mind you, if they only took a few cents from each credit card account, they COULD buy a Ferrari...
There are ongoing frauds where small amounts in fraudulent "service fees" or subscriptions to porn sites are being charged on hundreds of thousands of cards every month. The charges are small enough that most card holders don't bother to track them down and get hit up month after month for years.
There is a web page about one of these frauds here In this particular fraud the card numbers were taken from a shady bank that did CC transactions for porn sites. The con men would make charges under a variety of entities posing as subscription based porn sites so the card holder would not only be paying for his original porn purchase but other fraudulent ones besides - pretty smart because it wouldn't set of any alarms at the card company (the guy is already making legitimate purchases of that particular product) and the numbers are small enough that the guy wouldn't bother doing anything about it if he even notices. Since it's porn, and some of it he really *did* sign up for, he might be too embarassed to do anything about it even if he realises some of the charges are fraudulent. This particular fraud ended up making between $40 and $50 million dollars off of about 900,000 card holders.
In Canada, stores are not obligated to accept cash.
That seems strange, but I can see why it might be that way. Convenience stores and the like which are subject to high rates of robbery often refuse to accept high denomination bills because they don't want to leave a lot of money in the register to make change for them. You haven't yet bought anything so you aren't yet in debt to them - if you were they *would* be obligated to accept cash - at least in the US where each bill says "
This note is legal tender for *all* debts, public and private."
This happened to my wife recently - She was suprised (to say the least) to be getting hundreds of bounces back from a spam.
If it had been porn I would have looked into the possiblity of filing a defamation of character lawsuit. It was in your case and if it was written in the first person singular ( "come see me nekkid...") and had *you* as the reply-to I'd imagine you'd have an excellent chance of winning such a case - it would certainly be worth talking to a lawyer about.
If they ARE the law, then youd think they would abide it. Maybe Im asking too much.
I'm not sure I get your point. What law is Parliment not abiding by? It's their domain, they not only own the domain under the law as it exists but they write the laws about.uk domains in the first place. I'm being silly when I suggest that they could imprison or fine the executives of Thawte for refusing to recongnize their ownership to make a point - the write the laws! Yes they *wouldn't* write a law that penalizes Thawte in horrible and nasty ways for refusing to play ball but they *could* and it would be perfectly legal because they determine what is legal and what isn't (within unwritten constitutional limits that are to some extent determined by - you guessed it: Parliment)
In the UK we don't detain anyone we like, unlike some other countrys (*peer Iraq & US*)
Sure you do, Parliment has written many laws that require the detention of people for all sorts of (mostly) good reasons. Of course my example is silly but it is still the case that if Parliment *really* wants their domain recognized and Thwate for some unaccountable reason doesn't want to do so Parliment has all sorts of ways to require Thawte to do so - at least if Thawte wants to do business in the UK.
The argument about some detentions in the US is that they are *illegal* - against both our laws and our constitution - in some cases that appears to be a perfectly valid criticism, in others it is debatable, all of which is beside the point. In my hypothetical situation it would be legal because Parliment wrote a law making it so - as for "constitutional" well I don't exactly understand the complexities of "constitutionality" in the UK but I'm pretty sure that Parliment has some impact on what is considered legal and on how the government is "constituted".
People selling smut want to get it under the noses of as wide a potential audience as possible. Hence the existence of things like www.whitehouse.com [whitehouse.com]
You seem to think that people aren't *looking* for.sex . If there was such a TLD I am pretty sure a fairly large number of searches on google (and even more at images.google.com) would be restricted to the.sex domain - those looking for their favorite porn star named "bambi" aren't interested in pictures of animated deer after all. It works both ways - both someone with a fetish and someone who doesn't want to see that would know the likely differences between nurses.com and nurses.sex. To some extent the porn providers would move to.sex on their own to follow the market.
No that blurb was there before - and I seem to recall there was some type of promotional offer targetted at video pros. They offered better video cards as BTO options for those using it as a digital video workstation.
I don't know what advantages it may have on a server - But Apple is also marketting these things as video editting workstations (which are often rack mounted along with all the other video equipment). That's probably why there is Firewire on the *front* of the box.
Yes, but Parliament is 10/10 of the law, and it's not helping them.
Actually I'm sure it *will* help them out. The fact that they ARE the law means that someone high up enough at Thawte to make a decision will decide to acknowledge Parliment's ownership of their domain. Or parliment can pass a law that simply says "we own parliment.uk" - If that is not enough for Thawte Parliment could pass a law that says "Any entity failing to recongise parliments sole ownership of 'Parliment.uk" shall have it's assets frozen and executives held in custody until such time as they recongise said ownership". I'm sure Thawte would come around, it doesn't pay for a commercial entity to get into a fight with the legislative body of a country they want to do business in.
I think YOU are also missing the point. Now an enemy that *could* have used the instantaneous communications cell phones would have afforded must rely on motorcycle courriers that may take hours or even days to transmit their message - or in the case when armies are on the move may miss them and *never* deliver their message.
I would agree that having these high-tech capabilities can blind the US military to the possiblity that their opponent may do something smart and low-tech that defeats our capabilities. General Van Riper very effectively showed them the cost of such an oversight - which is the entire point of such war games. But those low-tech work-arounds come at a cost (in speed and reliablity). In the short run Gen. Van Ripers low-tech couriers allowed him to set up and win *one* suprise attack (albeit a spectacular one). An unacceptable result for the US Military to be sure, but over the long run he is at a massive disadvantage - he cannot quickly or reliably communicate with his troops (especially now that we know to strafe motorcyclists when we see them).
Despite all the bitching and moaning about resetting the war game & cheating the "opposing force" of a victory the war game still performed it's function. You *know* the generals & military planners that were burned by that suprise attack have learned a very important lesson. The other function of the war game is to train for the most likely scenario - which is why they reset it after they got themselves wiped out - unless we are *planning* to be devestated in an initial attack it was pointless to continue the game in that state after the flaw in their thinking (which they are now intensely aware of) was revealed. On the other hand I think it would be very good to have war games that are more open ended where the US commanders have to adapt to suprises and defeats and have to come up with a few suprises of their own to claw their way back to a victory after getting their asses kicked.
Plus, correct me if I'm wrong, but as a convicted criminal, isn't he not allowed to benefit monetarily from his crimes?
I don't see how winning a libel suit is "benefiting from his crimes". Writing a book on the other hand would be - he can still write it to attempt to clear his name but any proceeds would probably have to go to charity.
Not to be a jerk but how do you know? That is what he *says* but as his card number story (and numerous others) illustrate he is not above lying - so how do we know with any certainty that he is being truthful in this particular instance? It's a rather delicate moral position for someone who excels at what he euphamistically calls "social engineering". It seems to me if you are stupid enough to confide in an admited confidence man you deserve whatever betrayal of confidence he may inflict on you. I'd think in the field of "social engineering" he would even get extra points for style for brazenness.
He may really adhere to such a fine moral distinction but I don't see how one could have much trust in that.
See, I just don't see the scientific take as a compelling argument for continuing space flight. Space is a place where people should go to do stuff. I believe our species is programmed to be inquisitive and exploratory, and when we can scratch those itches (even vicariously through the courage of others) we are better off as a people.
I actually agree with this... BUT, I think at the moment we need more knowledge to reach the point where we can send people on to the next Big Thing(tm). IMO the fastest way to get to that next Big Thing is to acquire that knowledge as quickly and effeciently as possible. I think we should have been sending increasing numbers of ever larger and more sophisticated probes to Mars. Eventually we would reach the point where we would be routinely sending payloads to Mars of equivelent size & complexity to a manned mission - at that point we would be in a position to do just that. The only way the ISS advances us towards Mars is in studying the prolonged health effects of weightlessness - an important problem to consider but one we already know a fair amount about, and only one of dozens, all the others of which we could have been solving with unmanned missions.
So, which is better? Another Shuttle launch or color pictures from a Mars rover? For me, it's a wash.
Considering that pictures from Mars are cheaper, advance our knowledge further, and generate far more interest (baring a tragedy) my money is on the pictures from Mars. People were at least interested in the pictures from Pathfinder and they were of a featureless plain that looked like the most boring section of Arizona. If you want to spend $$$ to inspire people instead of glorified milk runs to the ISS that nobody pays attention to anymore how about video from a flying probe as it cruises along a canyon with walls 8km high? I think THAT could capture the imagination in a way the ISS doesn't.
Now PEOPLE on Mars, that's something to get excited about.
I agree, but I think for the moment unmanned exploration is the fastest way to get there. We are spending heaps of $$$ on manned flights that aren't really advancing our knowledge or expertise by that much. Learning how to *reliably* send stuff to Mars (probes now, people later), learning where (and if) there is water, learning what other natural resources may be available - all these are things we are NOT learning because we are spending *enormous* sums of money on the Shuttle and ISS.
So, I want people in space. But I don't think that going over and over to LEO accomplishes anything. If I thought it would be possible to say "OK, we're not going to fly any people for five years, but then by God we'll start flight testing our Mars hardware!" I'd be a happy guy. However, I believe that if we don't keep in the habit (if you will) of putting people in space, we will lose the political will to do it.
I think our focus right now should be on whatever gives us the most knowledge and understanding for the buck - either manned or unmanned. I think in the long run that will lead us towards our goals the quickest - including manned exploration or even colonization. I think at this point manned space flight has lost it's power to inspire - it's seen as routine and we don't have the knowledge to attempt a mission that would inspire (like a mission to mars). But we could gain the knowledge and expertise we need to attempt something really significant more efficiently (and thus more quickly) with unmanned exploration and tests. Even as PR the shuttle program seems to be a failure - When it comes for bang for the PR buck in inspiring people which has more impact: a shuttle run to the ISS? or color pictures back from Mars? Sadly shuttle flights only have any value in inspiring people when it does something dramatic - like blow-up - not exactly an ideal way to achieve the goal of inspiring people. If the money we have been spending on the shuttle and ISS had instead been put into unmanned exploration of Mars we would know a LOT more about the object of our study and about how to send stuff there reliably. We would also have some REALLY cool photos of awe inspiring martian canyons & mountains that would make a LOT more people say "I want to go there, and I'm willing for more of my tax $$$ to be spent making that possible." In terms of inspiring the next generation of scientists and willingness to fund I think a photo of the sunrise from the slopes of Olumpus Mons or a video of the winding passages of Valles Marineris is worth a hundred milk runs to the ISS, at far less cost.
Sorry, but that's a non-argument. None of these programs used any hardware-specific stuff like SSE
I've just read the original article and I didn't see this - could you give me a source? Frankly I would find it highly unlikely that a programmer wouldn't use hardware specific SIMD or vector processing since this is EXACTLY the kind of software that SIMD was invented for. If you are right these programmers should be fired - it is gross incompetance on their part to ignore a technology that would give them *massive* performance benefits. You could be right the second article/press release points out that MacBibble using hardware specific Altivec processing is faster than it's competitor by a factor of 10
...but since 95% of the world aren't using Mac we can probably assume that most programs will not be developed on Macs.
Yes, but 99.9% of the world are NOT professional photographers of that.1% that ARE probably 60-80% are using Macs. I'm being generous here, I have worked with many professional photographers and only one of the many I know uses a PC. Which is all beside the point, the complaint (I actually have no idea how legitimatly) was that the software was tweaked for the PC and the Mac suffered in comparison for that reason. The new Mac version is tweaked for the Mac and benefits *significantly* from that.
Back in the '80s Steve Jobs managed to wangle a tour or four at PARC for himself and some other Apple types to see the windowing system that Xerox researchers were working on. The researchers were ordered to show the Apple team members how things worked.
At least one key member of the team objected strenuously to giving any information to Apple without any sort of benefit for Xerox. (no NDA, no financial compensation, no limits on the information that was being given away, etc.) She was ordered to comply anyway.
Actually this is the vastly oversimplified and "more interesting" version of the story as told in "Triumph of the Nerds". Jeff Raskin (the developer of the MacIntosh) has pointed out that many of the concepts supposedly stolen from PARC during Steve Jobs infamous 1979 visit had actually already been *implemented* on the Apple Lisa and MacIntosh (which was in development). These implementations which predated the visit to PARC were even arguably more advanced and are the ones we are familiar with now (for example click-and-drag as opposed to click-move-click). Some of the supposedly "stolen" ideas were in Raskins 1967 thesis which predate PARC's very existence. One could perhaps make a case that PARC "stole" the ideas from Raskin except for the fact that Raskin visited PARC as an academic and they freely discussed their GUI ideas with each other (Raskin and the PARC folks) - it is not suprising that people that shared a common vision (the GUI) and openly discussed their ideas in an academic research setting would at a later date develop those ideas into similar products.
OK, I'm a techie and graphic designer (yes, rare).
Me too!
I generally agree though I would add a couple of points. First Apple's dominance of this particular market itself is a compelling reason for those entering the market to stick with it. If you are a designer you are going to be expected to use macs wherever you work - what kind of machine are you going to buy for yourself? If you are hiring designers you are going to be hiring people that have always used macs and might *never* have used PC's - what kind of machines are you going to buy for them? If you freelance everyone you have to work with will be sending you files from macs and taking the files you provide and using them on a mac - you can use a PC but it will add at least a little hassle. If you write software for these people which platform are you going to focus on? In the past the PC didn't even have the software required, that's changed now but still a lot of designers (especially somewhat older ones like me) still have the idea that you simply *can't* do professional design work using a PC.
Second I think focussing on stability/reliablity is a little unfair. I think windows is a lot more reliable than Mac users believe and MacOS 9 which many designers are still using until Quark gets it's act together certainly had NOTHING to brag about in that department. The real advantage is more subtle but perhaps more significant, especially considering how it apparently compensated for OS 9's UNreliablity. That is: when it worked it really did work more intuitively - This was certainly true back when the competition was DOS and then Windows 3.x and even Windows 95. After windows started to improve by borrowing heavily from the "mac way" the Mac was still more intuitively easy, partly from long familialarity by this point and partly from the continued focus on that value which shows up in Apple's focussed attention to little details that Microsoft seems to only think of as afterthoughts. I'd say OS 9 was an instance of getting all the big things wrong but getting all of the details, at least from the users perspective, right. UNIX is probably the exact opposite (which is why MacOS X is so exciting) and Windows is a (unhappy?) compromise between the two criticized from the UNIX side for getting the big things wrong (though not as wrong as the old MacOS) and criticized from the Mac side for getting the user interface details wrong (though not as wrong as UNIX). MacOS X has a real chance of getting both the fundamental things and all the little interface details right, though it's still a little immature and suffers from having had to make some comprimises. It is not quite there yet, though I think they are pulling ahead of the competition.
I have to disagree. I would say that the particular benchmark in the original article and to a lesser extent even the much maligned Steve Jobs Photoshop benchmark are really the only kind that count - real world tasks that (some) users will actually be using (a lot). The problem is when people imply or believe that these narrow benchmarks of specific tasks mean something about the performance of the chips more generally. A VERY fair criticism of Steve Jobs, though to be fair his audience is largely made up of people that make their living with Photoshop. It's not fair at all of Rob Galbraith who's audience is entirely made up of people that make their living not only with photoshop but spend most of their time working with RAW formatted images.
The original article by Rob Galbraith was an extrememly fair test of how well different platfroms did a particular set of processor intensive/time consuming tasks that professional photographers are doing all day long. It doesn't matter WHY one performs better than the other. It doesn't matter if the test is "fair". It doesn't immediately matter* if the results are lousy on one because the software is written in a notoriously slow scripting language running under emulation and great on the other because it was written in assembly - it only matters that I can process more photos in an hour on one machine than I can on the other.
*One caveat to the above - in the long run it might matter that the tests are at least somewhat "fair" because the next upgrade to the software might change things dramatically - which apears to be the case with this second/. article.
Hang on a moment. The last Mac vs PC test was conducted fairly - Photoshop on a Mac vs Photoshop on a PC.
No, you didn't read the article - it conducted tests using several different pieces of software but not one of them was Photoshop, although one was a third party photoshop plug-in. The tests were very narrowly focussed for a specific set of tasks of vital interest to professional digital photographers but of very little interest to anybody else.
The complaint at the time was that all of the software used was originally written for the PC and ported to the Mac.
To use your analogy: In the original article the pi calculator was written in assembly for the PC but in basic for the Mac and the Mac suffered from that. Despite the MHz gap this was counterintuitive to those who follow this kind of issue because it was exactly the kind of specialized task where the PowerPC's superior vector/SIMD performance should have (and was assumed to) MORE than compensated for it's slower clock speed. Still it's a perfectly fair test because if you're interested in doing that task and this is the only software to do it with it doesn't matter to you WHY one system is faster than the other, only that it IS.
NOW, however as a follow up on the original story & controversy/. is pointing out that MacBibble has rewritten it's Mac version to take full advantage of the PowerPC's multithreading & Altivec processing and that it is much faster than it was before and therefore that one little task of interest only to professional photographers the Mac is back in the running as the fastest tool for that particular job.
A fair criticism of/. (though not of Rob Galbraith) would be that they are trying to imply that these very narrow and specific benchmarks are indicative of general processor performance or general vector performance when that is not the case. In the first story the implication was that the PowerPC's one advantage had ceased to exist when that was not necessarily the case. In the second story the implication was that the PowerPC's one advantage was a general one and not tied to very specific computing tasks. In slashdots defense - RTA, the/. crowd should be assumed to be technically inclined and able to pay attention to such details and to care about them.
I would agree with just about everything you said - with a few of caveats.
1) The IBM PowerPC 970 looks good *now*. It might be Apples saviour - but I'm not counting on it until I see systems shipping. It's going to be a long time before any systems are shipping and by the time they ship x86 chips will be that much further ahead.
2) The 970 looks good *on paper* - but there is still time for IBM to screw it up and ship a product that doesn't quite live up to the hype - it happens all the time in the processor world & the 970 seems to have a lot of potential design issues they have to get just right (the "deep and wide" design and the way they group IOPs seem like performance killers if done poorly)
I totally agree that they aren't going to move to the x86 any time soon. They need to give their developers some time to recuperate from the last big change from the MacOS to MacOS X. But, if the 970 is a flop they will have to move pretty soon after, if it merely maintains the lagging status quo (which seems the most likely) Apple will still be crippled by the GHz gap but can stay the course and put their hope in the 970's successor. If IBM hits it out of the park with the 970 and catches right up to the x86 Apple will happily stay with PowerPC.
If Apple does move to the x86 they will just be using a different chip in their machines not producing MacOS X for all the wintel clones out there. It should be easier for their developers than the switch from the MacOS to MacOS X which is really a *completely* different OS. Aside from Altivec code most apps should only require a simple recompile to be ported from Mac PPC to Mac x86. Most of the work on Apples side has already been done. NextStep had to be ported from x86 to PowerPC to become MacOS X in the first place and back in the days of "Rhapsody" you could compile your Cocoa apps for PowerPC, x86 or as a fat binary to run on either. If I understand it right Marklar is just the continuing maintenance of all that initial work - very smart, it keeps their options open.
The only problem is that it doesn't do TWICE as much per cycle in practice (save a couple of photoshop filters carefully selected by Apple), so the raw clock of x86 still makes Intel the winner in most cases.
Yeah, that is basically what I said. I'm guessing that a PowerPC would be equivalent to something between 25% to 50% faster on the intel side depending on what your doing. It certainly isn't 100% faster (as steve claims) though in a very few select places it is.
Let me defend his practice of using Photoshop as a benchmark. Even though it is misleading as a benchmark of general performance it IS also the "killer app" of the PowerMac's core market of designers. Most PowerMac users don't really care about the performance of SETI@Home or Quake 3 but they care very much about the performance of Photoshop - I'll even go out on a limb and say that they ONLY care about the performance of Photoshop.
Finally - Apple/Motorola has a bigger problem: it makes sense to invest time in handcoding SSE/SSE2 for a CPU with 95% of the market, but usually not for one with 5% of the market.
I don't see this as a problem - IF a software maker has already decided to go after that 5% Mac market (which is still a lot of users & $$$ in absolute terms) they are likely to spend the time doing altivec if it will be of any real benefit. I'd say that almost all of the apps that really need it use it - I'm sure there are others that would see marginal benefits that don't bother but for the most part those aren't the apps that are slowing things down.
Errr, yeah, cuz you can't get SCSI on x86 boxes. Right.
We are talking about a pretty long time ago. SCSI came built in on the mac whereas IBM compatibles (in the jargon of the time) came with IDE built in. I'm not saying you couldn't add SCSI to the PC, I'm just saying that SCSI was better and more expensive and explained some of the Mac's premium price.
As much as I wish you were right, you're actually wrong on this. The Supreme Court ruled on the case, and found that what the Congress did was constitutional, and since the constitution grants the Supreme Court the right to interpret the Constitution, it is constitutional to do so.
A couple of points. The supreme court is not infallible so while as a legal matter their opinion decides a laws constitutionality I think it is perfectly fair point out constitutional flaws in a law even if the court have ruled that it IS constitutional.
Also the constitution does NOT explicitly grant the Supreme Court the right to interpret the constitution - they granted themselves that right in a very early case. ALL of our elected federal officials and judges swear the same oath to uphold the constitution. It is ALL of their responsibilities to do so. The idea that the supreme court alone decides constitutionality has led to some real irresponsiblity, particularly in congress where many lawmakers are willing to KNOWINGLY pass laws that are unconstitutional. The most glaring recent example was the campaign finance reform law. Most if it's staunchest supporters don't think it will pass muster with the supreme court - which is fine if they really believed it should, but one got the impression they didn't really consider the question of constitutionality at all. The really irresponsible ones were those that truly believed it was unconstitutional but bowed to popular pressure and voted for it anyway thinking the Supreme Court would clean up ther mess. That borders on treachery - it is certainly breaking their oath of office. Our government is meant to be balanced - congress should be interpeting and following the constitution when writing the law, The president should do so when signing or vetoing the law, the supreme court should do so when deciding cases. And congress should do so if they ever decide to check the courts power through regulation and exemptions (check out article 3, section 2 the last line in the second paragraph for a really fun constitutional crisis waiting to happen if the court ever REALLY pisses off congress).
Back to the topic at hand. I think however in this case the court was unfortunately right. The constitution puts it in congress's hands to decide the length of copyrights as long as that time is limited. Now congress keeps increasing the limits but the court can't rule that a limited time is "unlimited" simply because it's really long, or because they have written laws that keep making it longer. This is a case where I'm sure the court wanted to stamp the law "stupid, but constitutional". It's not the courts job to make sure the laws are good, or wise, only that they are constitutional. This law is constitutional on it's face - it's also bad, stupid and unwise. But, it is a GOOD THING that the court refrained from strike it down for those reasons. If they had they would be putting themselves in the position of unelected, unaccountable, anti-democratic (if benign - for now) rulers. It is congress' job to write our laws and OUR job to elect people that will do so wisely. The court cannot save us from ourselves and if they try they will only undermine democracy and balanced government.
...Now these microinstructions execute at a rate directly proportional to the overall frequency of the machine
This is *vastly* oversimplified - there are complexities to processor design & trade-offs to be made that make clock speed almost useless for the sake of comparisons between chips with different architectures - even if they DO perform the same number of instructions per cycle (which often isn't the case).
there can be, and usually are, parrallel microrocessing units inside of each processor, so this can increase the operational speed
And this is one of the differences between PowerPC and Intel architectures - in general PowerPC has chosen to sacrifice clock cycle speed to do more instructions per cycle while Intel has chosen to sacrifice the number of instructions to get more speed. In other words Intel usually chooses to do one thing at a time really fast while PowerPC chooses to do several things at once more slowly. Right there you have a *partial* explanation for the MHz (now GHz) gap.
Fact: Intel chips have been extended to include all the same vector processing functionality included in most PowerPC chips.
I'm no expert on this but most reviews & articles from fairly non-partisan sites have concluded that Altivec is superior to the Intel alternative and that this shows up in real world scenarios.
The final upshot is that *in general* the PowerPC does more per cycle than an Intel chip. How much more (or even if it's more at all) depends on what exactly it's doing. But the fact remains: for most applications, especially multimedia applications that use Altivec, the PowerPC outperforms Intel chips of the same clock speed.
BUT intel is so far ahead in speed that even taking the "MHz Myth" into account Intel is still far ahead of the PowerPC in overall performance. Apple has got to get it's old AIM partners to step up or it will have to abandon the PowerPC for Intel (or intel compatible)
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mind you, if they only took a few cents from each credit card account, they COULD buy a Ferrari ...
There are ongoing frauds where small amounts in fraudulent "service fees" or subscriptions to porn sites are being charged on hundreds of thousands of cards every month. The charges are small enough that most card holders don't bother to track them down and get hit up month after month for years.
There is a web page about one of these frauds here In this particular fraud the card numbers were taken from a shady bank that did CC transactions for porn sites. The con men would make charges under a variety of entities posing as subscription based porn sites so the card holder would not only be paying for his original porn purchase but other fraudulent ones besides - pretty smart because it wouldn't set of any alarms at the card company (the guy is already making legitimate purchases of that particular product) and the numbers are small enough that the guy wouldn't bother doing anything about it if he even notices. Since it's porn, and some of it he really *did* sign up for, he might be too embarassed to do anything about it even if he realises some of the charges are fraudulent. This particular fraud ended up making between $40 and $50 million dollars off of about 900,000 card holders.
In Canada, stores are not obligated to accept cash.
That seems strange, but I can see why it might be that way. Convenience stores and the like which are subject to high rates of robbery often refuse to accept high denomination bills because they don't want to leave a lot of money in the register to make change for them. You haven't yet bought anything so you aren't yet in debt to them - if you were they *would* be obligated to accept cash - at least in the US where each bill says " This note is legal tender for *all* debts, public and private."
This happened to my wife recently - She was suprised (to say the least) to be getting hundreds of bounces back from a spam.
If it had been porn I would have looked into the possiblity of filing a defamation of character lawsuit. It was in your case and if it was written in the first person singular ( "come see me nekkid...") and had *you* as the reply-to I'd imagine you'd have an excellent chance of winning such a case - it would certainly be worth talking to a lawyer about.
There you go - they don't even have to write a new law about this - they already have one.
If they ARE the law, then youd think they would abide it. Maybe Im asking too much.
.uk domains in the first place. I'm being silly when I suggest that they could imprison or fine the executives of Thawte for refusing to recongnize their ownership to make a point - the write the laws! Yes they *wouldn't* write a law that penalizes Thawte in horrible and nasty ways for refusing to play ball but they *could* and it would be perfectly legal because they determine what is legal and what isn't (within unwritten constitutional limits that are to some extent determined by - you guessed it: Parliment)
I'm not sure I get your point. What law is Parliment not abiding by? It's their domain, they not only own the domain under the law as it exists but they write the laws about
In the UK we don't detain anyone we like, unlike some other countrys (*peer Iraq & US*)
Sure you do, Parliment has written many laws that require the detention of people for all sorts of (mostly) good reasons. Of course my example is silly but it is still the case that if Parliment *really* wants their domain recognized and Thwate for some unaccountable reason doesn't want to do so Parliment has all sorts of ways to require Thawte to do so - at least if Thawte wants to do business in the UK.
The argument about some detentions in the US is that they are *illegal* - against both our laws and our constitution - in some cases that appears to be a perfectly valid criticism, in others it is debatable, all of which is beside the point. In my hypothetical situation it would be legal because Parliment wrote a law making it so - as for "constitutional" well I don't exactly understand the complexities of "constitutionality" in the UK but I'm pretty sure that Parliment has some impact on what is considered legal and on how the government is "constituted".
People selling smut want to get it under the noses of as wide a potential audience as possible. Hence the existence of things like www.whitehouse.com [whitehouse.com]
.sex . If there was such a TLD I am pretty sure a fairly large number of searches on google (and even more at images.google.com) would be restricted to the .sex domain - those looking for their favorite porn star named "bambi" aren't interested in pictures of animated deer after all. It works both ways - both someone with a fetish and someone who doesn't want to see that would know the likely differences between nurses.com and nurses.sex. To some extent the porn providers would move to .sex on their own to follow the market.
You seem to think that people aren't *looking* for
No that blurb was there before - and I seem to recall there was some type of promotional offer targetted at video pros. They offered better video cards as BTO options for those using it as a digital video workstation.
Firewire 800 on a server? Why?
I don't know what advantages it may have on a server - But Apple is also marketting these things as video editting workstations (which are often rack mounted along with all the other video equipment). That's probably why there is Firewire on the *front* of the box.
Yes, but Parliament is 10/10 of the law, and it's not helping them.
Actually I'm sure it *will* help them out. The fact that they ARE the law means that someone high up enough at Thawte to make a decision will decide to acknowledge Parliment's ownership of their domain. Or parliment can pass a law that simply says "we own parliment.uk" - If that is not enough for Thawte Parliment could pass a law that says "Any entity failing to recongise parliments sole ownership of 'Parliment.uk" shall have it's assets frozen and executives held in custody until such time as they recongise said ownership". I'm sure Thawte would come around, it doesn't pay for a commercial entity to get into a fight with the legislative body of a country they want to do business in.
I think YOU are also missing the point. Now an enemy that *could* have used the instantaneous communications cell phones would have afforded must rely on motorcycle courriers that may take hours or even days to transmit their message - or in the case when armies are on the move may miss them and *never* deliver their message.
I would agree that having these high-tech capabilities can blind the US military to the possiblity that their opponent may do something smart and low-tech that defeats our capabilities. General Van Riper very effectively showed them the cost of such an oversight - which is the entire point of such war games. But those low-tech work-arounds come at a cost (in speed and reliablity). In the short run Gen. Van Ripers low-tech couriers allowed him to set up and win *one* suprise attack (albeit a spectacular one). An unacceptable result for the US Military to be sure, but over the long run he is at a massive disadvantage - he cannot quickly or reliably communicate with his troops (especially now that we know to strafe motorcyclists when we see them).
Despite all the bitching and moaning about resetting the war game & cheating the "opposing force" of a victory the war game still performed it's function. You *know* the generals & military planners that were burned by that suprise attack have learned a very important lesson. The other function of the war game is to train for the most likely scenario - which is why they reset it after they got themselves wiped out - unless we are *planning* to be devestated in an initial attack it was pointless to continue the game in that state after the flaw in their thinking (which they are now intensely aware of) was revealed. On the other hand I think it would be very good to have war games that are more open ended where the US commanders have to adapt to suprises and defeats and have to come up with a few suprises of their own to claw their way back to a victory after getting their asses kicked.
Plus, correct me if I'm wrong, but as a convicted criminal, isn't he not allowed to benefit monetarily from his crimes?
I don't see how winning a libel suit is "benefiting from his crimes". Writing a book on the other hand would be - he can still write it to attempt to clear his name but any proceeds would probably have to go to charity.
Mr. Mitnick never did anything remotely similar.
Not to be a jerk but how do you know? That is what he *says* but as his card number story (and numerous others) illustrate he is not above lying - so how do we know with any certainty that he is being truthful in this particular instance? It's a rather delicate moral position for someone who excels at what he euphamistically calls "social engineering". It seems to me if you are stupid enough to confide in an admited confidence man you deserve whatever betrayal of confidence he may inflict on you. I'd think in the field of "social engineering" he would even get extra points for style for brazenness.
He may really adhere to such a fine moral distinction but I don't see how one could have much trust in that.
See, I just don't see the scientific take as a compelling argument for continuing space flight. Space is a place where people should go to do stuff. I believe our species is programmed to be inquisitive and exploratory, and when we can scratch those itches (even vicariously through the courage of others) we are better off as a people.
I actually agree with this... BUT, I think at the moment we need more knowledge to reach the point where we can send people on to the next Big Thing(tm). IMO the fastest way to get to that next Big Thing is to acquire that knowledge as quickly and effeciently as possible. I think we should have been sending increasing numbers of ever larger and more sophisticated probes to Mars. Eventually we would reach the point where we would be routinely sending payloads to Mars of equivelent size & complexity to a manned mission - at that point we would be in a position to do just that. The only way the ISS advances us towards Mars is in studying the prolonged health effects of weightlessness - an important problem to consider but one we already know a fair amount about, and only one of dozens, all the others of which we could have been solving with unmanned missions.
So, which is better? Another Shuttle launch or color pictures from a Mars rover? For me, it's a wash.
Considering that pictures from Mars are cheaper, advance our knowledge further, and generate far more interest (baring a tragedy) my money is on the pictures from Mars. People were at least interested in the pictures from Pathfinder and they were of a featureless plain that looked like the most boring section of Arizona. If you want to spend $$$ to inspire people instead of glorified milk runs to the ISS that nobody pays attention to anymore how about video from a flying probe as it cruises along a canyon with walls 8km high? I think THAT could capture the imagination in a way the ISS doesn't.
Now PEOPLE on Mars, that's something to get excited about.
I agree, but I think for the moment unmanned exploration is the fastest way to get there. We are spending heaps of $$$ on manned flights that aren't really advancing our knowledge or expertise by that much. Learning how to *reliably* send stuff to Mars (probes now, people later), learning where (and if) there is water, learning what other natural resources may be available - all these are things we are NOT learning because we are spending *enormous* sums of money on the Shuttle and ISS.
So, I want people in space. But I don't think that going over and over to LEO accomplishes anything. If I thought it would be possible to say "OK, we're not going to fly any people for five years, but then by God we'll start flight testing our Mars hardware!" I'd be a happy guy. However, I believe that if we don't keep in the habit (if you will) of putting people in space, we will lose the political will to do it.
I think our focus right now should be on whatever gives us the most knowledge and understanding for the buck - either manned or unmanned. I think in the long run that will lead us towards our goals the quickest - including manned exploration or even colonization. I think at this point manned space flight has lost it's power to inspire - it's seen as routine and we don't have the knowledge to attempt a mission that would inspire (like a mission to mars). But we could gain the knowledge and expertise we need to attempt something really significant more efficiently (and thus more quickly) with unmanned exploration and tests. Even as PR the shuttle program seems to be a failure - When it comes for bang for the PR buck in inspiring people which has more impact: a shuttle run to the ISS? or color pictures back from Mars? Sadly shuttle flights only have any value in inspiring people when it does something dramatic - like blow-up - not exactly an ideal way to achieve the goal of inspiring people. If the money we have been spending on the shuttle and ISS had instead been put into unmanned exploration of Mars we would know a LOT more about the object of our study and about how to send stuff there reliably. We would also have some REALLY cool photos of awe inspiring martian canyons & mountains that would make a LOT more people say "I want to go there, and I'm willing for more of my tax $$$ to be spent making that possible." In terms of inspiring the next generation of scientists and willingness to fund I think a photo of the sunrise from the slopes of Olumpus Mons or a video of the winding passages of Valles Marineris is worth a hundred milk runs to the ISS, at far less cost.
Sorry, but that's a non-argument. None of these programs used any hardware-specific stuff like SSE
...but since 95% of the world aren't using Mac we can probably assume that most programs will not be developed on Macs.
.1% that ARE probably 60-80% are using Macs. I'm being generous here, I have worked with many professional photographers and only one of the many I know uses a PC. Which is all beside the point, the complaint (I actually have no idea how legitimatly) was that the software was tweaked for the PC and the Mac suffered in comparison for that reason. The new Mac version is tweaked for the Mac and benefits *significantly* from that.
I've just read the original article and I didn't see this - could you give me a source? Frankly I would find it highly unlikely that a programmer wouldn't use hardware specific SIMD or vector processing since this is EXACTLY the kind of software that SIMD was invented for. If you are right these programmers should be fired - it is gross incompetance on their part to ignore a technology that would give them *massive* performance benefits. You could be right the second article/press release points out that MacBibble using hardware specific Altivec processing is faster than it's competitor by a factor of 10
Yes, but 99.9% of the world are NOT professional photographers of that
Back in the '80s Steve Jobs managed to wangle a tour or four at PARC for himself and some other Apple types to see the windowing system that Xerox researchers were working on. The researchers were ordered to show the Apple team members how things worked.
At least one key member of the team objected strenuously to giving any information to Apple without any sort of benefit for Xerox. (no NDA, no financial compensation, no limits on the information that was being given away, etc.) She was ordered to comply anyway.
Actually this is the vastly oversimplified and "more interesting" version of the story as told in "Triumph of the Nerds". Jeff Raskin (the developer of the MacIntosh) has pointed out that many of the concepts supposedly stolen from PARC during Steve Jobs infamous 1979 visit had actually already been *implemented* on the Apple Lisa and MacIntosh (which was in development). These implementations which predated the visit to PARC were even arguably more advanced and are the ones we are familiar with now (for example click-and-drag as opposed to click-move-click). Some of the supposedly "stolen" ideas were in Raskins 1967 thesis which predate PARC's very existence. One could perhaps make a case that PARC "stole" the ideas from Raskin except for the fact that Raskin visited PARC as an academic and they freely discussed their GUI ideas with each other (Raskin and the PARC folks) - it is not suprising that people that shared a common vision (the GUI) and openly discussed their ideas in an academic research setting would at a later date develop those ideas into similar products.
OK, I'm a techie and graphic designer (yes, rare).
Me too!
I generally agree though I would add a couple of points. First Apple's dominance of this particular market itself is a compelling reason for those entering the market to stick with it. If you are a designer you are going to be expected to use macs wherever you work - what kind of machine are you going to buy for yourself? If you are hiring designers you are going to be hiring people that have always used macs and might *never* have used PC's - what kind of machines are you going to buy for them? If you freelance everyone you have to work with will be sending you files from macs and taking the files you provide and using them on a mac - you can use a PC but it will add at least a little hassle. If you write software for these people which platform are you going to focus on? In the past the PC didn't even have the software required, that's changed now but still a lot of designers (especially somewhat older ones like me) still have the idea that you simply *can't* do professional design work using a PC.
Second I think focussing on stability/reliablity is a little unfair. I think windows is a lot more reliable than Mac users believe and MacOS 9 which many designers are still using until Quark gets it's act together certainly had NOTHING to brag about in that department. The real advantage is more subtle but perhaps more significant, especially considering how it apparently compensated for OS 9's UNreliablity. That is: when it worked it really did work more intuitively - This was certainly true back when the competition was DOS and then Windows 3.x and even Windows 95. After windows started to improve by borrowing heavily from the "mac way" the Mac was still more intuitively easy, partly from long familialarity by this point and partly from the continued focus on that value which shows up in Apple's focussed attention to little details that Microsoft seems to only think of as afterthoughts. I'd say OS 9 was an instance of getting all the big things wrong but getting all of the details, at least from the users perspective, right. UNIX is probably the exact opposite (which is why MacOS X is so exciting) and Windows is a (unhappy?) compromise between the two criticized from the UNIX side for getting the big things wrong (though not as wrong as the old MacOS) and criticized from the Mac side for getting the user interface details wrong (though not as wrong as UNIX). MacOS X has a real chance of getting both the fundamental things and all the little interface details right, though it's still a little immature and suffers from having had to make some comprimises. It is not quite there yet, though I think they are pulling ahead of the competition.
The reality remains that benchmarks prove little.
/. article.
I have to disagree. I would say that the particular benchmark in the original article and to a lesser extent even the much maligned Steve Jobs Photoshop benchmark are really the only kind that count - real world tasks that (some) users will actually be using (a lot). The problem is when people imply or believe that these narrow benchmarks of specific tasks mean something about the performance of the chips more generally. A VERY fair criticism of Steve Jobs, though to be fair his audience is largely made up of people that make their living with Photoshop. It's not fair at all of Rob Galbraith who's audience is entirely made up of people that make their living not only with photoshop but spend most of their time working with RAW formatted images.
The original article by Rob Galbraith was an extrememly fair test of how well different platfroms did a particular set of processor intensive/time consuming tasks that professional photographers are doing all day long. It doesn't matter WHY one performs better than the other. It doesn't matter if the test is "fair". It doesn't immediately matter* if the results are lousy on one because the software is written in a notoriously slow scripting language running under emulation and great on the other because it was written in assembly - it only matters that I can process more photos in an hour on one machine than I can on the other.
*One caveat to the above - in the long run it might matter that the tests are at least somewhat "fair" because the next upgrade to the software might change things dramatically - which apears to be the case with this second
Hang on a moment. The last Mac vs PC test was conducted fairly - Photoshop on a Mac vs Photoshop on a PC.
/. is pointing out that MacBibble has rewritten it's Mac version to take full advantage of the PowerPC's multithreading & Altivec processing and that it is much faster than it was before and therefore that one little task of interest only to professional photographers the Mac is back in the running as the fastest tool for that particular job.
/. (though not of Rob Galbraith) would be that they are trying to imply that these very narrow and specific benchmarks are indicative of general processor performance or general vector performance when that is not the case. In the first story the implication was that the PowerPC's one advantage had ceased to exist when that was not necessarily the case. In the second story the implication was that the PowerPC's one advantage was a general one and not tied to very specific computing tasks. In slashdots defense - RTA, the /. crowd should be assumed to be technically inclined and able to pay attention to such details and to care about them.
No, you didn't read the article - it conducted tests using several different pieces of software but not one of them was Photoshop, although one was a third party photoshop plug-in. The tests were very narrowly focussed for a specific set of tasks of vital interest to professional digital photographers but of very little interest to anybody else.
The complaint at the time was that all of the software used was originally written for the PC and ported to the Mac. To use your analogy: In the original article the pi calculator was written in assembly for the PC but in basic for the Mac and the Mac suffered from that. Despite the MHz gap this was counterintuitive to those who follow this kind of issue because it was exactly the kind of specialized task where the PowerPC's superior vector/SIMD performance should have (and was assumed to) MORE than compensated for it's slower clock speed. Still it's a perfectly fair test because if you're interested in doing that task and this is the only software to do it with it doesn't matter to you WHY one system is faster than the other, only that it IS.
NOW, however as a follow up on the original story & controversy
A fair criticism of
I would agree with just about everything you said - with a few of caveats.
1) The IBM PowerPC 970 looks good *now*. It might be Apples saviour - but I'm not counting on it until I see systems shipping. It's going to be a long time before any systems are shipping and by the time they ship x86 chips will be that much further ahead.
2) The 970 looks good *on paper* - but there is still time for IBM to screw it up and ship a product that doesn't quite live up to the hype - it happens all the time in the processor world & the 970 seems to have a lot of potential design issues they have to get just right (the "deep and wide" design and the way they group IOPs seem like performance killers if done poorly)
I totally agree that they aren't going to move to the x86 any time soon. They need to give their developers some time to recuperate from the last big change from the MacOS to MacOS X. But, if the 970 is a flop they will have to move pretty soon after, if it merely maintains the lagging status quo (which seems the most likely) Apple will still be crippled by the GHz gap but can stay the course and put their hope in the 970's successor. If IBM hits it out of the park with the 970 and catches right up to the x86 Apple will happily stay with PowerPC.
If Apple does move to the x86 they will just be using a different chip in their machines not producing MacOS X for all the wintel clones out there. It should be easier for their developers than the switch from the MacOS to MacOS X which is really a *completely* different OS. Aside from Altivec code most apps should only require a simple recompile to be ported from Mac PPC to Mac x86. Most of the work on Apples side has already been done. NextStep had to be ported from x86 to PowerPC to become MacOS X in the first place and back in the days of "Rhapsody" you could compile your Cocoa apps for PowerPC, x86 or as a fat binary to run on either. If I understand it right Marklar is just the continuing maintenance of all that initial work - very smart, it keeps their options open.
The only problem is that it doesn't do TWICE as much per cycle in practice (save a couple of photoshop filters carefully selected by Apple), so the raw clock of x86 still makes Intel the winner in most cases.
Yeah, that is basically what I said. I'm guessing that a PowerPC would be equivalent to something between 25% to 50% faster on the intel side depending on what your doing. It certainly isn't 100% faster (as steve claims) though in a very few select places it is.
Let me defend his practice of using Photoshop as a benchmark. Even though it is misleading as a benchmark of general performance it IS also the "killer app" of the PowerMac's core market of designers. Most PowerMac users don't really care about the performance of SETI@Home or Quake 3 but they care very much about the performance of Photoshop - I'll even go out on a limb and say that they ONLY care about the performance of Photoshop.
Finally - Apple/Motorola has a bigger problem: it makes sense to invest time in handcoding SSE/SSE2 for a CPU with 95% of the market, but usually not for one with 5% of the market.
I don't see this as a problem - IF a software maker has already decided to go after that 5% Mac market (which is still a lot of users & $$$ in absolute terms) they are likely to spend the time doing altivec if it will be of any real benefit. I'd say that almost all of the apps that really need it use it - I'm sure there are others that would see marginal benefits that don't bother but for the most part those aren't the apps that are slowing things down.
Errr, yeah, cuz you can't get SCSI on x86 boxes. Right.
We are talking about a pretty long time ago. SCSI came built in on the mac whereas IBM compatibles (in the jargon of the time) came with IDE built in. I'm not saying you couldn't add SCSI to the PC, I'm just saying that SCSI was better and more expensive and explained some of the Mac's premium price.
As much as I wish you were right, you're actually wrong on this. The Supreme Court ruled on the case, and found that what the Congress did was constitutional, and since the constitution grants the Supreme Court the right to interpret the Constitution, it is constitutional to do so.
A couple of points. The supreme court is not infallible so while as a legal matter their opinion decides a laws constitutionality I think it is perfectly fair point out constitutional flaws in a law even if the court have ruled that it IS constitutional.
Also the constitution does NOT explicitly grant the Supreme Court the right to interpret the constitution - they granted themselves that right in a very early case. ALL of our elected federal officials and judges swear the same oath to uphold the constitution. It is ALL of their responsibilities to do so. The idea that the supreme court alone decides constitutionality has led to some real irresponsiblity, particularly in congress where many lawmakers are willing to KNOWINGLY pass laws that are unconstitutional. The most glaring recent example was the campaign finance reform law. Most if it's staunchest supporters don't think it will pass muster with the supreme court - which is fine if they really believed it should, but one got the impression they didn't really consider the question of constitutionality at all. The really irresponsible ones were those that truly believed it was unconstitutional but bowed to popular pressure and voted for it anyway thinking the Supreme Court would clean up ther mess. That borders on treachery - it is certainly breaking their oath of office. Our government is meant to be balanced - congress should be interpeting and following the constitution when writing the law, The president should do so when signing or vetoing the law, the supreme court should do so when deciding cases. And congress should do so if they ever decide to check the courts power through regulation and exemptions (check out article 3, section 2 the last line in the second paragraph for a really fun constitutional crisis waiting to happen if the court ever REALLY pisses off congress).
Back to the topic at hand. I think however in this case the court was unfortunately right. The constitution puts it in congress's hands to decide the length of copyrights as long as that time is limited. Now congress keeps increasing the limits but the court can't rule that a limited time is "unlimited" simply because it's really long, or because they have written laws that keep making it longer. This is a case where I'm sure the court wanted to stamp the law "stupid, but constitutional". It's not the courts job to make sure the laws are good, or wise, only that they are constitutional. This law is constitutional on it's face - it's also bad, stupid and unwise. But, it is a GOOD THING that the court refrained from strike it down for those reasons. If they had they would be putting themselves in the position of unelected, unaccountable, anti-democratic (if benign - for now) rulers. It is congress' job to write our laws and OUR job to elect people that will do so wisely. The court cannot save us from ourselves and if they try they will only undermine democracy and balanced government.
...Now these microinstructions execute at a rate directly proportional to the overall frequency of the machine
This is *vastly* oversimplified - there are complexities to processor design & trade-offs to be made that make clock speed almost useless for the sake of comparisons between chips with different architectures - even if they DO perform the same number of instructions per cycle (which often isn't the case).
there can be, and usually are, parrallel microrocessing units inside of each processor, so this can increase the operational speed
And this is one of the differences between PowerPC and Intel architectures - in general PowerPC has chosen to sacrifice clock cycle speed to do more instructions per cycle while Intel has chosen to sacrifice the number of instructions to get more speed. In other words Intel usually chooses to do one thing at a time really fast while PowerPC chooses to do several things at once more slowly. Right there you have a *partial* explanation for the MHz (now GHz) gap.
Fact: Intel chips have been extended to include all the same vector processing functionality included in most PowerPC chips.
I'm no expert on this but most reviews & articles from fairly non-partisan sites have concluded that Altivec is superior to the Intel alternative and that this shows up in real world scenarios.
The final upshot is that *in general* the PowerPC does more per cycle than an Intel chip. How much more (or even if it's more at all) depends on what exactly it's doing. But the fact remains: for most applications, especially multimedia applications that use Altivec, the PowerPC outperforms Intel chips of the same clock speed.
BUT intel is so far ahead in speed that even taking the "MHz Myth" into account Intel is still far ahead of the PowerPC in overall performance. Apple has got to get it's old AIM partners to step up or it will have to abandon the PowerPC for Intel (or intel compatible)