Guys, I've been at Slashdot for years, and have never seen such blatant disregard for the core subject matter. You guys are all going on writing about how obvious the patent is / how bad akamai is, without even looking into the matter. I've been an Akamai customer for many years now, and no matter how much of a bloodsucking leech they are, and how exorbitantly they price their services, they do have some massive innovation going behind their products.
First, the patent isn't so obvious. The patent is for Edge Side Includes, which is in no way trivial. It is the method by which you can have a full HTML page (eg.the slashdot homepage), cached at the akamai edge servers, and have one part of personalized message (welcome USERNAME / you have X private messages / etc. etc.) load from the origin servers, taking into account all cookies etc. Doing so required inventing a whole new method of writing, interpreting, and selectively applying caching to enhanced include tags, that too across a distributed network, supporting other cool items like tiered distribution, progressive caching, server side cookies etc. etc.
Now, realize, this isn't about loading one object, like an image / flash object / javascript from a different server, but transparently loading a part of the core HTML code of a page from the origin server, with full support for cookies / post etc. while making it look like it is coming from the same physical source, so as to maintain cookie coherency. Trust me, before Akamai's founder came around and invented this, web caching static objects with personalized items was like pulling teeth. Also, Akamai is licensing this technology to the whole world http://www.akamai.com/html/support/esi.html, and if they choose not to license this to their competitors, but the competitor goes ahead and implements it "as-is" based on their spec, then hey, the competitor deserves to be sued.
And you know what? Limelight is a bunch of ex-akamai guys, who left with a boatload of trade secrets, and customer lists. I got a call from them within 15 days of their service starting, asking to switch over at half price, but their Super POP model doesn't work for dynamic content like ours.
This image is actually pretty old. It's been used as a wallpaper in a lower res in many Windows and Linux (KDE) themes too. Ain't nothing new, just that today it became the pic of the day.
NASA must be cursing slashdot right now for posting a link to the hi-res image download page. Surely, it will multiply like a plague in the next few days, not only will us geeks be leetching this photo, but everything else that we find interesting, in high res.
I prefer the Nasa JPL DFRC (Dryden) Planes pics as opposed to the heavens and the earth at DMSP (what's with Nasa's naming scheme?). All those X-Planes and B-2s and SR-71s in Hi Res.
Go leech some of the most beautiful war machines ever created. Sonic Booms photographed..
I hope you all have seen Sony's QRIO ROBOT. It's that humanoid robot. More like an AIBO in the human form.
Can do all that the AIBO can, and can do it all a lot better cause it can carry a lot more equipment. It has Wi-Fi, and a customizable software that lets you control all cameras / motion / etc. It can be used as an autonomous creature, or be remote controlled.
A customized version could easily do security robot tasks.
There are many reasons A9 can't harm a fly in google's office...reasons follow..
1. It is based on google, the day google pulls their own search OEMing to Amazon, it literally dies
2. It is far slower than google itself, maybe because it pulls data from google's servers in the backend.
3. the design isn't as accesible and simple as google is. any good designer will tell you a brown background isn't the best way to read text. That itself turned me off from visiting it again.
4. it is far heavier than google when it comes to "HTML and Image Dowwnloads per page". Google is a total of 19k for a certain search, and A9 is over 42K for the same search, while it shows the exact same links and content.
5. Google has a great brand recall. A9 isn't a name people will find easy to remember as compared to google, which has become a part of the language itself now. Can you imagine people saying "A9 it" instead of "Google it". Nah!
Read the entire story here on Techtree.com. They have some interesting observation and comments too.
"However, there are various issues raised over "voice-over Wi-Fi." Firstly, there isn't enough Wi-Fi coverage yet to make it feasible for the executives who are the primary users of pocket PCs to own only that device. Most people who would want to use that service need a reliable network. Also, the sound quality offered is poor."
Why don't you go check benchmarks before you say faster....Most sites say it is slower than the earlier Pentium 4 because of the increased number of stages in the pipeline. And obviously, it's beaten blue by the AMD A64 3400+ in more than half of the real-world benchmarks.
Sure, the increase in cache helps, but the increase in pipeline stages really kills intensive non-repetitive computing tasks...
I think the slashdot perspective may not be the perfect perspective to look at the whole 'engineer vs. manager' thing, or for that matter, the outsourcing phenomena.
Most slashdotters are 'engineers'...not 'managers'...even if they are, not in the general perspective, i.e. non-skilled 'Line' managers...
When it comes to management, the ladder is reverse of skillset. To the top-rung management, a regular manager who can translate the work of 12 engineers into a product which they want to see is more 'Advanced' than the coders / engineers themselves..If he can accomplish the same job with coders seven seas away, who get paid 1/4th of the salary of the engineers here, and produce the same result in 1.5 times the time, considering getting the quality up to the same level as on-site workers takes some extra effort, it is still a 50% + saving on people cost for that product.
To management, in times where depression is like a looming sword, cutting costs seems the most obvious solution to survive, unlike some puritans who believe that 'Contributing Back to the US Economy' by hiring US workers is the only way out of this depression.
So..point is...perspective at slashdot is highly skewed towards one side...this is just one effort to try and balance it..
Here at Techtree.com is an interesting viewpoint about how, if the open source community doesn't take any action, "Microsoft will become the âcontrollerâ(TM) of all digital entertainment you see around you."
He says that the movie industry is already happily using Microsoft's Windows Media 9 for digital theater, and they're lobbying hard to get into many other standards commities.
The columnist also goes on to say "It is inevitable. DRM and Copy Protection will get implemented whether consumers want it or not. The choice of whether we want it to be based on an open technology, or a proprietary technology from one of the âworstâ(TM) purveyors of monopolistic regimes, lies with us, the consumers and the open source community.".
US is not such a big GSM market, which is why they get GSM phones after their official launch in europe and asia-pacific....
India is predominantly GSM, and now a few 3G CDMA2000x1 operators...so the market for GSM mobile phones is in the range of over 20Mill handsets a year, consistently, for the past two years. And it's only going to grow...
When I get a billion dollars after suing Microsoft for those "rattlebox" XBOX controllers....RSI injuries...and that uPNP exploit....I will buy myself an isle and make my own country...
These will be the software rules there..
1. Software patents don't exist.
2. What is Software Piracy? It's All Free! ShareReactor Jindabad...
3. Who said Amazon Owns One-Cick buying...i own it...This is my country..
4. Everyone should submit the ratings about how much "virtual damage" they did to each software company by pirating their software...and I will issue prizes for each $1 Billion...
alas....microsoft will be the first one to invade my country.....
Corporations will own armies in future...(ahem..didnt' they own armies in the past? East india company?)
Well...Let's see what you do when you mod a Car, and what exactly happens when you do that.
You put Biturbos - put more air into the engine - you void your warranty
You put Intercoolers - put cooler, compressed air into the engine - Void your warranty
You put raised suspension - make the car ride differently than the manufacturer intended - Void your warranty
So...no matter what mod you do...you always 'VOID YOUR WARRANTY'......and now...remember...if you choose to actually modify an engine managment system done by Ferrari to generate 200 more horses, and try selling it, and they have it patented.....they will sue your ass for the IPR of it, and they will win.
So boy...cars aren't much different...so when you say that 'MODDING' to do something the company that made it never intended to do was legal, think again.....it never was..never will be...It is just 'ACCEPTED' in the sporty spirit of the car companies cause it does't cause them to loose any money when you do it....
Whereas....come on...let's be fair...X-Box modders who do it for the sole purpose of using pirated shit (which, a fact, 99% of them do) do cost the game companies..and Microsft...money....
So Microsoft isn't going to sit back and take it...they're going to go after those who want to harm their profits...
As for running Linux on XBOX...try make a 'Public Request' to Microsoft....on the lines of the Sony PS2 Linux kit....and they might agree to help the community out with that...You never know...
I'm sure it will help them in their 'court battle'..
Doing so, that is, "ignoring" what RIAA/MPAA sell to you means ignoring the work of the artists behind all that stuff....so yes. It harms the RIAA/MPAA, but it harms the artists even more....and it's the artists that are essential for the industry, or your interest in music/movies/snips to survive.
The solution is the other way around, "artists and producers" need to "ignore" the RIAA/MPAA and find alternative distribution models, alternative promotion models, and change the way they deal with customers....as of now....every customer who pays $14 to a retailer, and gets one CD, is paying the retailer around $2, and the rest goes to RIAA distributors, who keep another dollar and a half, and pass on the rest to the record company. So the record company gets around US$ 10.5 per CD sold at full price.
Out of that, depending on how good a deal the lawyers of the band managed to cut out, the artist gets somewhere between US$1 to US$3 per disc, plus the check they got for recording if they were lucky. Record studios keep the rest, and account for production/promotion costs.
Let's say "Public Enemy" did an album, got paid US$2 a disc ("good" payment), and a bill of US$ 0.5 million for recording it (highly unlikely), and they sold a million copies, then overall, RIAA managed to get US$ 8 per disc, let's deduct US$ 1 for production (too much, but then let's take the worst case), and put a hefty big promotion worth US$ 1 million for the overall project, then too, the record label made a total of US$ 6 million on this recording in just the base first week/month sales of the album. Whereas artists made US$ 2.5 million, but then that's the best case for the artist, and the worst for the company.
In real world, not only do the artists get paid far less, they also loose the rights to their own work, and that means being unable to "re-sell" their own old music to another company, when their contract with one company expires, or breaks out.
The artist got only US$ 2.5 (in an optimal case) for 1 million copies of his album, lost his music; fans got Costlier CDs, RIAA got rich.
Let's say the artists did everything all by themselves, produce, market, promote and then sell, one album for US$ 7 for a physical "CD", and an electronic download for US$ 5.5 for the entire album download, or US$1.5 for the "best singles".
It costs US$ 0.5 million to get two weeks for a final recording in a good sound studio. It costs US$1 to make a CD with jewel case and covers, a nice poster and a nice lyrics booklet. Let's say they spent US$.5 million in making and spreading a music video, US$0.5 million in promos and adverts, and outsourced distribution from one of the underground low-price distribution networks, pay them US$ 1 per CD sold, the total cost, other than the artistic talent, comes to around US$ 3 to produce an album.
Let's say they sold 1 million CDs, because other than their talent, the marketing was better because they spent more money, and went the right way, and then, the album is cheaper, and has more goodies. They still own their music, they earn from the online sales in "full", and that single the public really fancied will sell so much for US$1.5 that it would make them even more money to pump into promos. This lands the band on a cash pit of over US$ 5 million, while making it cheaper for customers to acquire their music.
Now, obviously, a new artist won't have so much money to pump into all this, so the established ones need to begin on this first, and the others will soon latch on. Obviously, there will be other music companies, those who will be the "breeding ground" for new upcoming artists, invest in their effort, and overall, make money, but then, the internet makes it so much easier to begin small, and then grow up big for any artist.
Now, the dynamics for the movie industry are a little different, and i'm not so familiar with those, but i guess similar things apply there too, specifically in the DVD sales area.
So guys, it's the artists who need to "ignore" the RIAA/MPAA alliance, and find alternative means to reach their audience. Not the other way around.
The car uses a 0.3 liter, single cylinder, naturally aspirated diesel engine, that produces around 8.5 BHPs at 4000 RPM. The subframe and chassis are made of costly, but light alloy, same goes for the "tub" which is nothing less "technologically sophisticated" than a McLaren F1 roadcar tub.
The way I look at it, my 98CC petrol four stroke bike that weighs around 107KGs all by itself without fuel gives something like 80 KPL easily when loaded with two people, and i'm talking two fat ones. Put that same bike on three wheels, smaller ones, put a modded go-kart chassis with shock-absorbers that i can find easily at our local track, a canopy with a plexiglass window over it to prevent rain from coming in, and the whole thing, after a bit of mod, would take two people, weigh around 170 KGs with 10 KG fuel, and would average around 60 KPL easy, and reach around 75 KPH speeds.
All this can be done for less than Rs. 1,20,000 here in India (around US$2300). And trust me, a poor engineering college student in sriperambudur, chennai, India, has done this.
What did VW achieve that anybody with "little technical resources" and a desire to make fuel-efficient stuff, not hotrods, would achieve.
Remember, Diesels are anyday more efficient than petrol engines, run cleaner, and can offer more torque for the "cubic capacity" because of higher compression ratios.
Compiled for 64 Bit...and Programmed for 64 Bit..
on
If I Had a Hammer
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There's a lot of difference between 32 bit optimized code compiled for 64 Bit, and code written and optimized for 64 bit and compiled for 64 bit.
Applications need to be programmed and optimized to make use of the extra registers, extra info paths, extra instructions available on the new platform. Without that, the application speeds can't be compared, even though the base code and output is the same.
Let's take the example of some of the 1st. generation playstation II code...which was actually code written for a 32 Bit machines, on a different platform like the PC, or the old PSX, now..pure recompiling won't get you any major performance boost, so all the developers had to "re-do" the code to make use of the 128 bit emotion engine.
Exactly the reason why all these gamedev guys kept screaming it is much harder to code for the PS2 than for other platforms....one part of that whole hing is this...the other part is changing graphics APIs.
PCs is dirextx/opengl....and PS2 can be either custom renderers, or Open GL.
Put it in perspective....why don't 16 bit games re-compiled for 32 bit give a "major" performance boost...unless optimised code is included...??
When I get a billion dollars after suing Microsoft for those "rattlebox" XBOX controllers....RSI injuries...and that uPNP exploit....I will buy myself an isle and make my own country...
These will be the software rules there..
1. Software patents don't exist.
2. What is Software Piracy? It's All Free! ShareReactor Jindabad...
3. Who said Amazon Owns One-Cick buying...i own it...This is my country..
4. Everyone should submit the ratings about how much "virtual damage" they did to each software company by pirating their software...and I will issue prizes for each $1 Billion...
alas....microsoft will be the first one to invade my country.....
Corporations will own armies in future...(ahem..didnt' they own armies in the past? East india company?)
If any of you happen to have seen Microsoft's announcement and demo of Windows XP (Tablet PC Edition), you would easily be able to figure out why this..the Aquapad won't be succesful, when compared to Windows XP tablet PC...All small mistakes...
In all portable devices, three things matter the most on the usability side...
Now...looking at the midori/transmeta combo, sure..it has x86 Linux binary compatibility...nice...but what Tablet PC type apps are there on Linux.....is there a single office suite specifically modified for that purpose? Any proper handwriting recognition tool? Any Ink manager? All these apps/APIs will have to be built and standardized before you expect such a device/platform to become popular.
As apps that run on the Tablet PC edition are exactly the same that run on the PCs, and add support fot he INK API that runs as a service on WinXP tablet PC (handwriting recognition), the data generated is exactly compatible to the one on PC apps..full compatibility...
Look at the advantages the Crusoe offers....the whole platform offers around 20% of battery life saving over others..but at the cost of a 40% performance hit..as proved by many benchmarks all around....
Building a simple 600 MHz PIII mobile platform for a tablet PC, is just fine to defeat the crusoe...as it runs almost as long as the crusoe...provides much more power...and is a more commonplace platform with widely adopted production base....making it easier for OEMs to start on that track....and make TabletPC devices...
Size...same.....variety...LOADS....everybody will be making them.....
My advice...first make proper software..then think of hardware to put it onto...not the other way around......
Hardware can be modded to suit specs more easily than software nowadays....OEMS and fabricators offer you the capability to do all that for much lower costs than you had to invest in the past....
Who do you think makes PDAs for Handspring...? Not them....it's a company called Flextronics....the same guys who make the XBOX for microsoft...
When it comes to Gaming consoles, looking at what has been done in the past would give you a fairly clear idea that they are all about "one-processor-for-each-medium".
Starting from the NES (or even Atari, for that matter), all these "computers" have different chips to process each element of a game, those being, graphics, physics/gameplay/backend work and sound.
Looking at the original playstation, and comparing it to a PC in the same era, let's see what you get. It had a 33 MHz core processor (CPU) for doing the I/O/Physics/backend work, a seperate GPU with its own memory for graphics, and a seperate SPU (Sound processing unit)for the audio. All well balanced, and each part doing its job individually, controlled and piped by the IO processor, are capable of beating the shit out of a P-200 with a Voodoo graphics accelarator (which was commonplace when the PS-1 came out).
The whole point being, "BALANCE"....
If you look at PS2, it has a very well balanced architecture. The CPU is capable enough to max out the GPU, and the sound engine supports what can usably be classified as "best in gaming audio". The DVD ROM has enough storage to pack in all hi-q cutscenes you would ever want, eliminating the need to have in-game rendering, which is both hard to make, and not so good looking.
XBOX, although flaunts so much high tech stuff, it isn't well balanced. The CPU - a 700 MHz intel P-III equivalent, is hardly capable of pushing the graphics unit to 60% of its usability, so even though the theoretical graphical fill rate/texel/pixel pipelines might be capable of a lot more, it will never actually deliver those rates because the CPU isn't capable enough to pump those bits to the GPU fast enough. Same for sound, XBOX supports "so many channels" of audio, but to put all that through the sound processor, you would need to dedicate a major chunk of CPU processing power to that thread, bringing down the available CPU power once again. Not to mention the overheads the XBOX carries as it has to address far more hardware devices than the PS2.
Well integrated design, balanced specs = cheap/decent performing architecture
high specs, no balance, bloatware = inconsistent performance, scalability issues
you decide....hack your XBOX, benchmark everything, and prove me wrong....i guarantee it doesn't even perform as much as 55% of the claims the specs make..
As far as I know all these three services use one common engine by that makes it possible for them to interoperate with each other. Basically, a user who is using Morpheus can download files shared by KaZaA and vice versa.
Because of this, at present, these three together form the largest network (far larger than napster or even gnutella's break-brick-block kind of network).
As fasttrack says, this architecture is distributed, self-organising network. Neither search requests nor actual downloads pass through any central server. The network is multi-layered, so that more powerful computers get to become search hubs ("SuperNodes"). Any client may become a SuperNode, if it meets the criteria of processing power, bandwidth and latency. Network management is 100% automatic - SuperNodes appear and disappear according to demand.
Basically, unstoppable!....You can stop the development of the code, and the program, but not the existing network. Just like gnutella.
For sure, they are RIAA, MPAA and the software industry's largest and the hardest to destroy enemies because they also allow users to share movies and programs.
Now that's what they say, let's see what the reality is!
Slashdot Mirror
Guys, I've been at Slashdot for years, and have never seen such blatant disregard for the core subject matter. You guys are all going on writing about how obvious the patent is / how bad akamai is, without even looking into the matter. I've been an Akamai customer for many years now, and no matter how much of a bloodsucking leech they are, and how exorbitantly they price their services, they do have some massive innovation going behind their products.
First, the patent isn't so obvious. The patent is for Edge Side Includes, which is in no way trivial. It is the method by which you can have a full HTML page (eg.the slashdot homepage), cached at the akamai edge servers, and have one part of personalized message (welcome USERNAME / you have X private messages / etc. etc.) load from the origin servers, taking into account all cookies etc. Doing so required inventing a whole new method of writing, interpreting, and selectively applying caching to enhanced include tags, that too across a distributed network, supporting other cool items like tiered distribution, progressive caching, server side cookies etc. etc.
Now, realize, this isn't about loading one object, like an image / flash object / javascript from a different server, but transparently loading a part of the core HTML code of a page from the origin server, with full support for cookies / post etc. while making it look like it is coming from the same physical source, so as to maintain cookie coherency. Trust me, before Akamai's founder came around and invented this, web caching static objects with personalized items was like pulling teeth. Also, Akamai is licensing this technology to the whole world http://www.akamai.com/html/support/esi.html, and if they choose not to license this to their competitors, but the competitor goes ahead and implements it "as-is" based on their spec, then hey, the competitor deserves to be sued.
And you know what? Limelight is a bunch of ex-akamai guys, who left with a boatload of trade secrets, and customer lists. I got a call from them within 15 days of their service starting, asking to switch over at half price, but their Super POP model doesn't work for dynamic content like ours.
Actually, that is a really popular use for a phone in Asian and European markets. SMS is such a shock for US citizens.
p ?storyid=53686
Check another review of this phone at the link below.
http://www.techtree.com/techtree/jsp/showstory.js
This article here has a little more info about the lunar mission, and a small backgrounder on the EDUSAT, which was covered on Slashdot last week.
This image is actually pretty old. It's been used as a wallpaper in a lower res in many Windows and Linux (KDE) themes too. Ain't nothing new, just that today it became the pic of the day.
NASA must be cursing slashdot right now for posting a link to the hi-res image download page. Surely, it will multiply like a plague in the next few days, not only will us geeks be leetching this photo, but everything else that we find interesting, in high res.
I prefer the Nasa JPL DFRC (Dryden) Planes pics as opposed to the heavens and the earth at DMSP (what's with Nasa's naming scheme?). All those X-Planes and B-2s and SR-71s in Hi Res.
Go leech some of the most beautiful war machines ever created. Sonic Booms photographed..
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/
I hope you all have seen Sony's QRIO ROBOT. It's that humanoid robot. More like an AIBO in the human form.
Can do all that the AIBO can, and can do it all a lot better cause it can carry a lot more equipment. It has Wi-Fi, and a customizable software that lets you control all cameras / motion / etc. It can be used as an autonomous creature, or be remote controlled.
A customized version could easily do security robot tasks.
Read more about it here.
There are many reasons A9 can't harm a fly in google's office...reasons follow..
1. It is based on google, the day google pulls their own search OEMing to Amazon, it literally dies
2. It is far slower than google itself, maybe because it pulls data from google's servers in the backend.
3. the design isn't as accesible and simple as google is. any good designer will tell you a brown background isn't the best way to read text. That itself turned me off from visiting it again.
4. it is far heavier than google when it comes to "HTML and Image Dowwnloads per page". Google is a total of 19k for a certain search, and A9 is over 42K for the same search, while it shows the exact same links and content.
5. Google has a great brand recall. A9 isn't a name people will find easy to remember as compared to google, which has become a part of the language itself now. Can you imagine people saying "A9 it" instead of "Google it". Nah!
Read the entire story here on Techtree.com. They have some interesting observation and comments too.
"However, there are various issues raised over "voice-over Wi-Fi." Firstly, there isn't enough Wi-Fi coverage yet to make it feasible for the executives who are the primary users of pocket PCs to own only that device. Most people who would want to use that service need a reliable network. Also, the sound quality offered is poor."
Why don't you go check benchmarks before you say faster....Most sites say it is slower than the earlier Pentium 4 because of the increased number of stages in the pipeline. And obviously, it's beaten blue by the AMD A64 3400+ in more than half of the real-world benchmarks.
Sure, the increase in cache helps, but the increase in pipeline stages really kills intensive non-repetitive computing tasks...
and oh...i think I got first post!
I think the slashdot perspective may not be the perfect perspective to look at the whole 'engineer vs. manager' thing, or for that matter, the outsourcing phenomena.
Most slashdotters are 'engineers'...not 'managers'...even if they are, not in the general perspective, i.e. non-skilled 'Line' managers...
When it comes to management, the ladder is reverse of skillset. To the top-rung management, a regular manager who can translate the work of 12 engineers into a product which they want to see is more 'Advanced' than the coders / engineers themselves..If he can accomplish the same job with coders seven seas away, who get paid 1/4th of the salary of the engineers here, and produce the same result in 1.5 times the time, considering getting the quality up to the same level as on-site workers takes some extra effort, it is still a 50% + saving on people cost for that product.
To management, in times where depression is like a looming sword, cutting costs seems the most obvious solution to survive, unlike some puritans who believe that 'Contributing Back to the US Economy' by hiring US workers is the only way out of this depression.
So..point is...perspective at slashdot is highly skewed towards one side...this is just one effort to try and balance it..
Here at Techtree.com is an interesting viewpoint about how, if the open source community doesn't take any action, "Microsoft will become the âcontrollerâ(TM) of all digital entertainment you see around you."
He says that the movie industry is already happily using Microsoft's Windows Media 9 for digital theater, and they're lobbying hard to get into many other standards commities.
The columnist also goes on to say "It is inevitable. DRM and Copy Protection will get implemented whether consumers want it or not. The choice of whether we want it to be based on an open technology, or a proprietary technology from one of the âworstâ(TM) purveyors of monopolistic regimes, lies with us, the consumers and the open source community.".
I have one....
US is not such a big GSM market, which is why they get GSM phones after their official launch in europe and asia-pacific....
India is predominantly GSM, and now a few 3G CDMA2000x1 operators...so the market for GSM mobile phones is in the range of over 20Mill handsets a year, consistently, for the past two years. And it's only going to grow...
When I get a billion dollars after suing Microsoft for those "rattlebox" XBOX controllers....RSI injuries...and that uPNP exploit....I will buy myself an isle and make my own country...
These will be the software rules there..
1. Software patents don't exist.
2. What is Software Piracy? It's All Free! ShareReactor Jindabad...
3. Who said Amazon Owns One-Cick buying...i own it...This is my country..
4. Everyone should submit the ratings about how much "virtual damage" they did to each software company by pirating their software...and I will issue prizes for each $1 Billion...
alas....microsoft will be the first one to invade my country.....
Corporations will own armies in future...(ahem..didnt' they own armies in the past? East india company?)
Well...Let's see what you do when you mod a Car, and what exactly happens when you do that.
You put Biturbos - put more air into the engine - you void your warranty
You put Intercoolers - put cooler, compressed air into the engine - Void your warranty
You put raised suspension - make the car ride differently than the manufacturer intended - Void your warranty
So...no matter what mod you do...you always 'VOID YOUR WARRANTY'......and now...remember...if you choose to actually modify an engine managment system done by Ferrari to generate 200 more horses, and try selling it, and they have it patented.....they will sue your ass for the IPR of it, and they will win.
So boy...cars aren't much different...so when you say that 'MODDING' to do something the company that made it never intended to do was legal, think again.....it never was..never will be...It is just 'ACCEPTED' in the sporty spirit of the car companies cause it does't cause them to loose any money when you do it....
Whereas....come on...let's be fair...X-Box modders who do it for the sole purpose of using pirated shit (which, a fact, 99% of them do) do cost the game companies..and Microsft...money....
So Microsoft isn't going to sit back and take it...they're going to go after those who want to harm their profits...
As for running Linux on XBOX...try make a 'Public Request' to Microsoft....on the lines of the Sony PS2 Linux kit....and they might agree to help the community out with that...You never know...
I'm sure it will help them in their 'court battle'..
Doing so, that is, "ignoring" what RIAA/MPAA sell to you means ignoring the work of the artists behind all that stuff....so yes. It harms the RIAA/MPAA, but it harms the artists even more....and it's the artists that are essential for the industry, or your interest in music/movies/snips to survive.
The solution is the other way around, "artists and producers" need to "ignore" the RIAA/MPAA and find alternative distribution models, alternative promotion models, and change the way they deal with customers....as of now....every customer who pays $14 to a retailer, and gets one CD, is paying the retailer around $2, and the rest goes to RIAA distributors, who keep another dollar and a half, and pass on the rest to the record company. So the record company gets around US$ 10.5 per CD sold at full price.
Out of that, depending on how good a deal the lawyers of the band managed to cut out, the artist gets somewhere between US$1 to US$3 per disc, plus the check they got for recording if they were lucky. Record studios keep the rest, and account for production/promotion costs.
Let's say "Public Enemy" did an album, got paid US$2 a disc ("good" payment), and a bill of US$ 0.5 million for recording it (highly unlikely), and they sold a million copies, then overall, RIAA managed to get US$ 8 per disc, let's deduct US$ 1 for production (too much, but then let's take the worst case), and put a hefty big promotion worth US$ 1 million for the overall project, then too, the record label made a total of US$ 6 million on this recording in just the base first week/month sales of the album. Whereas artists made US$ 2.5 million, but then that's the best case for the artist, and the worst for the company.
In real world, not only do the artists get paid far less, they also loose the rights to their own work, and that means being unable to "re-sell" their own old music to another company, when their contract with one company expires, or breaks out.
The artist got only US$ 2.5 (in an optimal case) for 1 million copies of his album, lost his music; fans got Costlier CDs, RIAA got rich.
Let's say the artists did everything all by themselves, produce, market, promote and then sell, one album for US$ 7 for a physical "CD", and an electronic download for US$ 5.5 for the entire album download, or US$1.5 for the "best singles".
It costs US$ 0.5 million to get two weeks for a final recording in a good sound studio. It costs US$1 to make a CD with jewel case and covers, a nice poster and a nice lyrics booklet. Let's say they spent US$.5 million in making and spreading a music video, US$0.5 million in promos and adverts, and outsourced distribution from one of the underground low-price distribution networks, pay them US$ 1 per CD sold, the total cost, other than the artistic talent, comes to around US$ 3 to produce an album.
Let's say they sold 1 million CDs, because other than their talent, the marketing was better because they spent more money, and went the right way, and then, the album is cheaper, and has more goodies. They still own their music, they earn from the online sales in "full", and that single the public really fancied will sell so much for US$1.5 that it would make them even more money to pump into promos. This lands the band on a cash pit of over US$ 5 million, while making it cheaper for customers to acquire their music.
Now, obviously, a new artist won't have so much money to pump into all this, so the established ones need to begin on this first, and the others will soon latch on. Obviously, there will be other music companies, those who will be the "breeding ground" for new upcoming artists, invest in their effort, and overall, make money, but then, the internet makes it so much easier to begin small, and then grow up big for any artist.
Now, the dynamics for the movie industry are a little different, and i'm not so familiar with those, but i guess similar things apply there too, specifically in the DVD sales area.
So guys, it's the artists who need to "ignore" the RIAA/MPAA alliance, and find alternative means to reach their audience. Not the other way around.
The car uses a 0.3 liter, single cylinder, naturally aspirated diesel engine, that produces around 8.5 BHPs at 4000 RPM. The subframe and chassis are made of costly, but light alloy, same goes for the "tub" which is nothing less "technologically sophisticated" than a McLaren F1 roadcar tub.
The way I look at it, my 98CC petrol four stroke bike that weighs around 107KGs all by itself without fuel gives something like 80 KPL easily when loaded with two people, and i'm talking two fat ones. Put that same bike on three wheels, smaller ones, put a modded go-kart chassis with shock-absorbers that i can find easily at our local track, a canopy with a plexiglass window over it to prevent rain from coming in, and the whole thing, after a bit of mod, would take two people, weigh around 170 KGs with 10 KG fuel, and would average around 60 KPL easy, and reach around 75 KPH speeds.
All this can be done for less than Rs. 1,20,000 here in India (around US$2300). And trust me, a poor engineering college student in sriperambudur, chennai, India, has done this.
What did VW achieve that anybody with "little technical resources" and a desire to make fuel-efficient stuff, not hotrods, would achieve.
Remember, Diesels are anyday more efficient than petrol engines, run cleaner, and can offer more torque for the "cubic capacity" because of higher compression ratios.
There's a lot of difference between 32 bit optimized code compiled for 64 Bit, and code written and optimized for 64 bit and compiled for 64 bit.
Applications need to be programmed and optimized to make use of the extra registers, extra info paths, extra instructions available on the new platform. Without that, the application speeds can't be compared, even though the base code and output is the same.
Let's take the example of some of the 1st. generation playstation II code...which was actually code written for a 32 Bit machines, on a different platform like the PC, or the old PSX, now..pure recompiling won't get you any major performance boost, so all the developers had to "re-do" the code to make use of the 128 bit emotion engine.
Exactly the reason why all these gamedev guys kept screaming it is much harder to code for the PS2 than for other platforms....one part of that whole hing is this...the other part is changing graphics APIs.
PCs is dirextx/opengl....and PS2 can be either custom renderers, or Open GL.
Put it in perspective....why don't 16 bit games re-compiled for 32 bit give a "major" performance boost...unless optimised code is included...??
When I get a billion dollars after suing Microsoft for those "rattlebox" XBOX controllers....RSI injuries...and that uPNP exploit....I will buy myself an isle and make my own country...
These will be the software rules there..
1. Software patents don't exist.
2. What is Software Piracy? It's All Free! ShareReactor Jindabad...
3. Who said Amazon Owns One-Cick buying...i own it...This is my country..
4. Everyone should submit the ratings about how much "virtual damage" they did to each software company by pirating their software...and I will issue prizes for each $1 Billion...
alas....microsoft will be the first one to invade my country.....
Corporations will own armies in future...(ahem..didnt' they own armies in the past? East india company?)
If any of you happen to have seen Microsoft's announcement and demo of Windows XP (Tablet PC Edition), you would easily be able to figure out why this..the Aquapad won't be succesful, when compared to Windows XP tablet PC...All small mistakes...
In all portable devices, three things matter the most on the usability side...
"data exchangeability"...
"binaries/Software availability"....
"Data Input methods/GUI"....
And these three matter the most on the "Device feasibility" side..
"size/weight"...
"battery life"....
"variety/installed base".....
Now...looking at the midori/transmeta combo, sure..it has x86 Linux binary compatibility...nice...but what Tablet PC type apps are there on Linux.....is there a single office suite specifically modified for that purpose? Any proper handwriting recognition tool? Any Ink manager? All these apps/APIs will have to be built and standardized before you expect such a device/platform to become popular.
As apps that run on the Tablet PC edition are exactly the same that run on the PCs, and add support fot he INK API that runs as a service on WinXP tablet PC (handwriting recognition), the data generated is exactly compatible to the one on PC apps..full compatibility...
Look at the advantages the Crusoe offers....the whole platform offers around 20% of battery life saving over others..but at the cost of a 40% performance hit..as proved by many benchmarks all around....
Building a simple 600 MHz PIII mobile platform for a tablet PC, is just fine to defeat the crusoe...as it runs almost as long as the crusoe...provides much more power...and is a more commonplace platform with widely adopted production base....making it easier for OEMs to start on that track....and make TabletPC devices...
Size...same.....variety...LOADS....everybody will be making them.....
My advice...first make proper software..then think of hardware to put it onto...not the other way around......
Hardware can be modded to suit specs more easily than software nowadays....OEMS and fabricators offer you the capability to do all that for much lower costs than you had to invest in the past....
Who do you think makes PDAs for Handspring...? Not them....it's a company called Flextronics....the same guys who make the XBOX for microsoft...
When it comes to Gaming consoles, looking at what has been done in the past would give you a fairly clear idea that they are all about "one-processor-for-each-medium".
Starting from the NES (or even Atari, for that matter), all these "computers" have different chips to process each element of a game, those being, graphics, physics/gameplay/backend work and sound.
Looking at the original playstation, and comparing it to a PC in the same era, let's see what you get. It had a 33 MHz core processor (CPU) for doing the I/O/Physics/backend work, a seperate GPU with its own memory for graphics, and a seperate SPU (Sound processing unit)for the audio. All well balanced, and each part doing its job individually, controlled and piped by the IO processor, are capable of beating the shit out of a P-200 with a Voodoo graphics accelarator (which was commonplace when the PS-1 came out).
The whole point being, "BALANCE"....
If you look at PS2, it has a very well balanced architecture. The CPU is capable enough to max out the GPU, and the sound engine supports what can usably be classified as "best in gaming audio". The DVD ROM has enough storage to pack in all hi-q cutscenes you would ever want, eliminating the need to have in-game rendering, which is both hard to make, and not so good looking.
XBOX, although flaunts so much high tech stuff, it isn't well balanced. The CPU - a 700 MHz intel P-III equivalent, is hardly capable of pushing the graphics unit to 60% of its usability, so even though the theoretical graphical fill rate/texel/pixel pipelines might be capable of a lot more, it will never actually deliver those rates because the CPU isn't capable enough to pump those bits to the GPU fast enough. Same for sound, XBOX supports "so many channels" of audio, but to put all that through the sound processor, you would need to dedicate a major chunk of CPU processing power to that thread, bringing down the available CPU power once again. Not to mention the overheads the XBOX carries as it has to address far more hardware devices than the PS2.
Well integrated design, balanced specs = cheap/decent performing architecture
high specs, no balance, bloatware = inconsistent performance, scalability issues
you decide....hack your XBOX, benchmark everything, and prove me wrong....i guarantee it doesn't even perform as much as 55% of the claims the specs make..
As far as I know all these three services use one common engine by that makes it possible for them to interoperate with each other. Basically, a user who is using Morpheus can download files shared by KaZaA and vice versa.
Because of this, at present, these three together form the largest network (far larger than napster or even gnutella's break-brick-block kind of network).
As fasttrack says, this architecture is distributed, self-organising network. Neither search requests nor actual downloads pass through any central server. The network is multi-layered, so that more powerful computers get to become search hubs ("SuperNodes"). Any client may become a SuperNode, if it meets the criteria of processing power, bandwidth and latency. Network management is 100% automatic - SuperNodes appear and disappear according to demand.
Basically, unstoppable!....You can stop the development of the code, and the program, but not the existing network. Just like gnutella.
For sure, they are RIAA, MPAA and the software industry's largest and the hardest to destroy enemies because they also allow users to share movies and programs.
Now that's what they say, let's see what the reality is!