If you don't like clock locking then don't buy the processor. Intel can do any damn thing they want with their processors. By your logic we should still be moaning about the multiplier lock that Intel has used for many years. Why don't you get an AMD processor instead?
You first state that raw sales are not the only factor (which I agree with) but then you go on to point out that overclockers cost money to AMD, and that this is a bad thing. What they purchase with that money is more than reputation; they get a lot of free press on enthusiast sites. This can influence the buying decisions of many people that do not overclock, which is a net gain. I think this press more than offsets the cost of a few RMAs.
Most of the game formats mentioned in the article are popular for arcade games. Most of them support short play times, which is good for operator income. In the US the entire arcade category is not doing well due to the availability of cheap high quality home consoles and PC games. Most home video games have longer play times. I think it is because a long game is perceived to have greater value which helps people justify spending $50. This means that all game genres that are mostly represented in the arcade are living on borrowed time.
I'm glad someone is taking a stand for lazy coding. I wish every application had its own unique look and feel. I love spending half an hour trying to figure out where all the menus are, or where the exit option is. I can't wait until uninstallers are spread throughout the system so I can spend 10 minutes trying to get rid of a piece of software. I wish that all help documents were either 8 billion line plain text files or embedded in a custom help browser.
And I am so glad that most programs are installed in subfolders named after the fucking publisher, because the first thing that jumps in my head when I think of Nero is "Ahead", and Neverwinter Nights always makes me think "Bioware".
No doubt this is stealing. But the cable industry is an easy target. PPV is ridiculously expensive when compared to rentals. And since each cableco is a monopoly prices are going up all the time. Lastly the cable industry is notorious for poor service. It is a lot easier to steal from a company with such a poor public image.
ENIAC was developed to compute firing tables for the military. This doesn't mean that the primary purpose of computing equipment is for the military. I'm sure the economic impact of civilian computer use far outweighs that of military use. Computing has generally been repurposed for business and scientific needs.
TCP/IP was also developed to satisfy a requirement for the military, and it too has outlived its original purpose to serve a wider audience. Even if the military could they would never limit the use of TCP/IP because they would cripple the US economy. The benefits of limiting access to enemies would be outweighed by the instant revolution back home.
GPS may have been developed to guide cruise missiles, but it can do a lot more than that. The US military may currently have control over this system, but that won't necessarily last forever. One commercial dependence on GPS passes a critical point then the disadvantages of shutting down the system outweigh the advantages to our adversaries.
Anyone with the resources and the technology to deploy their own satellite positioning system is also in a position to defend their system from the US with economic sanctions or military force. Candidates include Japan, China, the EU, and Russia. I don't think the US could afford the repercussions of an overt strike to any of those nations.
Right on. I wish I could go back to two channels of hissy sound going through an onboard amplifier. But I got some new speakers and I like music and games, so now I guess I'll have to stick with 4.1 channels of clean sound with line and microphone in and the ability to accelerate multiple 3D sound streams in hardware. And you can get all that for about $25 if you are willing to live with a card that is a few years old (SB Live).
It sounds like you either you don't give a damn about sound. Why bother having a soundcard at all?
DVD-Audio may be the last hope for the recording industry. So they are going to make sure it is the perfect platform for generating revenue.
CD quality audio is a lost cause. It can be massively compressed to the point where it can be shared on the internet easily. There is no built-in DRM which means that all later attempts at security must be bolted on. These attempts are either incompatible with many players or easily circumvented (or both).
DVD-Audio is too big to copy to a CD bit-for-bit (don't tell the recording industry that recordable DVDs are going to be very cheap very soon:). It will take a few years for anyone to come up with a codec that can fit 90% of the quality of a DVD-Audio disc in a file that can be shared easily.
To complete this perfect format DRM must be built-in, and apparently the licensing agreement for the codec is the mechanism.
I don't see how DVD-Audio support is a "massive benefit" to any product line. The recording industry would love a new standard that they could charge more for. It must be considerably more expensive to produce albums with 5.1 channels, which raises the barrier of entry to the business and protects the big 5 from competition. Good thing they'll all be bankrupt before most people lose their minds and decide that they want to pay 20 bucks for 5.1 channels of Britney Spears.
Because otherwise it wouldn't be "integrated" into the OS and therefore might be an illegal attempt to use an existing monopoly to propagate another one (see IE for further details). Although it looks like IIS is too late and Apache has already won the day for open source.
If all programming tasks were as exciting as defending a small village from rapacious bandits then I'm sure you would have no trouble finding brilliant programmers. Unfortunately a lot of software is not very exciting. I find it unlikely that there is a single programmer out there that writes commission accounting systems for fun.
As a hobbyist you have the opportunity to pick and choose your projects. A working programmer often has to solve business problems that aren't unique or exciting.
Storage Review recently reviewed the lone 10K RPM IDE hard drive and there was an interesting quote from Western Digital (the manufacturer). They said they held off on releasing this drive because they needed the enterprise market to support the product, and previous iterations of ATA were incapable of supporting hot-swapping.
This implies two interesting facts: only enterprises are willing to pay the price for 10k+ RPM hard drives and SATA finally has the necessary features to support enterprise usage. Does this bode ill for SCSI?
What exactly is your point? Mine was that STR increases regardless of need because it is a byproduct of increasing the factors that do make a difference to customers (capacity and speed through latency). Oh, and by the way Storage Review will reinforce this point by illustrating that STR has improved dramatically over the years whether or not it is a major factor in performance.
And as a matter of fact it looks like straight throughput does benefit some applications. In particular the Bootup test that Storage Review uses favors disks with good throughput performance. This may be a minor factor for Linux but poor Windows users are often subject to multiple daily reboots.
Thanks for this excellent link. Here is an excellent one-pager on this site:
http://www.lsilogic.com/products/islands/sas/exp an ders_config.html
They show multiple desktops hooked up to a disk array but that wouldn't be very practical since you would have to run yet another wire to each box. But a server box full of blades that all shared high-speed access to a single disk array could be a very powerful and flexible system.
People want hard drives that are faster and have more capacity. The economical way to get larger capacity is to increase areal density, which means you can pack more bits on less disk. If rotational speed is maintained then the added benefit is that bandwidth is increased.
The best way to improve speed is to reduce latency, and that means increasing rotational speed or reducing the size of the disks. Reducing disk size conflicts with our first objective, which leaves us with faster disks. This incidentally improves bandwidth.
So even if hard drive manufacturers don't want to increase bandwidth they end up doing it anyway to meet their other goals. But sequential access is actually quite common in workstations and desktops so it pays to improve bandwidth as well.
There is exactly one IDE disk that runs at 10k RPM. This is the average speed of SCSI disks, and several run at 15k. SCSI seek times are usually lower as well. So it can safely be implied that SCSI hard disks are made to higher standards.
You can already buy solid-state storage in a hard-disk form factor. They cost a lot though. And don't forget that a RAM disk would need uninterrupted power FOREVER. The power in my apartment is pretty good but it goes out a couple times a year.
Someone might point out that you could use a RAM disk and back it up with a hard drive. Modern computers already have this with virtual memory.
Flash memory could be used instead but I don't believe it is faster than a hard disk anyway at this time. Eventually this might be a suitable replacement for a hard disk but it will take time for the cost to come down and the access time to speed up.
I like the idea of the GuitarPort, and wish they made a version tailored for the bass. I am sure that Gibson will produce a similar product that uses their new MaGIC system of multichannel digital transmission over Ethernet. The interface box could be much cheaper since it would not need to do an analog-to-digital conversion. They could use a custom DSP instead to provide additional horsepower for realtime effects.
The bus is 450Mhz and it is dual-pumped. How difficult is it to produce a chipset that can maintain a 900Mhz data channel? That is faster than anything else I have heard of. Apple may not be able to produce an economical chipset for this CPU. That would explain why IBM is positioning this as a server solution.
Last time I checked I could drive a car other than a Jaguar or a Mercedes without trouble. However it appears that in many industries an inability to handle Word documents is not tenable. That is how a monopoly works. The reason monopolies have different rules is because otherwise we would pay thousands of dollars a month for our power and telephone access. The monopoly has no incentive to improve services or reduce prices.
It may not be fair to the monopoly to require them to adhere to extra regulations but it is less fair to punish everyone else with a stagnation in competition.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't like clock locking then don't buy the processor. Intel can do any damn thing they want with their processors. By your logic we should still be moaning about the multiplier lock that Intel has used for many years. Why don't you get an AMD processor instead?
You first state that raw sales are not the only factor (which I agree with) but then you go on to point out that overclockers cost money to AMD, and that this is a bad thing. What they purchase with that money is more than reputation; they get a lot of free press on enthusiast sites. This can influence the buying decisions of many people that do not overclock, which is a net gain. I think this press more than offsets the cost of a few RMAs.
Most of the game formats mentioned in the article are popular for arcade games. Most of them support short play times, which is good for operator income. In the US the entire arcade category is not doing well due to the availability of cheap high quality home consoles and PC games. Most home video games have longer play times. I think it is because a long game is perceived to have greater value which helps people justify spending $50. This means that all game genres that are mostly represented in the arcade are living on borrowed time.
...thanks to voice recognition software.
I'm glad someone is taking a stand for lazy coding. I wish every application had its own unique look and feel. I love spending half an hour trying to figure out where all the menus are, or where the exit option is. I can't wait until uninstallers are spread throughout the system so I can spend 10 minutes trying to get rid of a piece of software. I wish that all help documents were either 8 billion line plain text files or embedded in a custom help browser.
And I am so glad that most programs are installed in subfolders named after the fucking publisher, because the first thing that jumps in my head when I think of Nero is "Ahead", and Neverwinter Nights always makes me think "Bioware".
No doubt this is stealing. But the cable industry is an easy target. PPV is ridiculously expensive when compared to rentals. And since each cableco is a monopoly prices are going up all the time. Lastly the cable industry is notorious for poor service. It is a lot easier to steal from a company with such a poor public image.
ENIAC was developed to compute firing tables for the military. This doesn't mean that the primary purpose of computing equipment is for the military. I'm sure the economic impact of civilian computer use far outweighs that of military use. Computing has generally been repurposed for business and scientific needs.
TCP/IP was also developed to satisfy a requirement for the military, and it too has outlived its original purpose to serve a wider audience. Even if the military could they would never limit the use of TCP/IP because they would cripple the US economy. The benefits of limiting access to enemies would be outweighed by the instant revolution back home.
GPS may have been developed to guide cruise missiles, but it can do a lot more than that. The US military may currently have control over this system, but that won't necessarily last forever. One commercial dependence on GPS passes a critical point then the disadvantages of shutting down the system outweigh the advantages to our adversaries.
Anyone with the resources and the technology to deploy their own satellite positioning system is also in a position to defend their system from the US with economic sanctions or military force. Candidates include Japan, China, the EU, and Russia. I don't think the US could afford the repercussions of an overt strike to any of those nations.
Right on. I wish I could go back to two channels of hissy sound going through an onboard amplifier. But I got some new speakers and I like music and games, so now I guess I'll have to stick with 4.1 channels of clean sound with line and microphone in and the ability to accelerate multiple 3D sound streams in hardware. And you can get all that for about $25 if you are willing to live with a card that is a few years old (SB Live).
It sounds like you either you don't give a damn about sound. Why bother having a soundcard at all?
DVD-Audio may be the last hope for the recording industry. So they are going to make sure it is the perfect platform for generating revenue.
:). It will take a few years for anyone to come up with a codec that can fit 90% of the quality of a DVD-Audio disc in a file that can be shared easily.
CD quality audio is a lost cause. It can be massively compressed to the point where it can be shared on the internet easily. There is no built-in DRM which means that all later attempts at security must be bolted on. These attempts are either incompatible with many players or easily circumvented (or both).
DVD-Audio is too big to copy to a CD bit-for-bit (don't tell the recording industry that recordable DVDs are going to be very cheap very soon
To complete this perfect format DRM must be built-in, and apparently the licensing agreement for the codec is the mechanism.
I don't see how DVD-Audio support is a "massive benefit" to any product line. The recording industry would love a new standard that they could charge more for. It must be considerably more expensive to produce albums with 5.1 channels, which raises the barrier of entry to the business and protects the big 5 from competition. Good thing they'll all be bankrupt before most people lose their minds and decide that they want to pay 20 bucks for 5.1 channels of Britney Spears.
Since when is a serious IIS security issue news? How do we mod the story as flamebait?
Because otherwise it wouldn't be "integrated" into the OS and therefore might be an illegal attempt to use an existing monopoly to propagate another one (see IE for further details). Although it looks like IIS is too late and Apache has already won the day for open source.
If all programming tasks were as exciting as defending a small village from rapacious bandits then I'm sure you would have no trouble finding brilliant programmers. Unfortunately a lot of software is not very exciting. I find it unlikely that there is a single programmer out there that writes commission accounting systems for fun.
As a hobbyist you have the opportunity to pick and choose your projects. A working programmer often has to solve business problems that aren't unique or exciting.
Storage Review recently reviewed the lone 10K RPM IDE hard drive and there was an interesting quote from Western Digital (the manufacturer). They said they held off on releasing this drive because they needed the enterprise market to support the product, and previous iterations of ATA were incapable of supporting hot-swapping.
This implies two interesting facts: only enterprises are willing to pay the price for 10k+ RPM hard drives and SATA finally has the necessary features to support enterprise usage. Does this bode ill for SCSI?
What exactly is your point? Mine was that STR increases regardless of need because it is a byproduct of increasing the factors that do make a difference to customers (capacity and speed through latency). Oh, and by the way Storage Review will reinforce this point by illustrating that STR has improved dramatically over the years whether or not it is a major factor in performance.
And as a matter of fact it looks like straight throughput does benefit some applications. In particular the Bootup test that Storage Review uses favors disks with good throughput performance. This may be a minor factor for Linux but poor Windows users are often subject to multiple daily reboots.
Thanks for this excellent link. Here is an excellent one-pager on this site:
p an ders_config.html
http://www.lsilogic.com/products/islands/sas/ex
They show multiple desktops hooked up to a disk array but that wouldn't be very practical since you would have to run yet another wire to each box. But a server box full of blades that all shared high-speed access to a single disk array could be a very powerful and flexible system.
People want hard drives that are faster and have more capacity. The economical way to get larger capacity is to increase areal density, which means you can pack more bits on less disk. If rotational speed is maintained then the added benefit is that bandwidth is increased.
The best way to improve speed is to reduce latency, and that means increasing rotational speed or reducing the size of the disks. Reducing disk size conflicts with our first objective, which leaves us with faster disks. This incidentally improves bandwidth.
So even if hard drive manufacturers don't want to increase bandwidth they end up doing it anyway to meet their other goals. But sequential access is actually quite common in workstations and desktops so it pays to improve bandwidth as well.
There is exactly one IDE disk that runs at 10k RPM. This is the average speed of SCSI disks, and several run at 15k. SCSI seek times are usually lower as well. So it can safely be implied that SCSI hard disks are made to higher standards.
You can already buy solid-state storage in a hard-disk form factor. They cost a lot though. And don't forget that a RAM disk would need uninterrupted power FOREVER. The power in my apartment is pretty good but it goes out a couple times a year.
Someone might point out that you could use a RAM disk and back it up with a hard drive. Modern computers already have this with virtual memory.
Flash memory could be used instead but I don't believe it is faster than a hard disk anyway at this time. Eventually this might be a suitable replacement for a hard disk but it will take time for the cost to come down and the access time to speed up.
I like the idea of the GuitarPort, and wish they made a version tailored for the bass. I am sure that Gibson will produce a similar product that uses their new MaGIC system of multichannel digital transmission over Ethernet. The interface box could be much cheaper since it would not need to do an analog-to-digital conversion. They could use a custom DSP instead to provide additional horsepower for realtime effects.
The bus is 450Mhz and it is dual-pumped. How difficult is it to produce a chipset that can maintain a 900Mhz data channel? That is faster than anything else I have heard of. Apple may not be able to produce an economical chipset for this CPU. That would explain why IBM is positioning this as a server solution.
Last time I checked I could drive a car other than a Jaguar or a Mercedes without trouble. However it appears that in many industries an inability to handle Word documents is not tenable. That is how a monopoly works. The reason monopolies have different rules is because otherwise we would pay thousands of dollars a month for our power and telephone access. The monopoly has no incentive to improve services or reduce prices.
It may not be fair to the monopoly to require them to adhere to extra regulations but it is less fair to punish everyone else with a stagnation in competition.
Sounds like you haven't tried the latest version yet, which allows you to bring up the component tools individually.
How do you think Scott Mcnealy would feel about selling a CPU that supports Windows? I think he'd rather jump into a bag of starving wolverines.