If I recall the last batch of "sales tax
on internet purchases" articles, one of the
biggest arguments *for* tax centered on how
it *hurts* local merchants if someone can
buy things tax-free online.
Now, perhaps silly ol'
always-using-that-nasty-logic me has failed
to grasp a subtlety here, but if tax-free
sales online encourage people to shop online
rather than in real stores, then taxing those
sales removes that advantage.
So *how* will this not hurt online sales?
More importantly, I find this extremely
offensive, from the perspective of, who
does this "voluntary" tax money go to?
For example, with Wallyworld, does the
online tax go to the state in which the
buyer lives (which it should, since they
have a presence in every US state), or
does it go to Arkansas, home of their
corporate HQ? Or do they even have to
give it to anyone? "Yeah, we'll voluntarily
collect these taxes, but they go
straight into our own coffers until the
feds force us to turn it over to someone".
here's the single receipt for all 23
seats we bought yesterday
So when they come in and find 23 Linux
boxen, do they automatically assume you
just finished deleting all your pirated
copies of Windows and fine you anyway?
Although I suspect you have the right idea,
if it held up in court it would have some
VERY scary implications.
Most of the personal computer industry
is catching up to the changes Apple made
5 years ago, and they have been since the
Apple ][.
Five(ish) years ago, Apple decided to allow
3rd party manufacturers of Mac hardware to
bring down costs (much like the PC industry
had done 15 years earlier). It almost killed
them, and they stopped allowing this practice
(well, very tightly clamped down on it) only
a few months later.
Funny how one person's 5-years-too-soon may
equal another person's 15-years-too-late, and
what makes one can break the other.
Interesting question, if the 3.5" really
does go the way of the 8"...
Will bootable CDs based on the El Torito
method (which makes the first 2880 or 5760
blocks on a CD look like fd0) all suddenly
stop working?
When companies make decisions like this,
either for financial or marketing reasons,
they *really* need to consider the technical
problems such decisions may cause. This one
strikes me as amusing because, although they
can get rid of the convenience of *having* a
floppy drive, they can't actually get rid
of the BIOS support for it without breaking
quite a lot of seemingly-non-floppy media.
So what does paid product placement
in movies count as?
Tougher question, but I would say
"unspecified variables".
In some cases, the script may have called
for Cheerios. It much more likely said
"cereal", and the producer replaced that
ambiguity with the brand of cereal by the
highest bidder.
As for how that affects the artistic merit
of a work, I would say it doesn't - If the
author didn't specify the brand, the director
needs to pick *something*, and I personally
find Cheerios less intrusive than an
obviously nonexistant brand.
If the author *did* specify a brand,
or only a related food (perhaps the
script said "sausage & eggs", but Jimmy
Dean's didn't want to pay for a placement),
and the director/producer went against that,
then I find it offensive. But, I have no
control over that, and we don't really
have the technology to "santize"
something like that without making it glaringly
obvious.
Sure. I use a reasonable set of rules (by
"reasonable", I mean that I don't blindly
look for all possible words having to do
with commerce or pornography) to ID a
message as spam, then a whitelist to make sure
no messages from anyone I know has accidentally
gone into the trash bin.
I still get perhaps a half dozen spam messages
per day to manually delete, but out of over
100, and AFAIK I have no false positives.
Why would you want to look at a website
that has been sanitized?
Kudos for making your point (nice and
sharp... I approve), but ads do not
count as part of the artistic merit of
a movie/website/landscape. Usually
the director/author/wildlife don't even
know what ads will end up appearing in
their creation, so unless the intent
of a work involves making fun of ads,
the ads just detract from it. Skipping
commercials does not mean "sanitizing".
But *somebody* must be buying those
$400 video cards for PCs.
The "hardest-core" gamers, yes. But even
reading the first-run numbers expected for
the GeForce FX, *only* the most serious of
gamers will spring for that. And for most
people, even that will serve as an upgrade,
rather than the entire $2500 system all at
once.
I think the problem doesn't involve *no one*
wanting to buy it, but *not enough* people.
Perhaps the situation differed a bit 20 years
ago, but today, any console with "only" a
million units in the field after a year will
fail miserably. Why? Not because the company
can't pull *some* profit from the hard-core
gamers who will pay almost anything for the
best gear available. Rather, because very
few 3rd party developers will sign on with
them (for example, the Sega 32X the article
mentioned - a decent product, with a reasonably
large number of units sold, but Sega ended up
having almost every title that ran on it
as one of their own efforts).
I thought that an xbox may run pretty
well as a PC, but a wal-mart PC would be
better? I'm pretty shocked at that considering
how technologically 'good' it is for console
games.
The guy who did this did NOT compare
performance against Walmart Lindows PCs.
In fact, the XBox *WOULD* beat the $199
Wallyworld boxes for performance. The
XBox uses a 733Mhz PIII/celeron-like
CPU (same specs except a 133Mhz FSB).
The Walmart PC has an 800Mhz CPU, but
uses a crappy VIA C3 processor (think
"PII/400 at best" performance).
The linked article *ACTUALLY* claimed
that using a Walmart PC would take less
*EFFORT*, in that it wouldn't require a
mod chip or dealing with proprietary
but "PC-like" hardware. Quite a big
difference from saying the Lindows
machines would *perform* better.
Don't feel bad, apparently Slashdot editors
don't read the links before making
baseless comments either.
How fucking weird it is that you figure
the 'default' state for copyrighted material
is to allow copying.
Nice
strawman, but I did not claim what you argue
against. I claimed the the default *MINDSET*
of people includes arbitrary copying of material,
regardless of legal limitations on that
copying. Not that the material itself (or
rather, its owners, since "content", as
an inanimate thing, can't allow or disallow
anything) allows copying by default.
Actually, if MPlayer is in violation of
the GPL, then they don't have the right to
distribute.
False. MPlayer can use whatever license terms
they want. If that means "GPL sans section 6",
they have every right to do so, the inconvenience
of that choice falling on those who want to
USE or DISTRIBUTE such material, not the
authors themselves. I think you may have
misphrased your statement that I quoted,
however, since the rest of your comment
implies exactly the opposite of what you
actually said in the above quote. In which
case, I would *legally* agree with you,
IF they had also excluded the "modification
and free redistribution" portions of the
GPL. However, not having disallowed that,
I don't see the MPlayer authors as having
a choice in the matter. They chose to
use a license not entirely compatible with
their intent, they now have to live with the
consequences of that choice, whether they
"want" to or not. They can change the terms
for *future* releases, but for what they've
done up to now, they don't have a lot of
options to repair the damage.
For example, if Martha Stewart was to write
up some code and release it under the GPL, and
then Pamela Anderson took that code and added
to it and released the result with additional
restrictions, *you* do not have any rights to
that new code.
Bad example. I would indeed have the rights
to that code granted by the GPL, because Pam
*didn't* have the right to use a *MORE*
restrictive license in the first (second?)
place.
You don't get the code, you don't get money,
you don't get a blowjob, you get nothing.
Wrong again. I don't get money, or a BJ, or
any other considerations or damages, but I
*DO* get the code. The GPL exists to prevent
EXACTLY the situation you describe - someone
using GPL'd code to create a non-GPL'd result.
Someone can make as many GPL'd derivatives
of already-GPL'd code as they want, but they
can't just take the source and close it.
But it cannot forcibly make someone release
code that they own the copyright on, regardless
of whether it's a derivative.
True. But by *starting* from GPL'd code, the
derivative work DOESN'T own the copyright.
No one forced the author of the derivative
to start with GPL'd code. They made the choice
all by themselves, and byt the terms of the
GPL, that choice includes releasing that
derivative under the GPL (or not releasing
it at all).
God it's fucking amazing how stupid
people can be.
I agree with that completely. You make an
excellent example. With all the possible
valid responses you could have made to my
post, you chose an inarticulate (obscenity
in moderation makes a point - obscenity for
lack of a well-thought-out turn of phrase
makes you look like an idiot) one, materially
false in every important point.
The one situation in which you would seem
not *quite* so wrong involves MPlayer's
use of copyrighted 3rd-party binary modules
(such as using the Sorensen codec). However,
you did not mention anything about that, so
I will presume you meant something completely
different (and wrong). This would read more
like "If Martha released a closed commercial
program, Pam couldn't take it and release
a derivative GPL version". In that case,
no, I would have no rights to it, because
Pam had no rights to GPL it in the first
place.
Even then, this becomes somewhat sticky
in the case of MPlayer, *precisely*
because of their licensing terms - Similar
to how XVid gets around MPEG-4 licensing,
since they don't actually produce an MPEG-4
(binary) implementation, only "source code
for research". For a more familiar
real-world analogy, a CD player program
"uses" copyrighted material to which it
has no rights whatsoever. Without that
copyrighted material, a CD player seems
completely, utterly useless. Yet, would
you claim that a CD player program, GPL'd
or not,violates some third-party's
copyrights?
This does not at all reflect the
views of the MPlayer authors.
He didn't say that the MPlayer authors
don't care about licensing. He didn't
say Debian doesn't care about licensing
(in fact, Debian seems to insist on
strict adherence to the GPL more than
just about any company out there). He
didn't say that most *companies* don't
care about licensing issues.
He said that most PEOPLE don't care about
licenses. And, I believe that holds true.
How many MP3s do you have for which you have
no corresponding CD in your posession?
How about ROMS for video games? Windows
installations (even if you own one, do you
run it on more than one computers)? How
about 30-day shareware with no hard timeout,
which "expired" about two years ago?
People care abour convenience and functionality.
If they didn't, how many people would *BUY*
Debian or RedHat CDs? I can download all of
that from the net, totally legally. I can
download all of the documentation (or at
least comparable) as well. Why would I pay
for a CD? Because $20 for a 4-8 CD set saves
me several days time downloading and burning
the same material. OTOH, saving $80-$160 by
borrowing a friend's Windows install CD and
spending 20 minutes looking on-line for a
valid CD key seems very much worth it. Same
for MS Office.
People pay for convenience, not because they
give a damn about whether or not they legally
*need* to pay. I think most people *prefer*
to stay legal, given the choice with no
extra cost (in time *or* money), but they
won't go very far out of their way to
make sure they stay legal.
Note that I don't mean this to *encourage*
piracy - Just describing how I see this
issue WRT other peoples' buying/stealing
habits.
Now, to address the parent thread, I have an
interesting question...
If the MPlayer license complies with the GPL
in all regards *except* allowing binary
distribution, that means the authors cannot
stop me from modifying and re-releasing it
under GPL-or-better terms. So why hasn't
Debian done exactly that? "Nope, not MPlayer,
we changed int main(int argc, char **argv)
to int main(int argc, char *argv[]), much
more aesthetically pleasing, and released
it as DPlayer under pure GPL terms"?. Seems that
the GPL allows that...
Somehow, with all of the repetition in
music, there has GOT to be a way to do better
than that.
The problem comes with the word "lossless".
Music does indeed have a *lot* of repetition,
at a high level. If you look at an
audio waveform, you can see very regular-looking
patterns in the data, that change every now and
then but can go on for thousands of samples with
only slight variation. At a low level, however,
music has a *huge* amount of noise (not noise
as in clicks and artifacts, mind you, noise as
in stronly leptokurtic Gaussian deviations from
what the waveform "should" look like), and even
extremely regular plosives just destroy any sort
of adaptive prediction-based encoding. For
reference, "huge" means on the order of 5 to 6
bits out of 16 (even local nonlinear methods give
a RMS error of at best 40ish, but getting that
low means storing a lot of parameters of the
prediction model, RBF centers and weights
as an example).
If you want and extremely high level of
compression that you can *almost* call
lossless, use FLAC (or Shorten, or Monkey's,
or whatever) *after* running your sound through
a trajectory-based nonlinear noise reduction
filter. You'll see the compression go from
50% to 25% or better (for reference, "archive
quality" VBR OGG only gets down to 20-25%).
But, you can't *truly* call that lossless
anymore, because even though you might not
consider the "noise" as part of the music,
people *can* tell the difference and usually
prefer the version with noise (and, as I
mentioned, such a filter blunts plosives,
which *should* stay in the music, so you'd
need to detect those and add them back in
to avoid a noticeable degredation of
quality).
Trust me, lossless audio compression does
*not* count as a "toy" problem, nor one
that people have already "solved" optimally
(for example, just about every well-understood
time series prediction/analysis technique out
there depends on a property called "stationarity",
which music very strongly lacks... You can still
use such methods, but they give suboptimal
results in the best case, and exhibit serious
instability in the worst cases). For another
problem, *almost all* research on time series
analysis has focused on out-of-series error
and stability. This lets you do things like
predict stock values and the weather. It
doesn't, however, necessarily give the best
*in-series* error, which matters in an application
like audio compression, since you already know
the entire extent of the data you need to
predict (postdict?). In AI, this has a close
analogy to the idea of "overfitting" a neural
net - if you train a neural net too long, it
learns too many subtleties of the training
data and loses its generalization power. Except,
in audio compression, you don't *care* about
the generalization power, you care about it
learning as much about the training data as
possible.
Compressed air takes too much equipment,
though (sure, a cylinder will work for
portability, but you need regulators
and valves and tubing and an air-tight
seal on the chamber... too many parts).
Of the purely air-oxidized combustible
gasses readily available, butane has the
most energy per burnable load. 30-40ml per
liter of chamber volume, you get a hell of
a wallop from a spud gun (my 2-liter with a
2in by 5ft barrel clears half a mile). Unfortunately,
you do need to measure that 30-40ml carefully
(I use a 60ml irrigation syringe easy to get
at any surgical supply store), since butane
has a low range of cumbustibility in air (it
actually burns up to 80ml/liter, but a very
lean mixture seems to give far more power).
Now, getting into spontaneously decomposing
gasses, I never had the balls to try
acetylene. Combusts from 10% to 90% in air
(though not optimally) because it doesn't
need oxygen, it releases energy just by
breaking down. Use oxygen rather than air,
and you if the chamber holds, you can get
"real" bullet-like speeds on the spud.
Unfortunately, if the chamber *doesn't*
hold, you'd better have fired it from
behind a sand-bag wall, with hearing
protection...
The above code would only work if
sizeof(int) == sizeof(char *)
...Which it does, on the x86 line (post-286).
I will grant, however, that most compilers
would give a warning on a questionable type
conversion.
main should return an int, not void
I could count, on one hand (with three fingers
chopped off), the number of compilers I've used
that force that. Most compilers just assume a
return of zero (or true, or posixly-true, or
whatever convention of the week seems popular).
Again, a warning, but it will still go on
to generate a functional executable.
However, I think you have, to a large degree,
basically agreed with me. What I wrote, for
most C compilers running under DOS/Windows on
an x86 box, would compile and run, and produce
the correct output, despite having quite a few
fundamental flaws in it.
Of course, perhaps I should not have used that
example, since I didn't mean that as key to
my actual point... More like one absurd example
out of a large number of possible choices that
would prove equally useless for any task other
than the one intended.
To convert it to the software-world
equivalent - With enough knowledge of
the specific hardware platform it will
run on, a good programmer can write a
100% bug-free, "perfectly" robust
"hello world" program.
(Anyone who thinks "void main(void)
{printf("hello world\n");}" counts
as a perfectly bug-free program has
clearly never coded on anything but
well-behaved single-processor PC
running a Microsoft OS with a
well-behaved compiler).
However, extending your idea, how do
you get 100 "hello world" programs
to work together to, say, play an MP3?
Yeah, it sounds absurd, but seems
like exactly what the parent article
suggests. Trained on enough "patterns"
of input, even a set of "hello world"
programs should manage to learn to
work together the play MP3s.
That *might* work if we started writing
programs more as trainable functional
approximation models (such as neural
nets, to use the best currently known
version of this). But, as much as
it seems nice to have such techniques
around to help learn tasks a person
can't find a deterministic algorithm
for, they *SUCK*, both in training
time *and* run time, for anything a
human *can* write straightforward
code to do. And, on the issue of
training... This can present more
difficulties than just struggling
through a "hard" task, particularly
if we want unsupervised training.
I really do believe that, some day,
someone will come up with the "killer"
software paradigm, that will make
everything done up to that point
meaningless. But, including this
current idea, it hasn't happened
yet.
But to end on a more Zen note...
Phenotropic development already
exists, in the perfected form. When
a rock touches the ground, all the
atoms involved just intuitively
"know" where the balance of forces
lies. They don't need to "negotiate",
they just act in accord with their
true nature.;-)
How many people bitching about toxic
chemicals here even know where their local
recycling center is?
Most of them? Hey, even a complete moron
could find the blue (or sometimes green) bin
sitting on the sidewalk on trash day.;-)
Seriously, though, for a better question, how
many people bitching about toxic chemicals
understand that a DRAM chip weighing less
than a gram does not "consume", in any
meaningful way,
32kg + 1.6kg + 700g + 72g of material?
Yeah, the 72g and the 1.6kg you can argue
have ceased to exist, in any way that we
can still use. Ironically, however, they
have mostly converted to something that
helps offset the other numbers given,
namely, water and assorted gasses.
As for the water and "elemental gasses"
(700g of gasses? What does that
mean, anyway? "Our manufacturing facility
uses on the finest air availble"?), however,
they haven't just vanished into the aether.
They just need cleaning. And, you can
*bet* that chip fabs do indeed clean them,
since otherwise we'd hear about massive
EPA fines, as well as a massive number of
deaths in the region surrounding the
manufacturing facility. Not to mention
that, in most cases, it costs more to
buy new raw materials than to recover as
much as possible from what you would
otherwise discard as waste.
Just another money-wasting PR scheme. They
will have a crewmember who counts as a liability,
not an asset, and serves no real purpose.
Yeah, we may have one small group of kids who
feel very motivated about space tech for a
few weeks. A statistical blip, totally
meaningless.
And, of course, this means we'll have to
endure a "thawing out" of all the tasteless
jokes from the Challenger explosion (such
as "Need Another Seven
Astronauts"). Yay.
This platform *MUST* act as an emulator,
thus the *need* for it to have the most
power of any console on the market.
Why do I say "must"?
32k games equals, roughly, the number of
games ever created for all major consoles
(and that includes both regional variants,
and what MAME calls "clones", which usually
make up half to two thirds of the known games
for a given platform). Without including
such almost-identical versions of the same
game, 32k very well might equal the number
of games written *ever*, for *any* platform.
No, I did not just pull this number out of the
air. As of December 30th, the Cowering ROM
ID tools included 33,586 games for "major"
console systems (Atari, Nintendo, Sega,
Intellivision, Coleco, TG16, NeoGeo).
That does not include the Playstation
or Xbox line, of course, as the games
take up too much room on current hardware,
even if a decent emulator existed. But I
figure that would add another two to three
thousand.
For comparison, the C64/Amiga line, arguably
the longest running, most popular gaming
platform of all time (though not really a
console) only had 26k games. But this
never-before-heard-of company has already
beat that for their initial launch? Not
very likely.
So, as my guess, they plan to push this on
the retrogaming community, and possibly open
it to "modern" ports (though I don't think
they'll focus on that area, at least not
unless/until they get a good market share).
They can claim such a high number of games
without already having licensed them for the
same reason Nintendo now carries games written
by Sega: They don't need to "steal" the
original works, or make obscenely complicated
licensing deals (as many people have suggested
would hold true of and retrogaming platform).
They'll just let the authors republish their
original games (without even needing a rewrite,
since very likely most of the source code for
older consoles no longer exists), for a cut
of the action.
On the bright side, I could see this as
actually succeeding. Personally, I enjoy
retrogaming, and would gladly pay a few
bucks (perhaps even the price of a single
"modern" game) for a *legal* CD with 50-100
classic games on it ($0.25 per game,
with at least a quarter of them "good"
games, sounds quite reasonable). I
suppose this would have the number of
people into classic video games as the
biggest limiting factor, though.
Recharging them isn't a simple matter of
plugging them in the wall as it is now...
you've got to replace the hydrogen (or other
fuel, most people seem focused on hydrogen
for some inane reason, even though it's hard
to make and doesn't have much energy
content).
True. "Recharging" a fuel cell will not just
involve plugging them into the wall (unless
someone makes a *MAJOR* breakthrough in
both electrolysis techniques and hydrogen
storage).
Most likely, it would work more like a
cross between "normal" batteries, and the
sort of propane tanks people use for BBQ
grills. You would buy a 6-pack of methanol
cartridges, roughly the size and shape of
an AA battery (as a hypothetical example,
of course... I have no more knowledge of
future fuel-cell-form-factors than anyone
else ). You'd pop them into your
electricity-consuming device, just like
normal batteries. The actual functional
bits of the fuel cell would form a part
of the electricity consuming device (or
some sort of hip-pack to support legacy
devices until everything takes the standard
size fuel cell cartridges), and it would
simply "drink" from the cartridges
you plug in.
When you have a pile of empty cartridges,
you'd take them back to the store for a
rebate, a lot like recycling an aluminum
can. Except, to reuse them, we wouldn't
need to melt them down and make a whole
new fuel cell, we'd simply refill them.
The stores themselves might have some means
of doing this, or they might just send them
on to some sort of regional refilling center,
but the whole process would (could, anyway)
involve very little waste.
Of course, I only describe the *SENSIBLE*
way to do it. More likely we'd actually
build the entire functional fuel cell as
a single encapsulated unit, complete with
fuel *and* nasty chemistry for the catalyst;
ship them across country both ways in a
hideously polluting diesel 18-wheeler; and
we'd make them out of a plastic that for
reasons no one understands, we can't reuse,
so they go to the landfill and we waste even
*more* petroleum making more plastic.
But hey, what do I know. I need to stop
acting so optimistic all the time.;-)
one of the main problems would be the timing for the system and
the heat!!!!!!! 4 PIII cores running 2x2 would not only generate
somewhere around 200 watts of heat, and would require a 300 to 400
Watt psu for a bare minimum configuration
Don't take this as a disagreement, I do indeed think
heat dissipation would (and already does) make one of
the biggest problems. However, according to the
P-III 1.13-1.40 spec sheet, the.13 micron
P-III/1400 only dissipates 32.2W, for a total
of 128.8W over four cores. That includes the cache
as well.
For comparison,
the Athlon XP 2600+ gives off
68.3W,
the P4 3.06 sucks
82W,
and Intel's next Itanium, the Madison, will nicely
heat your computer room at a whopping
130W.
My opinion: Itanium does the job, and if people would
spend the time it would take to learn a new archecture,
it would be a nice, fast chip to start from.
I agree with you that, technologically, the Itanium
looks rather impressive. However, even taking into
consideration that it (well, at least the upcoming Madison
core) does 6ops/clock compared to the P4's 2ops/clock, that
still leaves it short for raw power at only 1.5Ghz (since,
by the time Intel starts shipping in quantity, the P4 will
certainly have passed 4.5Ghz). I understand that clock speed
doesn't mean everything, but clock speed times throughput
per clock *does* give a pretty good indication of its upper
limit.
somebody give me theirs.. I'm broke again:(
Okay... A quick tip for getting properly-mounted
Athlon heat sinks, without risking damage to the
chip... Buy a motherboard combo. I suppose this
doesn't apply if you just upgrade an existing
CPU, but if you need a new motherboard, get them
at the same time, from the same place. That way,
not only will you not risk a crushed chip, but
if it dies of heat within a few days, just send it
back and get a free replacement.:-)
Although the article skimped on any sort of
technical details (beyond describing it as
some sort of multi-layered CD), you won't
*need* to crack the protection on such
CDs.
They should rip just fine in any machine
that doesn't support Palladium. You don't
need to circumvent the DRM, just don't
use it at all.
With whatever the next format of DVDs uses,
we may lose the ability to play on untrusted
devices, since they don't care about backward
compatibility. With audio CDs, however,
not making something backward compatible
guarrantees it as DOA (look at DVD audio
or SACDs... Or more to the point, try
to find one to actually purchase).
People don't care about quality, above a
certain point. People don't care about
physical form, as long as they can carry
one in their pocket. People care about
*convenience*. Want to know why *I*
first switched from tapes to CDs? One
reason, and one reason only - The ability
to (nearly) instantly seek any track.
And I *do* care about the improvement
in quality, very much so, but in the
reverse situation (if tapes could seek
tracks and CDs only played in-order),
I would never have switched.
So, any attempt to copy protect an
audio CD will fail, as long as they
try to maintaining backward
compatibility. And if they abandon
backward compatibility, plain ol'
market pressures will doom such an
effort to a rapid demise.
Oh, as an aside, I just checked MS's site,
and they don't seem to have any better
info than what the article mentioned.
Guess we'll just have to wait on this
one, or hope another Slashdotter digs
up and links to something juicy...
As for the original poster's comments
regarding quads and speeds and so forth
it didn't make any sense to me.
For most applications, you will only
see as much "speed" as one CPU can
offer you, no matter how many CPUs
you have. This of course does not
hold true in efficiently multithreaded
apps (as opposed to the majority of
multithreaded apps out there which
would actually perform *better* as
a single thread), but for the things
we actually upgrade for (killer new game),
the speed of any one of your CPUs
matters more than how many of them you
have.
Now, Let's say CPUs powerful enough to
reasonably do anything you want exist
(short of intense number-crunching
research, for which enough CPU power
will *never* exist to satisfy the demand).
I personally believe we passed this point
somewhere around the PIII/800, though
*certainly* the newer PIII/1400's have
reached this point.
Once you have that level of performance,
a faster CPU doesn't mean *you* can do
things faster. Think back to the mid
1990's... Just how fast of a CPU did
we need to run Word or Excel such that
it would *never* exhibit an observably
delay? A PII/300? Even that high?
So, what do we do now? Well, we can run
any one thing as fast as we want. How
about putting things in the background?
Let's say I want to encode a movie to
Xvid. At full CPU on a 1Ghz machine,
this takes around 6 hours, and your machine
grinds to a halt in terms of responsiveness.
You could set the priority low, but the
machine will still "feel" laggy, and if
you do something else CPU intensive, the
video encoding will drag out for *FAR* more
than 6 hours.
So now on to the point.
Have you ever used a dual-CPU desktop
machine?
The first thing you will notice, the UI
*almost never* feels laggy. You can have
a load of 50 CPU's worth of processes
running, and the desktop will still respond
when you click something. Your foreground
task will act reasonably responsive. Yeah,
with 50 CPU-sucking processes, you won't do
anything in the background very quickly,
but if you try, you can still use the machine.
So, to go back to the Xvid idea, try this
on a single-CPU machine: Queue up a
movie to encode, set it to low priority,
then start playing your favorite CPU
intensive 3d shooter. Wow, lag sucks,
huh? And look, a framerate of 10. How
nice.
On a dual, even with the same "total Mhz"
(fairly meaningless, but just to stay
fair), you wouldn't even need to set the
video encode to low priority. Just fire
it up, then your game, and enjoy your
game at a "normal" frame rate.
But the benefit doesn't stop at "one
extra CPU intensive task per CPU". With
thoughtful management of process affinities,
you *really can* run those 50 CPU sucking
taks, confine them to CPU1, and play your
game (still with no noticeable slowdown)
on CPU0.
So, how does this relate to my oriinal
point?
We don't *need* a 10Ghz chip with half
a gig of cache. We don't even need 64b
chips yet, though I agree that, for the
sake of an increased per-process address
space, it wouldn't suck and we'll need it
within a few years. Why don't we need
this? Because we can't use it. No single
interactive application needs even as much
CPU as the current average single-CPU
desktop machine can throw at it.
So what about multitasking, you say?
Well, I've already answered that one.
If it costs less, and takes less complicated
technology, to make four 1Ghz processors than
it does to make one 4Ghz processor, why would
we go with the single 4Ghz processor? And,
for the reasons I've addressed above, I would
even pay somewhat *more* for the quad setup
than for the total-Ghz-equivalent single
CPU setup.
At first, it bummed me out to read this
headline, since I would *love* such a toy.
Then, following the link, I realized they only
plan this dual core toy for the *Itanium*
line, anyway. Bummer. I do like how the
article says Intel hasn't sold as many of
them as they planned, though... Can we say
"DOA"? I thought they had all but abandoned
the mega-flop (in the movie sense, not the
CPU sense) Itanium.
Anyway, back to my point...
I don't want a CPU with 6MB of cache (the
reason they give for pushing back their
SMP-on-a-chip). I don't want an Itanium.
I don't even want a P4.
I would *run* to the store, however, to
buy a quad (since at their current fabs,
they could fit four in the same space as
a single P4, so why only go dual) P-III
somewhere around 1.5Ghz (like the chip
they plan to release with 6 or 9MB of
cache). Not an inconsiderable amount
of CPU power (My current machine
has "only" a dual PIII/933, and I have
yet to find my "killer app" reason to
upgrade).
So, listen up, Intel - the server market
may pay more per chip, but we "mere"
home users buy a HELL of a lot more of
them. So throw us a bone, 'kay?
They do allow development. It's a device
API. Devices, ya know. Hardware.
Ah, therein lies my first point of confusion.
I had the impression "API" stood for
"Application
Programming
Interface".
As in, "hooks that will allow *your*
software to play nicely with *our*
software". And the idea that a
plugin could violate their license
seemed to support my (evidently erroneous)
view on that.
So, that cleared up, this "API" apparently
does not include any sort of all-in-one
(software) dev kit and documentation pack
(or if it does, it doesn't really have any
relevance to third-party software developers).
So how, exactly, does Apple claim some a
file-sharing plugin violates their license?
For that matter, why would one even *need*
a license for a hardware dev kit to develop
such a plugin?
I apologize if this sounds really, really
stupid. But I just don't get it... If I
wanted to develop software to, say, map
GPS data, I wouldn't start by ordering
a *hardware* dev kit, I'd only care about
the communication protocol for the device
I needed to talk to.
Why release an API if you don't plan to allow
anyone to develop to it?
Question #2:
Could Apple still shoot down a cleanroom
implementation of the same thing (ie, a
software plugin developed by simply
reverse engineering the API, without
going through Apple or their licensing
BS to get it)?
Question #3:
Anyone want to join me in making a
cleanroom API, to publish far and
wide, just to piss of Apple?
Question #4:
Some have speculated that Apple killed
iCommune because they have their own
file sharing network planned. Considering
the **AA's propensity for going after
two-bit file sharing networks, they
would *JUMP* at the chance to go after
a "real" company sponsoring one. Has
Apple finally decided to end it
all, opting to commit corporate
suicide to save fave?
Slashdot Mirror
It will hurt online sales
If I recall the last batch of "sales tax on internet purchases" articles, one of the biggest arguments *for* tax centered on how it *hurts* local merchants if someone can buy things tax-free online.
Now, perhaps silly ol' always-using-that-nasty-logic me has failed to grasp a subtlety here, but if tax-free sales online encourage people to shop online rather than in real stores, then taxing those sales removes that advantage.
So *how* will this not hurt online sales?
More importantly, I find this extremely offensive, from the perspective of, who does this "voluntary" tax money go to? For example, with Wallyworld, does the online tax go to the state in which the buyer lives (which it should, since they have a presence in every US state), or does it go to Arkansas, home of their corporate HQ? Or do they even have to give it to anyone? "Yeah, we'll voluntarily collect these taxes, but they go straight into our own coffers until the feds force us to turn it over to someone".
here's the single receipt for all 23 seats we bought yesterday
So when they come in and find 23 Linux boxen, do they automatically assume you just finished deleting all your pirated copies of Windows and fine you anyway?
Although I suspect you have the right idea, if it held up in court it would have some VERY scary implications.
Most of the personal computer industry is catching up to the changes Apple made 5 years ago, and they have been since the Apple ][.
Five(ish) years ago, Apple decided to allow 3rd party manufacturers of Mac hardware to bring down costs (much like the PC industry had done 15 years earlier). It almost killed them, and they stopped allowing this practice (well, very tightly clamped down on it) only a few months later.
Funny how one person's 5-years-too-soon may equal another person's 15-years-too-late, and what makes one can break the other.
Interesting question, if the 3.5" really does go the way of the 8"...
Will bootable CDs based on the El Torito method (which makes the first 2880 or 5760 blocks on a CD look like fd0) all suddenly stop working?
When companies make decisions like this, either for financial or marketing reasons, they *really* need to consider the technical problems such decisions may cause. This one strikes me as amusing because, although they can get rid of the convenience of *having* a floppy drive, they can't actually get rid of the BIOS support for it without breaking quite a lot of seemingly-non-floppy media.
So what does paid product placement in movies count as?
Tougher question, but I would say "unspecified variables".
In some cases, the script may have called for Cheerios. It much more likely said "cereal", and the producer replaced that ambiguity with the brand of cereal by the highest bidder.
As for how that affects the artistic merit of a work, I would say it doesn't - If the author didn't specify the brand, the director needs to pick *something*, and I personally find Cheerios less intrusive than an obviously nonexistant brand.
If the author *did* specify a brand, or only a related food (perhaps the script said "sausage & eggs", but Jimmy Dean's didn't want to pay for a placement), and the director/producer went against that, then I find it offensive. But, I have no control over that, and we don't really have the technology to "santize" something like that without making it glaringly obvious.
Sure. I use a reasonable set of rules (by "reasonable", I mean that I don't blindly look for all possible words having to do with commerce or pornography) to ID a message as spam, then a whitelist to make sure no messages from anyone I know has accidentally gone into the trash bin.
I still get perhaps a half dozen spam messages per day to manually delete, but out of over 100, and AFAIK I have no false positives.
Why would you want to look at a website that has been sanitized?
Kudos for making your point (nice and sharp... I approve), but ads do not count as part of the artistic merit of a movie/website/landscape. Usually the director/author/wildlife don't even know what ads will end up appearing in their creation, so unless the intent of a work involves making fun of ads, the ads just detract from it. Skipping commercials does not mean "sanitizing".
But *somebody* must be buying those $400 video cards for PCs.
The "hardest-core" gamers, yes. But even reading the first-run numbers expected for the GeForce FX, *only* the most serious of gamers will spring for that. And for most people, even that will serve as an upgrade, rather than the entire $2500 system all at once.
I think the problem doesn't involve *no one* wanting to buy it, but *not enough* people. Perhaps the situation differed a bit 20 years ago, but today, any console with "only" a million units in the field after a year will fail miserably. Why? Not because the company can't pull *some* profit from the hard-core gamers who will pay almost anything for the best gear available. Rather, because very few 3rd party developers will sign on with them (for example, the Sega 32X the article mentioned - a decent product, with a reasonably large number of units sold, but Sega ended up having almost every title that ran on it as one of their own efforts).
I thought that an xbox may run pretty well as a PC, but a wal-mart PC would be better? I'm pretty shocked at that considering how technologically 'good' it is for console games.
The guy who did this did NOT compare performance against Walmart Lindows PCs. In fact, the XBox *WOULD* beat the $199 Wallyworld boxes for performance. The XBox uses a 733Mhz PIII/celeron-like CPU (same specs except a 133Mhz FSB). The Walmart PC has an 800Mhz CPU, but uses a crappy VIA C3 processor (think "PII/400 at best" performance).
The linked article *ACTUALLY* claimed that using a Walmart PC would take less *EFFORT*, in that it wouldn't require a mod chip or dealing with proprietary but "PC-like" hardware. Quite a big difference from saying the Lindows machines would *perform* better.
Don't feel bad, apparently Slashdot editors don't read the links before making baseless comments either.
How fucking weird it is that you figure the 'default' state for copyrighted material is to allow copying.
Nice strawman, but I did not claim what you argue against. I claimed the the default *MINDSET* of people includes arbitrary copying of material, regardless of legal limitations on that copying. Not that the material itself (or rather, its owners, since "content", as an inanimate thing, can't allow or disallow anything) allows copying by default.
Actually, if MPlayer is in violation of the GPL, then they don't have the right to distribute.
False. MPlayer can use whatever license terms they want. If that means "GPL sans section 6", they have every right to do so, the inconvenience of that choice falling on those who want to USE or DISTRIBUTE such material, not the authors themselves. I think you may have misphrased your statement that I quoted, however, since the rest of your comment implies exactly the opposite of what you actually said in the above quote. In which case, I would *legally* agree with you, IF they had also excluded the "modification and free redistribution" portions of the GPL. However, not having disallowed that, I don't see the MPlayer authors as having a choice in the matter. They chose to use a license not entirely compatible with their intent, they now have to live with the consequences of that choice, whether they "want" to or not. They can change the terms for *future* releases, but for what they've done up to now, they don't have a lot of options to repair the damage.
For example, if Martha Stewart was to write up some code and release it under the GPL, and then Pamela Anderson took that code and added to it and released the result with additional restrictions, *you* do not have any rights to that new code.
Bad example. I would indeed have the rights to that code granted by the GPL, because Pam *didn't* have the right to use a *MORE* restrictive license in the first (second?) place.
You don't get the code, you don't get money, you don't get a blowjob, you get nothing.
Wrong again. I don't get money, or a BJ, or any other considerations or damages, but I *DO* get the code. The GPL exists to prevent EXACTLY the situation you describe - someone using GPL'd code to create a non-GPL'd result. Someone can make as many GPL'd derivatives of already-GPL'd code as they want, but they can't just take the source and close it.
But it cannot forcibly make someone release code that they own the copyright on, regardless of whether it's a derivative.
True. But by *starting* from GPL'd code, the derivative work DOESN'T own the copyright. No one forced the author of the derivative to start with GPL'd code. They made the choice all by themselves, and byt the terms of the GPL, that choice includes releasing that derivative under the GPL (or not releasing it at all).
God it's fucking amazing how stupid people can be.
I agree with that completely. You make an excellent example. With all the possible valid responses you could have made to my post, you chose an inarticulate (obscenity in moderation makes a point - obscenity for lack of a well-thought-out turn of phrase makes you look like an idiot) one, materially false in every important point.
The one situation in which you would seem not *quite* so wrong involves MPlayer's use of copyrighted 3rd-party binary modules (such as using the Sorensen codec). However, you did not mention anything about that, so I will presume you meant something completely different (and wrong). This would read more like "If Martha released a closed commercial program, Pam couldn't take it and release a derivative GPL version". In that case, no, I would have no rights to it, because Pam had no rights to GPL it in the first place.
Even then, this becomes somewhat sticky in the case of MPlayer, *precisely* because of their licensing terms - Similar to how XVid gets around MPEG-4 licensing, since they don't actually produce an MPEG-4 (binary) implementation, only "source code for research". For a more familiar real-world analogy, a CD player program "uses" copyrighted material to which it has no rights whatsoever. Without that copyrighted material, a CD player seems completely, utterly useless. Yet, would you claim that a CD player program, GPL'd or not,violates some third-party's copyrights?
This does not at all reflect the views of the MPlayer authors.
He didn't say that the MPlayer authors don't care about licensing. He didn't say Debian doesn't care about licensing (in fact, Debian seems to insist on strict adherence to the GPL more than just about any company out there). He didn't say that most *companies* don't care about licensing issues.
He said that most PEOPLE don't care about licenses. And, I believe that holds true.
How many MP3s do you have for which you have no corresponding CD in your posession? How about ROMS for video games? Windows installations (even if you own one, do you run it on more than one computers)? How about 30-day shareware with no hard timeout, which "expired" about two years ago?
People care abour convenience and functionality. If they didn't, how many people would *BUY* Debian or RedHat CDs? I can download all of that from the net, totally legally. I can download all of the documentation (or at least comparable) as well. Why would I pay for a CD? Because $20 for a 4-8 CD set saves me several days time downloading and burning the same material. OTOH, saving $80-$160 by borrowing a friend's Windows install CD and spending 20 minutes looking on-line for a valid CD key seems very much worth it. Same for MS Office.
People pay for convenience, not because they give a damn about whether or not they legally *need* to pay. I think most people *prefer* to stay legal, given the choice with no extra cost (in time *or* money), but they won't go very far out of their way to make sure they stay legal.
Note that I don't mean this to *encourage* piracy - Just describing how I see this issue WRT other peoples' buying/stealing habits.
Now, to address the parent thread, I have an interesting question...
If the MPlayer license complies with the GPL in all regards *except* allowing binary distribution, that means the authors cannot stop me from modifying and re-releasing it under GPL-or-better terms. So why hasn't Debian done exactly that? "Nope, not MPlayer, we changed int main(int argc, char **argv) to int main(int argc, char *argv[]), much more aesthetically pleasing, and released it as DPlayer under pure GPL terms"?. Seems that the GPL allows that...
Somehow, with all of the repetition in music, there has GOT to be a way to do better than that.
The problem comes with the word "lossless".
Music does indeed have a *lot* of repetition, at a high level. If you look at an audio waveform, you can see very regular-looking patterns in the data, that change every now and then but can go on for thousands of samples with only slight variation. At a low level, however, music has a *huge* amount of noise (not noise as in clicks and artifacts, mind you, noise as in stronly leptokurtic Gaussian deviations from what the waveform "should" look like), and even extremely regular plosives just destroy any sort of adaptive prediction-based encoding. For reference, "huge" means on the order of 5 to 6 bits out of 16 (even local nonlinear methods give a RMS error of at best 40ish, but getting that low means storing a lot of parameters of the prediction model, RBF centers and weights as an example).
If you want and extremely high level of compression that you can *almost* call lossless, use FLAC (or Shorten, or Monkey's, or whatever) *after* running your sound through a trajectory-based nonlinear noise reduction filter. You'll see the compression go from 50% to 25% or better (for reference, "archive quality" VBR OGG only gets down to 20-25%). But, you can't *truly* call that lossless anymore, because even though you might not consider the "noise" as part of the music, people *can* tell the difference and usually prefer the version with noise (and, as I mentioned, such a filter blunts plosives, which *should* stay in the music, so you'd need to detect those and add them back in to avoid a noticeable degredation of quality).
Trust me, lossless audio compression does *not* count as a "toy" problem, nor one that people have already "solved" optimally (for example, just about every well-understood time series prediction/analysis technique out there depends on a property called "stationarity", which music very strongly lacks... You can still use such methods, but they give suboptimal results in the best case, and exhibit serious instability in the worst cases). For another problem, *almost all* research on time series analysis has focused on out-of-series error and stability. This lets you do things like predict stock values and the weather. It doesn't, however, necessarily give the best *in-series* error, which matters in an application like audio compression, since you already know the entire extent of the data you need to predict (postdict?). In AI, this has a close analogy to the idea of "overfitting" a neural net - if you train a neural net too long, it learns too many subtleties of the training data and loses its generalization power. Except, in audio compression, you don't *care* about the generalization power, you care about it learning as much about the training data as possible.
I agree.
Compressed air takes too much equipment, though (sure, a cylinder will work for portability, but you need regulators and valves and tubing and an air-tight seal on the chamber... too many parts).
Of the purely air-oxidized combustible gasses readily available, butane has the most energy per burnable load. 30-40ml per liter of chamber volume, you get a hell of a wallop from a spud gun (my 2-liter with a 2in by 5ft barrel clears half a mile). Unfortunately, you do need to measure that 30-40ml carefully (I use a 60ml irrigation syringe easy to get at any surgical supply store), since butane has a low range of cumbustibility in air (it actually burns up to 80ml/liter, but a very lean mixture seems to give far more power).
Now, getting into spontaneously decomposing gasses, I never had the balls to try acetylene. Combusts from 10% to 90% in air (though not optimally) because it doesn't need oxygen, it releases energy just by breaking down. Use oxygen rather than air, and you if the chamber holds, you can get "real" bullet-like speeds on the spud. Unfortunately, if the chamber *doesn't* hold, you'd better have fired it from behind a sand-bag wall, with hearing protection...
The above code would only work if sizeof(int) == sizeof(char *)
...Which it does, on the x86 line (post-286).
I will grant, however, that most compilers
would give a warning on a questionable type
conversion.
main should return an int, not void
I could count, on one hand (with three fingers chopped off), the number of compilers I've used that force that. Most compilers just assume a return of zero (or true, or posixly-true, or whatever convention of the week seems popular). Again, a warning, but it will still go on to generate a functional executable.
However, I think you have, to a large degree, basically agreed with me. What I wrote, for most C compilers running under DOS/Windows on an x86 box, would compile and run, and produce the correct output, despite having quite a few fundamental flaws in it.
Of course, perhaps I should not have used that example, since I didn't mean that as key to my actual point... More like one absurd example out of a large number of possible choices that would prove equally useless for any task other than the one intended.
Very good point.
;-)
To convert it to the software-world equivalent - With enough knowledge of the specific hardware platform it will run on, a good programmer can write a 100% bug-free, "perfectly" robust "hello world" program.
(Anyone who thinks "void main(void) {printf("hello world\n");}" counts as a perfectly bug-free program has clearly never coded on anything but well-behaved single-processor PC running a Microsoft OS with a well-behaved compiler).
However, extending your idea, how do you get 100 "hello world" programs to work together to, say, play an MP3?
Yeah, it sounds absurd, but seems like exactly what the parent article suggests. Trained on enough "patterns" of input, even a set of "hello world" programs should manage to learn to work together the play MP3s.
That *might* work if we started writing programs more as trainable functional approximation models (such as neural nets, to use the best currently known version of this). But, as much as it seems nice to have such techniques around to help learn tasks a person can't find a deterministic algorithm for, they *SUCK*, both in training time *and* run time, for anything a human *can* write straightforward code to do. And, on the issue of training... This can present more difficulties than just struggling through a "hard" task, particularly if we want unsupervised training.
I really do believe that, some day, someone will come up with the "killer" software paradigm, that will make everything done up to that point meaningless. But, including this current idea, it hasn't happened yet.
But to end on a more Zen note... Phenotropic development already exists, in the perfected form. When a rock touches the ground, all the atoms involved just intuitively "know" where the balance of forces lies. They don't need to "negotiate", they just act in accord with their true nature.
How many people bitching about toxic chemicals here even know where their local recycling center is?
;-)
Most of them? Hey, even a complete moron could find the blue (or sometimes green) bin sitting on the sidewalk on trash day.
Seriously, though, for a better question, how many people bitching about toxic chemicals understand that a DRAM chip weighing less than a gram does not "consume", in any meaningful way, 32kg + 1.6kg + 700g + 72g of material?
Yeah, the 72g and the 1.6kg you can argue have ceased to exist, in any way that we can still use. Ironically, however, they have mostly converted to something that helps offset the other numbers given, namely, water and assorted gasses.
As for the water and "elemental gasses" (700g of gasses? What does that mean, anyway? "Our manufacturing facility uses on the finest air availble"?), however, they haven't just vanished into the aether. They just need cleaning. And, you can *bet* that chip fabs do indeed clean them, since otherwise we'd hear about massive EPA fines, as well as a massive number of deaths in the region surrounding the manufacturing facility. Not to mention that, in most cases, it costs more to buy new raw materials than to recover as much as possible from what you would otherwise discard as waste.
How does this benefit science?
Just another money-wasting PR scheme. They will have a crewmember who counts as a liability, not an asset, and serves no real purpose.
Yeah, we may have one small group of kids who feel very motivated about space tech for a few weeks. A statistical blip, totally meaningless.
And, of course, this means we'll have to endure a "thawing out" of all the tasteless jokes from the Challenger explosion (such as "Need Another Seven Astronauts"). Yay.
This platform *MUST* act as an emulator, thus the *need* for it to have the most power of any console on the market.
Why do I say "must"?
32k games equals, roughly, the number of games ever created for all major consoles (and that includes both regional variants, and what MAME calls "clones", which usually make up half to two thirds of the known games for a given platform). Without including such almost-identical versions of the same game, 32k very well might equal the number of games written *ever*, for *any* platform.
No, I did not just pull this number out of the air. As of December 30th, the Cowering ROM ID tools included 33,586 games for "major" console systems (Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Intellivision, Coleco, TG16, NeoGeo). That does not include the Playstation or Xbox line, of course, as the games take up too much room on current hardware, even if a decent emulator existed. But I figure that would add another two to three thousand.
For comparison, the C64/Amiga line, arguably the longest running, most popular gaming platform of all time (though not really a console) only had 26k games. But this never-before-heard-of company has already beat that for their initial launch? Not very likely.
So, as my guess, they plan to push this on the retrogaming community, and possibly open it to "modern" ports (though I don't think they'll focus on that area, at least not unless/until they get a good market share). They can claim such a high number of games without already having licensed them for the same reason Nintendo now carries games written by Sega: They don't need to "steal" the original works, or make obscenely complicated licensing deals (as many people have suggested would hold true of and retrogaming platform). They'll just let the authors republish their original games (without even needing a rewrite, since very likely most of the source code for older consoles no longer exists), for a cut of the action.
On the bright side, I could see this as actually succeeding. Personally, I enjoy retrogaming, and would gladly pay a few bucks (perhaps even the price of a single "modern" game) for a *legal* CD with 50-100 classic games on it ($0.25 per game, with at least a quarter of them "good" games, sounds quite reasonable). I suppose this would have the number of people into classic video games as the biggest limiting factor, though.
Recharging them isn't a simple matter of plugging them in the wall as it is now... you've got to replace the hydrogen (or other fuel, most people seem focused on hydrogen for some inane reason, even though it's hard to make and doesn't have much energy content).
;-)
True. "Recharging" a fuel cell will not just involve plugging them into the wall (unless someone makes a *MAJOR* breakthrough in both electrolysis techniques and hydrogen storage).
Most likely, it would work more like a cross between "normal" batteries, and the sort of propane tanks people use for BBQ grills. You would buy a 6-pack of methanol cartridges, roughly the size and shape of an AA battery (as a hypothetical example, of course... I have no more knowledge of future fuel-cell-form-factors than anyone else ). You'd pop them into your electricity-consuming device, just like normal batteries. The actual functional bits of the fuel cell would form a part of the electricity consuming device (or some sort of hip-pack to support legacy devices until everything takes the standard size fuel cell cartridges), and it would simply "drink" from the cartridges you plug in.
When you have a pile of empty cartridges, you'd take them back to the store for a rebate, a lot like recycling an aluminum can. Except, to reuse them, we wouldn't need to melt them down and make a whole new fuel cell, we'd simply refill them. The stores themselves might have some means of doing this, or they might just send them on to some sort of regional refilling center, but the whole process would (could, anyway) involve very little waste.
Of course, I only describe the *SENSIBLE* way to do it. More likely we'd actually build the entire functional fuel cell as a single encapsulated unit, complete with fuel *and* nasty chemistry for the catalyst; ship them across country both ways in a hideously polluting diesel 18-wheeler; and we'd make them out of a plastic that for reasons no one understands, we can't reuse, so they go to the landfill and we waste even *more* petroleum making more plastic.
But hey, what do I know. I need to stop acting so optimistic all the time.
one of the main problems would be the timing for the system and the heat!!!!!!! 4 PIII cores running 2x2 would not only generate somewhere around 200 watts of heat, and would require a 300 to 400 Watt psu for a bare minimum configuration
.13 micron
P-III/1400 only dissipates 32.2W, for a total
of 128.8W over four cores. That includes the cache
as well.
:(
:-)
Don't take this as a disagreement, I do indeed think heat dissipation would (and already does) make one of the biggest problems. However, according to the P-III 1.13-1.40 spec sheet, the
For comparison, the Athlon XP 2600+ gives off 68.3W, the P4 3.06 sucks 82W, and Intel's next Itanium, the Madison, will nicely heat your computer room at a whopping 130W.
My opinion: Itanium does the job, and if people would spend the time it would take to learn a new archecture, it would be a nice, fast chip to start from.
I agree with you that, technologically, the Itanium looks rather impressive. However, even taking into consideration that it (well, at least the upcoming Madison core) does 6ops/clock compared to the P4's 2ops/clock, that still leaves it short for raw power at only 1.5Ghz (since, by the time Intel starts shipping in quantity, the P4 will certainly have passed 4.5Ghz). I understand that clock speed doesn't mean everything, but clock speed times throughput per clock *does* give a pretty good indication of its upper limit.
somebody give me theirs.. I'm broke again
Okay... A quick tip for getting properly-mounted Athlon heat sinks, without risking damage to the chip... Buy a motherboard combo. I suppose this doesn't apply if you just upgrade an existing CPU, but if you need a new motherboard, get them at the same time, from the same place. That way, not only will you not risk a crushed chip, but if it dies of heat within a few days, just send it back and get a free replacement.
Although the article skimped on any sort of technical details (beyond describing it as some sort of multi-layered CD), you won't *need* to crack the protection on such CDs.
They should rip just fine in any machine that doesn't support Palladium. You don't need to circumvent the DRM, just don't use it at all.
With whatever the next format of DVDs uses, we may lose the ability to play on untrusted devices, since they don't care about backward compatibility. With audio CDs, however, not making something backward compatible guarrantees it as DOA (look at DVD audio or SACDs... Or more to the point, try to find one to actually purchase).
People don't care about quality, above a certain point. People don't care about physical form, as long as they can carry one in their pocket. People care about *convenience*. Want to know why *I* first switched from tapes to CDs? One reason, and one reason only - The ability to (nearly) instantly seek any track. And I *do* care about the improvement in quality, very much so, but in the reverse situation (if tapes could seek tracks and CDs only played in-order), I would never have switched.
So, any attempt to copy protect an audio CD will fail, as long as they try to maintaining backward compatibility. And if they abandon backward compatibility, plain ol' market pressures will doom such an effort to a rapid demise.
Oh, as an aside, I just checked MS's site, and they don't seem to have any better info than what the article mentioned. Guess we'll just have to wait on this one, or hope another Slashdotter digs up and links to something juicy...
As for the original poster's comments regarding quads and speeds and so forth it didn't make any sense to me.
For most applications, you will only see as much "speed" as one CPU can offer you, no matter how many CPUs you have. This of course does not hold true in efficiently multithreaded apps (as opposed to the majority of multithreaded apps out there which would actually perform *better* as a single thread), but for the things we actually upgrade for (killer new game), the speed of any one of your CPUs matters more than how many of them you have.
Now, Let's say CPUs powerful enough to reasonably do anything you want exist (short of intense number-crunching research, for which enough CPU power will *never* exist to satisfy the demand). I personally believe we passed this point somewhere around the PIII/800, though *certainly* the newer PIII/1400's have reached this point.
Once you have that level of performance, a faster CPU doesn't mean *you* can do things faster. Think back to the mid 1990's... Just how fast of a CPU did we need to run Word or Excel such that it would *never* exhibit an observably delay? A PII/300? Even that high?
So, what do we do now? Well, we can run any one thing as fast as we want. How about putting things in the background? Let's say I want to encode a movie to Xvid. At full CPU on a 1Ghz machine, this takes around 6 hours, and your machine grinds to a halt in terms of responsiveness. You could set the priority low, but the machine will still "feel" laggy, and if you do something else CPU intensive, the video encoding will drag out for *FAR* more than 6 hours.
So now on to the point.
Have you ever used a dual-CPU desktop machine?
The first thing you will notice, the UI *almost never* feels laggy. You can have a load of 50 CPU's worth of processes running, and the desktop will still respond when you click something. Your foreground task will act reasonably responsive. Yeah, with 50 CPU-sucking processes, you won't do anything in the background very quickly, but if you try, you can still use the machine.
So, to go back to the Xvid idea, try this on a single-CPU machine: Queue up a movie to encode, set it to low priority, then start playing your favorite CPU intensive 3d shooter. Wow, lag sucks, huh? And look, a framerate of 10. How nice.
On a dual, even with the same "total Mhz" (fairly meaningless, but just to stay fair), you wouldn't even need to set the video encode to low priority. Just fire it up, then your game, and enjoy your game at a "normal" frame rate.
But the benefit doesn't stop at "one extra CPU intensive task per CPU". With thoughtful management of process affinities, you *really can* run those 50 CPU sucking taks, confine them to CPU1, and play your game (still with no noticeable slowdown) on CPU0.
So, how does this relate to my oriinal point?
We don't *need* a 10Ghz chip with half a gig of cache. We don't even need 64b chips yet, though I agree that, for the sake of an increased per-process address space, it wouldn't suck and we'll need it within a few years. Why don't we need this? Because we can't use it. No single interactive application needs even as much CPU as the current average single-CPU desktop machine can throw at it.
So what about multitasking, you say?
Well, I've already answered that one. If it costs less, and takes less complicated technology, to make four 1Ghz processors than it does to make one 4Ghz processor, why would we go with the single 4Ghz processor? And, for the reasons I've addressed above, I would even pay somewhat *more* for the quad setup than for the total-Ghz-equivalent single CPU setup.
At first, it bummed me out to read this headline, since I would *love* such a toy.
;-)
Then, following the link, I realized they only plan this dual core toy for the *Itanium* line, anyway. Bummer. I do like how the article says Intel hasn't sold as many of them as they planned, though... Can we say "DOA"? I thought they had all but abandoned the mega-flop (in the movie sense, not the CPU sense) Itanium.
Anyway, back to my point...
I don't want a CPU with 6MB of cache (the reason they give for pushing back their SMP-on-a-chip). I don't want an Itanium. I don't even want a P4.
I would *run* to the store, however, to buy a quad (since at their current fabs, they could fit four in the same space as a single P4, so why only go dual) P-III somewhere around 1.5Ghz (like the chip they plan to release with 6 or 9MB of cache). Not an inconsiderable amount of CPU power (My current machine has "only" a dual PIII/933, and I have yet to find my "killer app" reason to upgrade).
So, listen up, Intel - the server market may pay more per chip, but we "mere" home users buy a HELL of a lot more of them. So throw us a bone, 'kay?
Because if you don't, AMD will (eventually).
They do allow development. It's a device API. Devices, ya know. Hardware.
Ah, therein lies my first point of confusion. I had the impression "API" stood for "Application Programming Interface". As in, "hooks that will allow *your* software to play nicely with *our* software". And the idea that a plugin could violate their license seemed to support my (evidently erroneous) view on that.
So, that cleared up, this "API" apparently does not include any sort of all-in-one (software) dev kit and documentation pack (or if it does, it doesn't really have any relevance to third-party software developers). So how, exactly, does Apple claim some a file-sharing plugin violates their license? For that matter, why would one even *need* a license for a hardware dev kit to develop such a plugin?
I apologize if this sounds really, really stupid. But I just don't get it... If I wanted to develop software to, say, map GPS data, I wouldn't start by ordering a *hardware* dev kit, I'd only care about the communication protocol for the device I needed to talk to.
Question #1:
Why release an API if you don't plan to allow anyone to develop to it?
Question #2:
Could Apple still shoot down a cleanroom implementation of the same thing (ie, a software plugin developed by simply reverse engineering the API, without going through Apple or their licensing BS to get it)?
Question #3:
Anyone want to join me in making a cleanroom API, to publish far and wide, just to piss of Apple?
Question #4:
Some have speculated that Apple killed iCommune because they have their own file sharing network planned. Considering the **AA's propensity for going after two-bit file sharing networks, they would *JUMP* at the chance to go after a "real" company sponsoring one. Has Apple finally decided to end it all, opting to commit corporate suicide to save fave?