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User: 0111+1110

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  1. Greedy Bastards on MPAA Goes After Its Customers · · Score: 1

    Looks like its time to start burning my DVD and laserdisc collection to my shared folder. I really hate these guys. They're making a ton of money. Movie tickets are approaching $10. The quality of online movies is certainly no better than VHS tape and probably worse. Pretty soon they'll be going door to door for VCR inspections. There's no way they're losing money over this. Do they have any idea how long it takes to download one of those movies. It can take long enough that the money you have to pay to the power company for leaving your computer running can cost almost as much as renting the real thing. I certainly hope this kind of behavoir is going to come back and bite them in the @ss. Don't they know that most people still only rent movies. Only a small minority actually buy them.

  2. Re:They were wrong - not this time though on Legalizing Attacks on P2P Networks · · Score: 1

    You're wrong about the quality argument here in both movies and music. Digital is not inherently superior to analog in quality except for making copies of copies. My cheap SVHS VCR can make copies of my laserdiscs that are almost as good as the originals. Same for those digitally compressed DVDs. The SVHS format has been around for a long time. Back when compact discs first came out, I used to borrow CDs from a friend and tape them onto analog "metal" tape. On a decent player the quality was still very good (just not quite as good). 128k MP3 have worse quality than analog tape recordings made directly from CDs. But the quality is still good enough for most people. There are two problems with your argument. One: most people don't care that much about the quality, unless it's *very* bad. Two: the quality of most MP3s is not even close to that of the original and usually less than that of the old analog tapes. The "digital" argument of bit for bit copying seems to be valid for direct CD to CDR burning however. And the convenience aspect is mostly true, especially for those with high bandwidth connections and very ordinary taste in music. One last point. The vast majority of people don't buy movies. They rent them. So much for the MPAA losing sales over movie copying.

  3. Re:What happens when... on Legalizing Attacks on P2P Networks · · Score: 1

    No. Mass piracy does *not* depend on anonymity. It depends on being sufficiently distributed and serverless. How do you sue 3,000,000 people? Have you ever been on a highway where everyone is exceeding the speed limit? Sometimes a speed trap tries to pull over 3 or 4 people at once. Does everyone else slow down after that? Only for 30 seconds or so. After that, everyone continues at their old illegal pace. And, just to give you a clue, unless you really go out of your way with many proxies and IP spoofing, you're not anonymous anyway. Except on Freenet, of course. And even that is debatable.

  4. Re:Better Quality? on CD Copying Kiosks Endorsed in Australia · · Score: 1

    Well, pressed CDs are better at storing all those zeros and ones precisely. Sometimes, usually on older CD players, the refractivity of the laser induced chemical changes in the dye is not enough of a difference for a particular reader to clearly distinguish between what a zero or a one is. The result is errors which would then be interpolated by the reader into a more muddy sound. With pressed CDs you either have a pit in the shiny aluminum or you don't, and it's very easy for any reader to tell the difference. So, the problem is not so much that the data in both CDs is not the same but rather that the data in a burned CD is harder to read. Of course, I'm assuming that the machine produces real pressed CDs (which are also more durable). If it just burns CDRs then it really is BS.

  5. Re:An idea for a truly new music distribution syst on MP3.com 'Subscriber Service' · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is a great idea. I would gladly do this. Have the low quality streaming(64kbps?) tracks available for free on the artist's page, and then allow members to download the 1440kbps .WAV version of the song for like 1$ each. That would be a great music site. You could have like a $5 annual membership fee and a free trial period. Of course a 3 minute song would be about 30MB or maybe 16MB if it was losslessly compressed with, say, Monkeys Audio or FLAC. Probably not practical for people with dial ups, but there are probably enough broadband users to make it profitable. I, for one, will never pay for lossy compressed garbage.

  6. Re:Wasn't there an FCC thing...? on AMD To Hide MHz Rating From Consumers · · Score: 1

    Actually this brings up an interesting point. Perhaps both manufacturers should simply list the die size and it's rated "purity". So you would have a .13u Intel with an "A" purity rating, a "B" purity rating and a "C" purity rating etc. AMD does have a slightly more efficient design. But other than that, the 2 companies are both basically competing based on die size anyway. It's a race to see who can shrink their dies the fastest.

  7. Re:Thoughts on the Hz Myth on AMD To Hide MHz Rating From Consumers · · Score: 1
    AMD's Athlon has always been notorious for smoking identically clocked Intel processors. PII, PIII, P4, it doesn't matter. The Athlon always outperforms in both integer math and floating point.
    Actually this is not true. Clock for clock an Intel P3 will "smoke" an Athlon Tbird by up to 100 Mhz. This is because the P3 had a much more efficient "4 way associative" cache. The Athlon only won in the most floating point intensive benchmarks, and even then not by much. Also, before the Tbird version with the on chip cache was released the Intel beat the AMD chip clock for clock by much more. This is what I find so interesting. Historically Intel has been the one who was more efficient per clock cycle. It's only since the P4 that the tables have turned. Remember that Intel used to be the king of speed and has only recently been dethroned by AMD. Historically AMD only succeeded by killing Intel's margins. Now they tend to have faster chips and still kill Intel's margins. Also the AMD has never beat Intel in Integer math.
  8. We're all overclockers now. on AMD To Hide MHz Rating From Consumers · · Score: 1

    Well, there will no longer be anything called "overclocking" for AMD chips. Meanwhile, the rest of us will just have to rely on Tom and Anand to provide us with benchmark data. Heatsink and fan manufacturers are going to love this. Time to buy some heat sink and fan stocks. However fast it goes is how fast it goes. Maybe we'll have to start measuring things in MIPS instead of MHZ. Of course real world benchmarks are the best. Pretty funny. It will be interesting to see what Chipzilla is going to do. Don't forget that CPUID will still report the clock freq and so will the OS. Maybe AMD could eventually convince Microsoft to not display the number in a future revision of XP, but that won't work with Linux. Also don't forget that Intel is going to be in the opposite position with their Itanium. They will only be too happy to see "model" ratings at that point.