The internet has conquered many traditional sources of information, but books are not one of them. There are articles, blogs, comments, old-style web pages, and the occasional long essay, but only the very best reach the quality level of even a moderately good book, and almost none of them approach the length. If you want to seriously study any field, you either read a book, take a class (but guess where your professor learned most of that stuff?), or spend years figuring things out on your own. The internet is great for intro-level stuff, but once you hit intermediate level good info is a lot harder to come by. In addition, much of the growth of the net is driven by blogs and news sites, which by nature organize information chronologically -- good for news and talk, bad for most other things. Thus, I feel that libraries are not threatened by new media, but by how people relate to old media.
I see a few overlapping possibilities: 1. Someone invents a good electronic reader and a format that will last forever. Books become an electronic medium, with older works being scanned in over time. Libraries cover the transition, then fade away to become more like museums. I'm assuming DRM will continue to fail, so local book repositories will be unnecessary.
2. People abandon books en masse in favor of shorter media like articles, TV shows, and radio segments/podcasts. Books become special-purpose/education only, and the intellectual quality of our culture declines. Libraries die out except at universities and major cities. There's been some movement in this direction due to TV and movies already, but it's pretty pessimistic to think it'll continue forever.
3. Modified status quo. The internet takes the place of TV and radio, but the convenience and other strengths of books allows them to hold on. Libraries undergo some superficial changes and benefit from technological advances in searching and indexing, but otherwise remain fundamentally the same as they've been for centuries.
1. I can't do my job because of X. 2. Changing X would fix that problem. 3. Therefore, we should change X.
With no regard for whether X has any value of its own. Open your eyes and look outside of your own field before you decide to change the world in your favor.
It is strange that American formal wear is based on Northern European styles when so much of our climate is warm. I live in Houston, where the humidity is wretched and summer temperatures regularly surpass 100 degrees. Explain to me again why a freaking *coat* is a standard part of the package?
Those are not trades - they are goods I can consume with the effect of being clean, enjoyed or full. I'm still not sure why that distinction would be important.
Now let's say your resources are limited and you can only go after one guy. Which one would you rather pursue? The one who stole more, of course, though that's a practical matter, not a philosophical one.
My problem with the standard Slashdot arguments against intellectual property is that they're usually only used when getting free stuff is on the line (not accusing you personally of this). They can just as easily be applied to things like corporations ripping off individuals or more abstract things like privacy. If I don't keep you from using your house or harm it in any way, why is trespassing a problem? Why aren't medical records and financial statements called "imaginary property", and the draconian restrictions on their use criticized? I don't particularly like the RIAA and friends, and I don't think all of their actions are ethical, but I don't understand why the answer to that is "free stuff" rather than "stop using their stuff".
But could you watch a movie and trade the enjoyment you had for something else afterwards?
Sure. The improvement in morale from being entertained makes me more productive (among other things). I can also discuss the movie with other people and improve my social standing.
Do you have ads on your website? If that's not the case your are only driving up your bandwith cost;)
Not true. I'm increasing my user base, which gives me influence, social standing, and the opportunity to make money by later adding ads. It would probably be a small gain, but...
If you watch a movie you didn't pay for you are causing a theoretical loss in the range of an overnight rental and the full DVD price.
The size of the loss shouldn't have anything to do with it. If someone sneaks into my house and steals a penny, I'm fully within my rights to go after them, even though the size of the loss is trivial. A trivial loss is one that's not worth the time and effort to recover, not one that's excused.
[Note: I'm not saying copyright violation is like robbery. I'm also not saying that the defendant's actions were okay.]
Not the same thing. This company used his images for profit. What would have been analogous to file sharing might be if the defendant had photocopied the image, put it on his wall for his own personal enjoyment, and given some copies to friends for the same purpose.
I fail to see the difference. What's so special about the money part? Isn't personal enjoyment a sort of profit? What if I take the picture, turn it into desktop wallpaper, and post it on my web site to drive up hits?
Is it $1.2 billion to manufacture one plane, or is that the total cost of R&D and manufacturing divided by the number of planes sold? How much would it have cost to buy 40 instead of 20?
Because I can ignore marketers and entertainers and other citizens.
You can, but in practice, I bet you do it a lot less than you think. Influences are often subtle and unconscious.
"Emotional oppression"? Really? You're seriously going to compare police brutality to "emotional oppression"?
I certainly wasn't referring to cheap insults, and gave two examples to that effect. You say words don't hurt unless you let them, but if you the right words in the right times in the right places, you don't get that choice. Again, do you think anyone *chooses* to become (for example) anorexic? People don't wake up one morning and decide "I think I'll have a mental disorder today!".
Umm.... how would my going to jail prevent these things from happening?
It wasn't a practical example. The point was that there are many things that cause more damage than the sort of violence the government institutionalizes and in practice are just as hard (if not harder) to ignore, so it doesn't make sense for violence to hold a special philosophical position. That doesn't mean we should accept police brutality or flagrant abuses of civil rights -- far from it. But I don't think those flaws are enough to support a philosophy of minimalism, and the rest of the argument is, for the reasons I've given above, somewhat lacking.
When I was in college I took an ethics class that discussed some criticisms of Tufte's critique of the Morton Thiokol engineers involved in the Challenger launch decision. Here's a paper on it:
Why should a government treat its citizens like adults when marketers, entertainers, and the citizens themselves don't? The idea that people are inherently rational and can't be swayed by clever psychology is one of the biggest delusions in the modern world.
However evil and corrupt corporations are, they don't have the right to bust down my door at 2am and kill me or (if I'm lucky) drag me away to spend the rest of my life in a small cement room.
Libertarian types get really hung up on institutionalized violence, but I don't think they've made the case that physical oppression is really any worse than emotional oppression. There are many things that can fuck you up *much* worse than being locked in a small cement room. If you try, I bet you can think of many things that you would happily go to jail to prevent -- how about your little sister becoming anorexic? Or a dear friend becoming a junkie and spiraling down into suicide? Now here's the real question -- are those personal choices, or the result of the actions of other people? The reality is that it's mixed. Nobody decides in advance that they're going to have an eating disorder or get addicted to drugs or elevate their blood pressure by checking email all day and night. It takes one step at a time, and often those steps are encouraged by organized groups that take advantage of quirks of human behavior to make money. No individual has the resources to keep up with that all of the time. I agree that government regulation is far from ideal, but it does act as a counterweight to corporate abuse, and I think the claim that we don't need that is based on an unrealistic view of how people work.
So to answer your earlier statement, does the government know better than me? About some things, no, but about a whole hell of a lot of things, yes. I'm one person; it's made up of millions.
Yeah, this is the problem with the assumption that there are terrorists just waiting to get on airliners -- why not go for easier and more effective targets? If you want to hurt air travel, blow up the checkpoints. Or better yet, do what they do in Israel and hit grocery stores. This maniacal focus on securing air travel just doesn't make any sense.
which gives four main sources of leakage. The two big ones are subthreshold current (which you pointed out) and gate oxide tunneling, both of which are related to Vdd-Vt.
Power consumption in a digital circuit can be approximated by the formula:
Pavg = N*f*C*Vdd^2 + Pleak
where N is the probability of a gate switching during one clock cycle, f is the clock frequency, C is the average gate capacitance, Vdd is the supply voltage, and Pleak is the power loss due to current leakage. Since power is proportional to the square of the voltage but directly proportional to everything else, reducing the voltage has a much greater impact on total power consumption. Going from 1V to 0.3V implies a >10x dynamic power reduction.
The article doesn't go into detail about what "meeting strangers" actually means. Is this one-on-one? In a group? I've met plenty of "strangers" that I knew online because they were friends of friends.
I'm a fan of partial quoting for personal emails, but for corporate email exchanges I've been won over by full quoting. It provides an easy history of the conversation in case new people need to be brought in or I forget what was said a week ago.
What I don't like is the way email (and PowerPoint) is becoming a substitute for documentation. Many times I've asked for information on how something works and been sent an old email or presentation. PowerPoint in particular is terrible for this because most slide shows by nature need to be explained.
I am aware of this, but there was another part to your sentence. You said that copyright is a monopoly, therefore it allows abuse of the copyright holder's position. You are conflating Microsoft-style dominanance with a much more restricted form of control. What abuse do you think is happening that cannot be addressed by not acquiring copyrighted media?
So how can Google be OK to allow me to find a torrent file and pirate bay is not OK?
Because Google indexes (almost) everything. They want to be a common carrier or something close to it. The Pirate Bay does not. Look at the name of their site. Look at their logo, for crying out loud. It's a pirate ship with a cassette tape on it! TPB has no claim to legitimacy. Piracy is not a minor side effect of their operation, it's the entire goal. Do you not see any difference there? Maybe they'll get out of jail on a technicality (and that's okay -- technicalities are important, too), but you do not have the moral high ground here. If you want free stuff, go for it, but I'm sorry, you are not a crusader. You're a leech.
The reality lots of people ignore is that copyright is a monopoly so it allows the copyright holder to abuse their position.
This is a complete abuse of the word "monopoly". Nobody's forcing you to buy media from major studios. Nobody's forcing artists to sign with major studios. Downloading their stuff for free might hurt industry organizations a little, but it also strengthens them by encouraging the popularity of works under their control. Where's the indie category on the Pirate Bay. Oh wait, there isn't one. If you really want them to go away, *don't acquire their stuff at all*. If you're pirating, you're still part of the system.
Your statement about Google is similarly lame. Google doesn't let you browse by category, and if they did, they certainly would't have categories that are flagrantly illegal. The Pirate Bay is nowhere near a common carrier.
They're making money aiding and abetting international copyright violation. They have categories on their web site that cannot possibly be for legitimate material (e.g. XBox 360). Is that legal in Sweden? Guess we'll find out.
Either way, my point still stands. Despite another commenter's opinion, I've been here for a long time, and I've seen the way the goalpost moves. Years ago when this whole anti-copyright fiesta started out, the prevailing line was that file sharing was really for legitimate purposes. Everyone would post comments about how many indie bands they'd found with Napster and how they'd never, *ever* downloaded anything illegal. People said the RIAA should go after actual pirates. They said that musicians, not industry bodies, should determine what to do with their works.
And what happened? Metallica stood up and suddenly what artists wanted wasn't so important. The RIAA started going after actual pirates and Slashdot threw a fit. News flash: college students are not helpless innocent victims. I went to RIT, the piracy capital of the northeastern US. I've downloaded more than my share of music and movies. I still do, now and then. I know what goes on. First, it was "sell cheap music online!". Then Apple did, and the line became "it's too expensive! make it cheaper!".
It's the same pattern over and over. What people want is free stuff, and they're perfectly willing to keep shifting their principles so that the current legal offering is just unacceptable enough to "justify" downloading. Do you really believe that if copyright terms were reduced and the RIAA stopped screwing over artists that people here would stop defending piracy?
What are people saying these days? "It's a dying business model". "People will make stuff for free". "Musicians make most of their money on tour". It doesn't matter whether it's legal or illegal, ethical or not. The line was drawn the moment someone downloaded that first MP3 off of a shady FTP site a decade or more ago. Slashdot wants free stuff. That's the truth, like it or not.
And you know what? If that's the case, it's fine by me. Like I said, I'm not innocent in this whole affair. But please, just admit it. Don't pretend it's about politics. Don't pretend it's about justice. Don't pretend it's about feeding starving artists. Just say that you want free stuff, and don't pretend that you have the moral high ground. Because you know what the real moral high ground is?
I find the "mafiaa" tag amusing given that the Pirate Bay is actually organized crime. Grow up, Slashdot -- flaws in copyright law or no, bittorrenting movies does not give you some sort of moral high ground. "Oh no, the government served them with documents for breaking the law! Fascism! Fascism!"
The idea of decreasing yield and increasing die size for something that's arguably worse than the status quo is pretty dumb, but the key is this sentence:
When tens or hundreds of cores are the norm, practical considerations will limit the number of unique designs to a very small subset of possible core layouts.
What the authors are saying is that in the future, when there may be hundreds of possible chip configurations, it will no longer be cost effective to individually design enough variations to cover the whole market, and that a more general approach will be needed. I don't know if their assumptions about core count or market coverage are valid, but it's not as stupid an idea as people are making it out to be.
While renting a CPU has a lot of problems, permanent and temporary upgrades may not. Make the upgrade interface write-only and use one-time pads determined at manufacturing time for the keys, and you've got something that would be very hard to crack and wouldn't require any surveillance hardware. Of course, that does add yet more cost overhead...
I'm on Windows, so a shell script isn't an option. I guess I could muck around with doing something involving cleartool. But why on earth doesn't the ClearCase Explorer let me do this automatically?
We use ClearCase where I work, and I also have complaints about the speed. Adding a few dozen text files can take over a minute. This wouldn't be so bad if there were a way to check in an entire directory hierarchy at once, but if there is I haven't found it. I have to sit at my computer manually checking in the files in each individual directory. Even copying or deleting view-private files is slow.
Slashdot Mirror
The internet has conquered many traditional sources of information, but books are not one of them. There are articles, blogs, comments, old-style web pages, and the occasional long essay, but only the very best reach the quality level of even a moderately good book, and almost none of them approach the length. If you want to seriously study any field, you either read a book, take a class (but guess where your professor learned most of that stuff?), or spend years figuring things out on your own. The internet is great for intro-level stuff, but once you hit intermediate level good info is a lot harder to come by. In addition, much of the growth of the net is driven by blogs and news sites, which by nature organize information chronologically -- good for news and talk, bad for most other things. Thus, I feel that libraries are not threatened by new media, but by how people relate to old media.
I see a few overlapping possibilities:
1. Someone invents a good electronic reader and a format that will last forever. Books become an electronic medium, with older works being scanned in over time. Libraries cover the transition, then fade away to become more like museums. I'm assuming DRM will continue to fail, so local book repositories will be unnecessary.
2. People abandon books en masse in favor of shorter media like articles, TV shows, and radio segments/podcasts. Books become special-purpose/education only, and the intellectual quality of our culture declines. Libraries die out except at universities and major cities. There's been some movement in this direction due to TV and movies already, but it's pretty pessimistic to think it'll continue forever.
3. Modified status quo. The internet takes the place of TV and radio, but the convenience and other strengths of books allows them to hold on. Libraries undergo some superficial changes and benefit from technological advances in searching and indexing, but otherwise remain fundamentally the same as they've been for centuries.
Except it doesn't have a guaranteed maximum lifespan. My NES is still going strong after 20 years.
1. I can't do my job because of X.
2. Changing X would fix that problem.
3. Therefore, we should change X.
With no regard for whether X has any value of its own. Open your eyes and look outside of your own field before you decide to change the world in your favor.
It is strange that American formal wear is based on Northern European styles when so much of our climate is warm. I live in Houston, where the humidity is wretched and summer temperatures regularly surpass 100 degrees. Explain to me again why a freaking *coat* is a standard part of the package?
My problem with the standard Slashdot arguments against intellectual property is that they're usually only used when getting free stuff is on the line (not accusing you personally of this). They can just as easily be applied to things like corporations ripping off individuals or more abstract things like privacy. If I don't keep you from using your house or harm it in any way, why is trespassing a problem? Why aren't medical records and financial statements called "imaginary property", and the draconian restrictions on their use criticized? I don't particularly like the RIAA and friends, and I don't think all of their actions are ethical, but I don't understand why the answer to that is "free stuff" rather than "stop using their stuff".
But could you watch a movie and trade the enjoyment you had for something else afterwards?
;)
Sure. The improvement in morale from being entertained makes me more productive (among other things). I can also discuss the movie with other people and improve my social standing.
Do you have ads on your website? If that's not the case your are only driving up your bandwith cost
Not true. I'm increasing my user base, which gives me influence, social standing, and the opportunity to make money by later adding ads. It would probably be a small gain, but...
If you watch a movie you didn't pay for you are causing a theoretical loss in the range of an overnight rental and the full DVD price.
The size of the loss shouldn't have anything to do with it. If someone sneaks into my house and steals a penny, I'm fully within my rights to go after them, even though the size of the loss is trivial. A trivial loss is one that's not worth the time and effort to recover, not one that's excused.
[Note: I'm not saying copyright violation is like robbery. I'm also not saying that the defendant's actions were okay.]
Not the same thing. This company used his images for profit. What would have been analogous to file sharing might be if the defendant had photocopied the image, put it on his wall for his own personal enjoyment, and given some copies to friends for the same purpose.
I fail to see the difference. What's so special about the money part? Isn't personal enjoyment a sort of profit? What if I take the picture, turn it into desktop wallpaper, and post it on my web site to drive up hits?
Is it $1.2 billion to manufacture one plane, or is that the total cost of R&D and manufacturing divided by the number of planes sold? How much would it have cost to buy 40 instead of 20?
What happens when it gets hit by a pebble at 75mph?
Because I can ignore marketers and entertainers and other citizens.
You can, but in practice, I bet you do it a lot less than you think. Influences are often subtle and unconscious.
"Emotional oppression"? Really? You're seriously going to compare police brutality to "emotional oppression"?
I certainly wasn't referring to cheap insults, and gave two examples to that effect. You say words don't hurt unless you let them, but if you the right words in the right times in the right places, you don't get that choice. Again, do you think anyone *chooses* to become (for example) anorexic? People don't wake up one morning and decide "I think I'll have a mental disorder today!".
Umm.... how would my going to jail prevent these things from happening?
It wasn't a practical example. The point was that there are many things that cause more damage than the sort of violence the government institutionalizes and in practice are just as hard (if not harder) to ignore, so it doesn't make sense for violence to hold a special philosophical position. That doesn't mean we should accept police brutality or flagrant abuses of civil rights -- far from it. But I don't think those flaws are enough to support a philosophy of minimalism, and the rest of the argument is, for the reasons I've given above, somewhat lacking.
When I was in college I took an ethics class that discussed some criticisms of Tufte's critique of the Morton Thiokol engineers involved in the Challenger launch decision. Here's a paper on it:
http://people.rit.edu/wlrgsh/FINRobison.pdf
Very interesting read.
Why should a government treat its citizens like adults when marketers, entertainers, and the citizens themselves don't? The idea that people are inherently rational and can't be swayed by clever psychology is one of the biggest delusions in the modern world.
However evil and corrupt corporations are, they don't have the right to bust down my door at 2am and kill me or (if I'm lucky) drag me away to spend the rest of my life in a small cement room.
Libertarian types get really hung up on institutionalized violence, but I don't think they've made the case that physical oppression is really any worse than emotional oppression. There are many things that can fuck you up *much* worse than being locked in a small cement room. If you try, I bet you can think of many things that you would happily go to jail to prevent -- how about your little sister becoming anorexic? Or a dear friend becoming a junkie and spiraling down into suicide? Now here's the real question -- are those personal choices, or the result of the actions of other people? The reality is that it's mixed. Nobody decides in advance that they're going to have an eating disorder or get addicted to drugs or elevate their blood pressure by checking email all day and night. It takes one step at a time, and often those steps are encouraged by organized groups that take advantage of quirks of human behavior to make money. No individual has the resources to keep up with that all of the time. I agree that government regulation is far from ideal, but it does act as a counterweight to corporate abuse, and I think the claim that we don't need that is based on an unrealistic view of how people work.
So to answer your earlier statement, does the government know better than me? About some things, no, but about a whole hell of a lot of things, yes. I'm one person; it's made up of millions.
Yeah, this is the problem with the assumption that there are terrorists just waiting to get on airliners -- why not go for easier and more effective targets? If you want to hurt air travel, blow up the checkpoints. Or better yet, do what they do in Israel and hit grocery stores. This maniacal focus on securing air travel just doesn't make any sense.
I found this paper:
http://atrak.usc.edu/~massoud/Papers/IEICE-leakage-review-journal.pdf
which gives four main sources of leakage. The two big ones are subthreshold current (which you pointed out) and gate oxide tunneling, both of which are related to Vdd-Vt.
Power consumption in a digital circuit can be approximated by the formula:
Pavg = N*f*C*Vdd^2 + Pleak
where N is the probability of a gate switching during one clock cycle, f is the clock frequency, C is the average gate capacitance, Vdd is the supply voltage, and Pleak is the power loss due to current leakage. Since power is proportional to the square of the voltage but directly proportional to everything else, reducing the voltage has a much greater impact on total power consumption. Going from 1V to 0.3V implies a >10x dynamic power reduction.
The article doesn't go into detail about what "meeting strangers" actually means. Is this one-on-one? In a group? I've met plenty of "strangers" that I knew online because they were friends of friends.
I'm a fan of partial quoting for personal emails, but for corporate email exchanges I've been won over by full quoting. It provides an easy history of the conversation in case new people need to be brought in or I forget what was said a week ago.
What I don't like is the way email (and PowerPoint) is becoming a substitute for documentation. Many times I've asked for information on how something works and been sent an old email or presentation. PowerPoint in particular is terrible for this because most slide shows by nature need to be explained.
Copyright is a government granted monopoly.
I am aware of this, but there was another part to your sentence. You said that copyright is a monopoly, therefore it allows abuse of the copyright holder's position. You are conflating Microsoft-style dominanance with a much more restricted form of control. What abuse do you think is happening that cannot be addressed by not acquiring copyrighted media?
So how can Google be OK to allow me to find a torrent file and pirate bay is not OK?
Because Google indexes (almost) everything. They want to be a common carrier or something close to it. The Pirate Bay does not. Look at the name of their site. Look at their logo, for crying out loud. It's a pirate ship with a cassette tape on it! TPB has no claim to legitimacy. Piracy is not a minor side effect of their operation, it's the entire goal. Do you not see any difference there? Maybe they'll get out of jail on a technicality (and that's okay -- technicalities are important, too), but you do not have the moral high ground here. If you want free stuff, go for it, but I'm sorry, you are not a crusader. You're a leech.
The reality lots of people ignore is that copyright is a monopoly so it allows the copyright holder to abuse their position.
This is a complete abuse of the word "monopoly". Nobody's forcing you to buy media from major studios. Nobody's forcing artists to sign with major studios. Downloading their stuff for free might hurt industry organizations a little, but it also strengthens them by encouraging the popularity of works under their control. Where's the indie category on the Pirate Bay. Oh wait, there isn't one. If you really want them to go away, *don't acquire their stuff at all*. If you're pirating, you're still part of the system.
Your statement about Google is similarly lame. Google doesn't let you browse by category, and if they did, they certainly would't have categories that are flagrantly illegal. The Pirate Bay is nowhere near a common carrier.
They're making money aiding and abetting international copyright violation. They have categories on their web site that cannot possibly be for legitimate material (e.g. XBox 360). Is that legal in Sweden? Guess we'll find out.
Either way, my point still stands. Despite another commenter's opinion, I've been here for a long time, and I've seen the way the goalpost moves. Years ago when this whole anti-copyright fiesta started out, the prevailing line was that file sharing was really for legitimate purposes. Everyone would post comments about how many indie bands they'd found with Napster and how they'd never, *ever* downloaded anything illegal. People said the RIAA should go after actual pirates. They said that musicians, not industry bodies, should determine what to do with their works.
And what happened? Metallica stood up and suddenly what artists wanted wasn't so important. The RIAA started going after actual pirates and Slashdot threw a fit. News flash: college students are not helpless innocent victims. I went to RIT, the piracy capital of the northeastern US. I've downloaded more than my share of music and movies. I still do, now and then. I know what goes on. First, it was "sell cheap music online!". Then Apple did, and the line became "it's too expensive! make it cheaper!".
It's the same pattern over and over. What people want is free stuff, and they're perfectly willing to keep shifting their principles so that the current legal offering is just unacceptable enough to "justify" downloading. Do you really believe that if copyright terms were reduced and the RIAA stopped screwing over artists that people here would stop defending piracy?
What are people saying these days? "It's a dying business model". "People will make stuff for free". "Musicians make most of their money on tour". It doesn't matter whether it's legal or illegal, ethical or not. The line was drawn the moment someone downloaded that first MP3 off of a shady FTP site a decade or more ago. Slashdot wants free stuff. That's the truth, like it or not.
And you know what? If that's the case, it's fine by me. Like I said, I'm not innocent in this whole affair. But please, just admit it. Don't pretend it's about politics. Don't pretend it's about justice. Don't pretend it's about feeding starving artists. Just say that you want free stuff, and don't pretend that you have the moral high ground. Because you know what the real moral high ground is?
Not having any of their media at all.
I find the "mafiaa" tag amusing given that the Pirate Bay is actually organized crime. Grow up, Slashdot -- flaws in copyright law or no, bittorrenting movies does not give you some sort of moral high ground. "Oh no, the government served them with documents for breaking the law! Fascism! Fascism!"
The idea of decreasing yield and increasing die size for something that's arguably worse than the status quo is pretty dumb, but the key is this sentence:
When tens or hundreds of cores are the norm, practical considerations will limit the number of unique designs to a very small subset of possible core layouts.
What the authors are saying is that in the future, when there may be hundreds of possible chip configurations, it will no longer be cost effective to individually design enough variations to cover the whole market, and that a more general approach will be needed. I don't know if their assumptions about core count or market coverage are valid, but it's not as stupid an idea as people are making it out to be.
While renting a CPU has a lot of problems, permanent and temporary upgrades may not. Make the upgrade interface write-only and use one-time pads determined at manufacturing time for the keys, and you've got something that would be very hard to crack and wouldn't require any surveillance hardware. Of course, that does add yet more cost overhead...
I'm on Windows, so a shell script isn't an option. I guess I could muck around with doing something involving cleartool. But why on earth doesn't the ClearCase Explorer let me do this automatically?
We use ClearCase where I work, and I also have complaints about the speed. Adding a few dozen text files can take over a minute. This wouldn't be so bad if there were a way to check in an entire directory hierarchy at once, but if there is I haven't found it. I have to sit at my computer manually checking in the files in each individual directory. Even copying or deleting view-private files is slow.