known for cluelessness.
On the other hand, telling the person to "go away" maybe considered criminal? You are telling him or her that you don't have any so they can easily look elsewhere - OK, that's stretching the point.
There doesn't seem to be a whole lot stopping anyone else from making their own database.
Right now, I don't see anything on whether the software that manages the data is "open source". AFIAK, the database data isn't really subject to the open source debate, so not really subject to "open source" theology.
Just because I use open source software doesn't mean that all the data I create with it should automatically be freely available to anyone.
I believe a totally public scan code dB would be great though. And make a totally independent and transparent front-end so that crap:(cat input is translated before the request is sent, so the database site isn't subject to cease-and-desist because the software isn't on the site.
I agree, I guess I would have a problem with people telling me what I have to look at. If slashdot didn't have the points moderation system, I wouldn't read or post at all, as there are too many garbage posts and too much noise.
Frankly, I only have time to read about 10 posts per thread, and to make those worth my time I want them to be good ones with good information or interesting perspectives. I trust human moderators to do a decent enough of a job, so basically everything that's 2 points and above has someone behind it saying it's probably worth reading. For the heavily posted threads, I might choose to read at 4 or 5, and this reduces the amount of error, and usually there are two or three people that find value in the post.
It isn't censorship because I can choose to read it or not read, and I can choose what I read, which is the basic point. Nothing is deleted at anyone's say-so. I've seen enough flamebaits and trolls and disgusting posts that I've decided not to wade in the sewer.
You don't see me telling someone not to read what level you want.
You've got Teletubbies and ... umm ... ummm ... well, try it for yourself and see how hard it is :)
:) I imagine even comedic depictions of accidents and violence is out too.
Well, that leaves us with PBS. Oops, scratch the nature shows.
I agree, trying to raise pacifists in a rude society (USA) is difficult and might possibly be unhealthy in terms of the possibility of being victimized. Heck, they'll either get victimized or think they are victims when they start school.
Life's tough. You have to be tough on some level to live through it. I'm not saying desensitize yourself or your children, but they have to grow up and learn the truth someday.
How about the fact that AMD's yeild during the K6 eras was around 25%?
That's a total rumor as far as I can tell, I have never seen that yield claim substantiated anywhere. I think in an article in Wired or some computer/game mag that the president of AMD denied that was the yeild and said it was definitely better than that.
Yields are always "state secrets", same with newer fab processes, so we never really know what the yield is on any plant, company, chip or process.
What severe problems?
Oh, say the recall of the 1.13 GHz P3? It couldn't pass the Linux kernel compile test for all its worth. It also required a special BIOS to load up special microcode that it needed to be even remotely stable. Note that it was quickly recalled for a re-tape and re-mask.
MMX speed up 3D? I don't remember anyone marketing it as that, at best, it sped up multimedia, such as audio and some video functions, and codecs that used floating point math weren't widely used either. MMX was only integer when I checked the instruction set. IIRC, Floating point 3D became used more widely when the Pentium came out, as well as the fact that the 486DX's had them too, not.
IIRC, Alpha didn't have SIMD instructions per se, but it did have most of the functions that MMX had, right from the start, circa 1991, due to having extensive byte manipulation methods and having 64 bit registers. I don't recall seeing SIMD add, subtract or multiply functions in the instruction set until MVI was introduced, I have never used it. That mostly only added add, subract and multiply, min, max as well as a couple more byte shuffling instructions.
IIRC, Intel also had a hard time meeting demands for nearly entire quarters - a reason that Gateway and such lowered their resistance to AMD chips. AMD is definitely giving them a run for the money, and I will admit that neither company is perfect, and different chips are usually better at different things.
Sharing copyrighted music was until rather recently only illegal if there was a profit involved
I think I forgot about that, but the case I can think of was related to software. I don't know how similar it is. It was pretty much a loophole because they didn't think of people doing wholesale copying without a profit motive, something that didn't happen until the BBS days IIRC.
Now, copying for others without a profit only limits your liability.
I believe the Berne Convention was the treaty that did that in, or at least started that change, signed in 1976 I believe.
Amidst all the confusion in that post, all I can say is, huh?
Sharing copyrighted music in the form of copying has been illegal for a long, long time. Sharing using Napster means that they are making a work available for copying.
Yes, there will always be some someone copying someone else's work without owning a proper copy, there is no way to end it. There are ways to reduce the amount of wholesale ripoffs that use the net, and it is within their rights to do some of it.
I am not saying that the fascists in the RIAA or MPAA are doing a good thing, but there's a limit to all things, at both ends.
In any case, the file format is "open" in the sense that it is not secret, but there *are* patent restrictions on it.
Are there any patent restricitions other than the Fraunhoffer encoder? I haven't heard about it.
AFAIK the Fraunhoffer encoder is the *only* proprietary thing about it, and Fraunhoffer *already* tried to crack down on its use. The encoder is only a human-psycho-acoustic model for stuffing the best bits into the file. Build your own psycho-acoustic model and encoder and you are set, AFIAK. Maybe you know more about the math than I do, but that's long been my impression.
I support a move to make a totally free audio format, but in my opinion, the only reason corporate pressure will be applied to removing MP3 is to move us to much more *closed* formats rather than try to milk the MP3 for cash, because they want to milk some closed format for even more cash.
Also, I was wrong on something else you didn't notice, I think it's an ISO standard, not IEEE, part of the MPEG-1 standard. Remember that? MPEG-1 Layer 3? The ISO reference code has some of Fraunhoffer's work and that's how these encoders got out in the first place, the reference code was freely available.
What exactly is wrong with X windows again?
d emark-concerns-3D-toolkit.
I'll admit that just about everyone uses a toolkit on top of X windows for programming (for me, that's MESA, the OpenGL-like-yet-trying-not-to-say-open-GL-for-tra
The term for this is "masochism". Like someone should finance their own pain and torture. I would encourage you to remove your rose colored glasses.
Um, flamebait?
OK, we are working from rumors, which are very unconfirmed at best and rarely have anything to do with the final product once we see it.
That's also the kind of thing that makes people suspicious of a magazine, you wonder if they gloss over or downplay problems in products which their makers advertise in their magazine. There are two extremes to be working from. Yeah, if Motor Trend repeatedly slams Ford or one of its products, I don't see a point in advertising with them. But in my opinion, these are sites that praise Apple at every possible opportunity. Yeah, lets hurt our fans.
Can Apple put a real dollar figure on their losses? Are they really loosing anything if a certain tidbit leaks out? It's not as if these sites are trying to do damage, and I really question the assumption that any real damage is done.
They are fan run sites that try to keep up the interest in the company's products. So Jobs can't surprise as many people when he announces something. He's got fans that would applaud any move he makes, and the "average" consumer wouldn't know any better either way.
This is all my own opinion.
Fraunhaufer had the original encoder. That's where the stickiness is. You can get non-proprietary encoder, which LAME is now. Maybe they renamed the program now it is its own encoder.
All the encoder really is is a piece of software that decides which parts of the signal should be represented in the compressed file.
The format decoders are totally free of proprietary IP and patents, IIRC. Some are shareware, freeware, GPL, although some are totally closed source payware, but no decoder pays royalties to read the format itself. Some might to use someone else's code tree though.
There is a significant difference. SDMI enabled formats are definitely proprietary in every way and are far worse in this respect.
The line done once or twice is a joke. Five times is damn annoying and makes the REAL message much harder to read.
Besides, my comment was kind of a joke of taking it as reverse psychology!
...if some of Metalica's lawyers are the alma matter of Harvard. I'm sorry, I don't know Latin so I don't even know if that's the proper word use.
:)
Hmm.. Lawyer suing his old law school? Can universities revoke diplomas and degrees once handed out?
Not that I like napster except as a civil disobedience tool against the RIAA, as well as a way to sample songs, but I have never used it. I don't support copyright infringement. Sharing or loaning a CD to a friend is legal, but making hundreds of copies and distributing them to anyone that wants them is not, and I believe unethical if it weren't for some of the RIAA's actions.
Yeah, and that story was an april fool's joke.
I'd be glad to moderate you DOWN for that annoying repetition you did there, but I already posted elsewhere.
It is about control. CSS was one of the restrictions placed by the studios before they'd agree to use the new format.
They wanted to enforce the idea that you had to sign an agreement to be able to make a player, so that the Macrovision and region coding demands are complied with, and CSS is such a bullying method that if you break the contract, they can revoke your encryption key on future discs, making your company's players worthless.
Again, control. And that's a pretty stiff cartel.
You do have a point. There is no perfect way to stop fraud. To me, remarking chips is easier than putting forth the effort to reverse engineer the BIOS, but once it's done, patching the BIOS should be simple, but I think the issue is that the remarkers would have to also be in the motherboard business or find a lot of crooked retailers that are willing to patch every board BIOS they sell. I think that part is hard, as the retailers are kind of working on plausible deniability or ignorance.
I honestly see AMD as trying to do something right. Maybe if the bus clock is locked (they don't make any with over 200MHz do they)?
Do you have multiple accounts? You can't moderate and post in the same thread, I tried once, it just revoked my moderation. You might not have noticed the revocation, or maybe it did work. It could be that someone else backed you up? Or does posting as Anonymous Coward allow this?
I do understand your point, using hick cursing language to raise yourself from scum to dirt is always in poor taste to me.
You haven't looked at these chips? They laser engrave the markings on the chips to a certain depth that is supposed to be hard to remark. The frauds do some slick tricks to remove and re-engrave the chips.
There's a lot of money in fraudulent overclocking since they can take a midrange chip, overclock it by 20-30% and make a hundred or so dollars on it, and it takes some amount of knowledge to expose some frauds.
The best alternative I see is getting the BIOS to query the chip to get the rated speed and also to show the working speed.
How does that affect anything?
Also, is it possible to reverse engineer the hardware without the software?
I think it should be mentioned that the USSR effort in WWII was extremely poorly managed at best. Many times units were shipped the wrong ammunition. The only reason they held the Germans off were because the Germans weren't all that well supplied either for their situation and that the Soviets had a huge population to work with, putting them in front of the German slaughtering system in the hopes of hurting a few of them. I think the mortality ratio was on a 10:1 for the soldiers, Russian to German, the soviets lost something like half the 50 million figure for the cost of WWII.
In my opinion, the super power was always a peasant nation. Yeah, they had some nice stuff for a while and managed to hold off Western influence for 70 years, but they have also made calculated attempts to keep out any and all western influence or even real facts. The USSR system was about lies and half truths, far more so than I have ever seen in the West. Even then, they had decades to recover from the war, and they have, but since then they have also made some very poor decisions that would rarely happen in a capitalist system. Communisim is about changing the economy to fit the political system, at the expense of the economics. Capitalism tends to change the political system to its own benifit, at the expense of the political system.
Personally, I prefer having the wealth to feed everyone rather than using the same power to uphold a stupid political party.
I don't think so. I think their calculations are based on what is sold, not how many people look but then go somewhere else. It is to find out how many people would buy at a certain price, for three different prices. They can figure out based on volumes sold at each price and eventually pick a price that gives them the most sales at the most margin possible.
You trust Amazon's "list" prices, which are basically MSRPs? They're usually inflated, and sometimes completely bogus.
I don't shop at Amazon, but for the most part list prices for DVDs are well known. If you want to say that the list prices are inflated by the studio, that's up to you. I don't think Amazon inflates the list prices of DVDs.
If one buys DVDs at buy.com, stay away from the free shipping deals. It seems once they announce free shipping, the prices on everything increases by 3$. Depending on how many suckers they find, they could stand to profit more from those that buy more than one disc.
Personally, if the disc is already released, buy from DVD Planet. They don't dick with prices, having consistent 30% discounts for many years, no SRP fudging and $2.50 flat rate shipping.
They might with CDs, I have found list prices that varied on those by as much as 5$, depending on who you buy it from. For what I was trying to buy, something out of production, the stated list price didn't matter as no one had it anymore. At at least one place the list price was inflated to make the 30% markdown cost more than the normal discount at other places...
I don't like the idea of being given random prices to see how much I'll pay. When I go somewhere, I want to have a stable price that isn't dependent on a rand() statement or what's already in my computer.
To me, the worst part is that no one is told what is going on.
Intels got chips out there now that use a fraction more power than the Crusoe yet sustain much better performance.
Huh? Is there a Pentium III that I don't know about? The Crusoe was said to consume a watt or so at full power. I keep hearing about complaints that the CPUs on current laptops are having huge heat problems at the CPU, and that sounds like an order of magnitude more than 1 watt.
Hmmmm.... I don't know how S.T.A.R.T. and such are written. The ABM treaty was signed with the U.S.S.R. In case you haven't noticed, that government doesn't officially exist anymore, and I haven't heard of any attempt to re-ratify the treaties with the new government.
For some odd reason ABM technology is pretty difficult to perfect, although ships with the AEGIS system (such as theTiconderoga cruiser class and Arleigh Burke destroyer class) can shoot down surface to surface and surface to air missiles quite easily. I think it has something to do with the speed and altitude of the flight of one of these things.
Another issue to consider is that there are plenty of missle silos that could go under rogue control, as illustrated with the Kursk incident, the Russian military isn't well maintained, and the Kursk was the prize of the Russian navy, now think about some silo that few know about... As some missles have MIRV capabilities to possibly take out a state (or two), I'd want some way of preventing a successful flight of these things.
I doubt that the nuclear stockpile will reduce all that significantly, right now it is supposedly at half of the peak, but I don't expect that the US or anyone else are willing to totally give them up for quite some time.