Compared to what it costs to create a given security, breaking it costs very little.
The best way to cut down on software piracy, the very best way bar none, is to cut down on the incentive for it. When software makers decide to get really competitive on pricing issues you'll see a big chunk taken out of the piracy market as a result. Especially commercial bootleggers who might see a bright future in investing in the hardware to mass-produce illegitimate copies of software they can retail at $69.95-$499 and higher. Dropping the price in that category drastically would take much of the wind out of the sails of a commercial pirate who has to spend the bucks to setup a successful CD-bootlegging operation. At $19.95 it gets even better, and the pirate has even less incentive.
That's why it's always been difficult for me to believe software piracy is anywhere near as bad as these companies make it out. If it was they'd be lowering prices to drive the bootleggers out of business. Instead of protection against pirates it seems more a case of these companies wanting to build greed-protection mechanisms instead.
Frankly, why should MS care if some hobbyist decides to mod his xBox to run Linux? Linux won't run any of the xBox software MS would receive a royalty for anyway, and in that case selling an xBox to a Linux hobbyist is one more xBox sale MS would not have made otherwise. (Granted I am not such a person so it's possible I've missed something material here.)
We have elections far more often than copyrights go extinct, whether it's copyrights under the old law, the newer law, or the law being debated right now.
Congress can repeal anything it passes. Laws are repealed with regularity.
The American President's chief power under the Constitution is that of Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, but even that power has been hamstrung by Congress. The President is more a figurehead than anything else, and a lightning rod when times get bad.
The President has no control over the Supreme Court, remember. In fact, the Supreme Court, the Congress, and the President are the three branches of government in the US. If the Supreme Court upholds the Constitutionality of the of the copyright law it will only be because it finds no Constitutional grounds to prevent Congress from enacting such a law.
The President has no power to pass laws himself. Legislation requires a majority in both Houses of Congress. Even if the President vetos a law, Congress may override that veto.
Does the US Federal government have too much control and power over the lives of its citizens? I would say yes. However, it must never be forgotten who put the politicians in office who have enacted these laws--voting citizens, and those citizens who did not vote.
The crisis that bodies like the Supreme Court always face in a Democracy is in deciding which shall prevail, the will of the people, or the Constitution of the United States. Even in an American Democracy, the two are not always the same.
The P4 already enjoys really bad prediction penalties, which can only be offset by the highest memory bandwidth possible, so I don't know that L3 would actually help very much. Aside from that the added expense will keep this from happening any time soon in the main consumer market where every company is Scrooge.
HyperThreading to me is the biggest con
since MMX and AGP x (?) for 3D cards. It *requires* multithreaded applications to even work, the HyperT cpus eat more voltage and run hotter than cpus without it and as a result require different motherboard support than the slower-than 3.06GHz nonHyperT P4s. This thing won't even be as useful to a desktop user as a dual cpu Mac currently is for your average Mac user. In fact, if you need to run multithreaded applications (of which there are almost none in the standard software marketplace) you are *far* better off going dual-cpu SMP, and the performance difference would eat HyperT alive. What a con job this is turning out to be.
Last, I wouldn't categorize HyperTransport, as "cheap, consumer crap," exactly...;) I think it's amazing to see it working down to the consumer desktop--High-end server systems have enjoyed its benefit for years.
Actually, the P4 3.06GHz cpus Intel is preparing to release run a fair bit hotter than the latest Athlon XP stepping from AMD--24/2600 +'s. INteresting to see a P4 actually displacing more heat than an Athlon.
For starters the Mac market worldwide commands less than a 3% slice of the market--many of the Macs in use today are older Macs (witness the extremes Apple's going to to entice, and then eventually force, its user base to go OSX or else move to another platform.)
On top of that you've all the attendant support and software issues that go with supplying support for this kind of service. When you have better than 90% of the market buying your products from a basically standardized Windows market, it's not worth it for these companies to gear up for Mac support with its attendant issues for a very small slice of an already very small segment of market share.
It's amusing to hear Mac users talk about "conspiracy" lurking behind every door when the fact is they just haven't faced the facts of what comes with being a member of a very small market. You often have to wait months or years to get software and services provided the much larger Windows market, and sometimes you don't get them at all. This situation is by no means unique or unprecedented. It would be nice if some of these erstwhile critics undertook the expense of doing something like this for the Mac themselves for a change. Easy it is to crticize, much more difficult to actually do something.
I read over the Armadillo site a good while ago, and I confess the basics of the ultimate goal seem a bit elusive. The only picture of the manned module I saw resembled a section of sewer pipe. I know the ultimate goal is to get a human payload up 50 miles or so, but...what then? Does a chute pop open and the thing simply return to earth, the passengers not even glimpsing space because of the lack of a porthole? If so it seems curious indeed as the passengers might get the same "experience" hopping into one of NASA's centrifugal G-force trainers, and be a whole lot safer for it, besides.
Yep, the sad thing is that the world is full of people like this, who think the only thing "safe" has a government "USDA" stamp of approval on it. Airplanes fall out of the sky daily (well, sometimes) and this guy's scared to death of a chair with toy rocket motors on it that lifts a single human being 15 feet off the ground. I've known people just like that, unfortunately, who can't see the forest for the tree.
The P4 was an initial disaster for Intel--the cpu hardly anybody wanted. But it wasn't just because of its low performance and IPC, it was because of its dependence on Rdram in the beginning. A mistake which Intel has since remedied.
The fact is that for the past three years Intel has done a lot more wrong than right, stretching all the way back to the infamous re-called 1.13GHz P3--it's the first time in my memory that a shipping cpu was ever recalled by the manufacturer.
In fact, it wasn't until the Northwood P4 2.53GHz variant that Intel started doing some things "right"--and that's been for only a few months now. Basically, It took Intel until Northwood to catch AMD's Athlon in performance, and the clock started ticking in 1999--so it took Intel the better part of 3 years to catch the Athlon.
Everybody knew that the low IPC in the P4 would be made up for, eventually, in sheer clock speed--that wasn't debated as far as I can recall. What hardly anyone suspected was that AMD would be able to extend the Athlon architecture so well against Intel's Pentium architectures. Indeed, with a new stepping of the Thoroughbred core which started shipping only last week, The Athlon holds its own against the P4 and will do so up to the 3GHz level and maybe beyond. After that comes Hammer, which supposedly will start shipping at close to the MHz range where Athlon XP leaves off, ~2.4GHz. Only thing is that Hammer will be at least 25% faster than Athlon XP clock for clock, which makes it considerably faster than NOrthwood clock for clock, yet it will have no trouble scaling up in MHz.
OK, it's Sunday night and I'm rambling so good night all.
The problem with your position relative to the Creationist, and his position relative yours, is that neither of you can prove the negative concerning the other's opinion. Therefore, both opinions are necessarily constrained to the area of faith as opposed to scientifically verifiable fact.
Of the two doctrines, I tend to to think evolution is the more dangerous because it pretends to be something it is not--it pretends to be science when in fact it is naught but a philosophy. Creationism on the other hand makes no bones about the fact it thinks the earth and the systems upon it are but the artifacts of intelligent creation, and therefore is clear in its interpretation of the data, at least from a completely objective and scientific point of view.
That's the central problem with attempting to divine evolution from the "fossil record"--as a record it is open to divergent forms of interpretation. Evolutionists would be wise to recall that when relying on such things to illustrate their opinions. A true scientist knows the difference between belief and verifiable fact--a poor one does not. I think that's true on both sides of the issue.
There's not a single evolutionist scientist anywhere who has been able to show how life spontaneously generates from inanimate chemicals--not a single instance where even in controlled experiments where the dice are loaded in ways never found in nature has this ever occurred. To me the entire notion is a scientific throwback almost akin to the dark ages when such things as spontaneous generation were routinely believed factual.
The theory of evolution is nothing less than the belief that life spontaneously generates from non-life. I find it amazing that such things are believed in, but hardly surprising--after all it was once taught in the world's most prestigious universities that the world was flat. JUst because we live today does not mean that popular science is any more accurate or truthful than the flat worlders.
Everything ascribed to evolution screams "intelligence." Evolutionists play word games and call this intelligence "nature" and ascribe its intelligent results to "Darwinism"--without, it seems, even looking with any depth at the implications. The blind are often blind because they choose it, not because they are. When evolutionists stop acting like priests in the temple and start acting like objective scientists who make deductions based on the data, I might start listening to them.
First of all, I know Apple is "working on it" with IBM. That still doesn't mean that Apple will find the chip suitable. "Working on" never means anything--you should certainly know that. Let's see what Apple *announces*--that's a whole lot more important than idle, wishful conjecture, I think. Let's also see IBM finalize the specs and show up with some *final* silicon in hand. Any idea when that will be? I didn't think so.
Secondly, your "blind journalist," the guy who wrote the article that's the center of this thread, is as big a Mac zealot as they come--for journalists--who aren't supposed to be zealots about anything, really. (Something called objectivity is supposed to apply.)
Now, lets finish up with your cpu remarks. I think it's fine and dandy that you like the PPC architecture better. That, however, doesn't do diddly squat for people who choose their OS's and hardware based on its *software compatability.* Most people don't know enough about esoteric cpu design to appreciate what you appreciate. They appreciate tangible things like software they can see on the shelves, and widely available hardware upgrades from 3rd parties--that kind of thing.
Where you're blind, and I think a bit stupid as well, is you simply have no idea what a BOON this would be for Apple--it would thrust them square in the middle of a huge and thriving market in so many obvious ways that it's hard to count them.
Further, *never again* would Apple be at the mercy of a minority cpu maker like Motorola. Let's say that IBM takes initial development of this chip in a direction Apple doesn't like later on--golly, gee, Apple's gone from the frying pan into the fire yet again. AGAIN! Do you think Steve Jobs wants to be saddled with a second Motorola? I don't think so.
Here's a clue for you. IBM's commitment to OS/2 was but a pale shadow of Microsoft's to Windows--that why OS/2 never went anywhere (sorry, I was there and know better--OS/2 didn't crap out because of some laughable nefarious Microsoft plot--it crapped out because IBM quit before they got the ball rolling. THIS is the company Apple wants to tie its cpu fate to?) If I was Jobs I would think long and hard about that. You see, Apple might survive one more major cpu shift--if Apple is forced to do it again in five years because IBM decides it's got better things to do than worry about PPC development for Apple, it's Deja Vu all over again.
OTOH, if Apple goes with, say, Hammer, Apple will never have to worry about switching cpus--ever again--because x86, like it or not, drives the market and is exactly what Apple competes with. No longer would Apple ever have to use pitiful photoshop microbenches to try and convince people its fairly slow present PPCs are fast enough to overcome clock leads of 2GHz or more (leads, not total MHz.) They certainly are not--and every body knows it. That would be a thorn Apple would never have to face again--it would appease investors--it would do all manner of good things for Apple.
As far as appeasing the traditionalist Mac users who irrationally hate everything x86 and can't help it, so steeped are they in propaganda Apple now needs to shed--these are the people Apple needs to eventually dump if the company ever wants anything more than 3% of the world market for PCs. Appeasing the faithful might well keep the red ink away right now--but it does nothing to help the company grow--without growth Apple may as well hang it up.
The last time IBM developed a PPC cpu there was a big hubub about Apple using it--with the usual blind Apple fans thinking that Apple was the reason IBM developed the chip. It's no different this time.
Couple of things...first, the IBM chip is at least a year away from complete development--IBM hasn't yet released all of the specs. Secondly, as I understand it, this particular PPC will have four processor cores on each die with a scalability of eight--meaning it could be run in dual cpu configurations. How this will fit into Apple's plans is beyond guessing at this point. Just because something is called "PPC" is no reason to think it will easily work within the Mac architecture.
IBM's stated goal with development of the cpu is to build and ship its own Linux-powered entry level servers--although IBM has used the word "desktop" as well, I think we should take that with a grain of salt until IBM has some silicon everyone can look at. The hubbub about Apple adoption comes almost exclusively from zealous Apple fans who have no earthly idea what IBM's cpu will be good for because apart from knowing IBM calls it a "PPC" they know little else about it.
Last time it was size, expense, heat and lack of AltiVec which nixed Apple's use of IBM's PPC. What will it be this time? We'll probably know more when IBM finalizes the cpu's specifications.
Personally, if Apple does become bright enough to move to x86, I'd rather they go to AMD's upcoming Hammer, provided Hammer pans out to meet expectations AMD has created around the cpu. It ought to easily outperfom a P4 and it would give Apple 64-bit capability (great for the corporate server market) when and if Apple might want to use it.
A couple of years ago when I found out I could buy a cable modem for $100 and easily hook it up myself, and when I compared the $55 per month for Earthlink and a separate phone line I was paying, to the $45 per month I'd have to pay for an @Home double-IP-address account, going broadband was a very easy decision. Now that Comcast has taken over the service it's been terrific--almost never goes down--and the difference in service is like night and day compared to dial-up. Anyone who has any degree of daily involvement with computer tech and the Internet is going to go broadband. Price certainly isn't a barrier and hasn't been for some time, at least in my area.
...and the fact that you can turn off serial # identification by way of a simple bios option, I don't think it should be forgotten that Intel's initial plan was to hardwire the s# so that it would not be bios configurable. Only after puclic complaint did they rework it to allow bios configurability and make it optional.
As I see it a similar s# scheme, in conjunction with software, would be the only approach that might actually work. It would be difficult indeed to deny your actions if they can be directly correlated to a unique cpu serial number which cannot be defeated. (However, the conjunctive software might well be defeated, but that's another issue.)
On the topic of AMD I think they are as likely to reject such a plan as they rejected it for Athlon the first time Intel introduced it. The only thing in this regard which has a chance is the current cpu s# which is bios configurable, and that I'm not even sure about (too many loopholes there to ensure 100% reliability for transaction security.)
...politely and articulately expressing my disdain for the bill he's co-sponsoring and urging him to drop his support. Not surprisingly, I have yet to receive a reply.
What baffles me is that nowhere in Coble's constituency is there the slightest motivation for this legislation. Therefore, whatever, Coble's motivation, it must come from outside his constituency. In a sense, this is par for the course among politicians who seek to grasp and become a part of issues they do not understand so as to bask in the limelight of national publicity.
However, it is also dangerous when politicians allow their personal ambitions to cloud and color their political agendas. Coble has his Democratic counterparts, to be sure (an old and genteel southern Democrat from South Carolina whose name I cannot quite recall at the moment, who clearly does not distinguish between a ram chip and a disk drive, is also using anti-computer, anti-geek sentiment to propel himself into the national limelight. Ok, now I remember. His name is Hollings.)
Anyway, assuming that these people are merely using these issues as political footballs for their own personal gain is the lighter side of the assumption. We're indeed in trouble if there's more to it than that.
As to the Grubb-Coble faceoff, the issue here is really over the Coble legislation. Should Coble quietly withdraw his support, I fear poor Ms. Grubb would soon go unappreciated.
If I take your meaning correctly, I think this is an absurd sentiment. The question in this case is "Who owns the IP from the wedding, the bride and groom, or the photographer?" (Who was, incidentally, hired, btw.)
Obviously, and certainly, the photographer does not own the IP. Whether you call the photographer a "creator" or "hired labor" seems to me utterly beside the point and a game of semantics. If I work for company A under contract, and I "create" software while fulfilling my contracted duties for which I am paid a salary, company A owns the IP, not me.
It strikes me that "who owns the IP" has nothing whatever to do with "creating."
One last point: we aren't dealing with a painter here who sets up his easel in the park and does an incredible painting. We're dealing with a person who hires out services to make a living, and who was hired by a specific party to cover a specific event, the event itself neither paid for or orchestrated by the photographer. If anyone ought to own the negatives, it's the bride and groom.
This fellow simply made the mistake of being too cavalier with his wedding photography arrangements. He definitely did not think through what he wanted beforehand. If you'll notice, everything "digital" he asked for came after the fact--after the shots were already taken. That was his chief mistake. All photograhers are not going to behave like the one he hired--who was a bit of a traditionalist snob, if you ask me. Most photographers are interested in charging for their time--not the prints (except for a reasonable fee, of course.) This photographer might not have agreed to his terms up front--but certainly another--who needed the work--would have.
And his notion about "IP" is laughable. If anyone owns the "IP" from his wedding--he does. It's his wedding--his friends--and they have all the right in the world to take all the photos they wish at his wedding (as long as he permits.) The photographer, however, has no rights. The photographer's place is akin to a programmer who is hired by a company to write software--when the software is done the company, not the programmer, owns the rights to the software. The programmer is compensated by salary, etc.
My daughter is a photographer by hobby--she actually got a formal degree in graphics (the traditional kind.) She uses both digital and film. She loves digital for its convenience but still uses film to set a mood that, so far, digital can't match. She is a natural for framing the subject artistically even with a digital camera--I could not do as well--I don't have that particular talent. So this photographer objecting to his friends taking their photos after she "set up" the shots seems to tell me she is a mediocre photographer because it's not just the "set up" that counts--the framing of the photo once that's done is critical. What, did this woman expect his friends to buy their pictures of his wedding from her, too?
Sheesh...don't people know that a game for Windows will be written for the D3d or OGL APIs, or both? And that any videocard with decent DX/OGL WIndows drivers should therefore be able to run it? I wonder what they think the purpose of the APIs is in the first place?
First, I would think that forcing companies to dump their source into the public domain would play hell with the security of state-owned computer systems using such software. Every hacker from here to Timbuktu would then have all of the information he needed to successfully hack the systems.
Second--it's difficult to understand the problem. OS's like M$ sells cost money. OS's like Linux cost very little $ to no money at all. Isn't the fact that Open Source is almost "free" incentive enough for companies to adopt it? Why do we need to legislate to try and turn commercial software companies into Open Source companies? What's the point, as you presently don't have to buy the commercial software if you don't want it?
Is this some sort of disguised initiative to try and make all software "free" ultimately? If so, it's definitely doomed to failure because programmers who don't eat aren't much motivated to write code for free.
Slashdot Mirror
Compared to what it costs to create a given security, breaking it costs very little.
The best way to cut down on software piracy, the very best way bar none, is to cut down on the incentive for it. When software makers decide to get really competitive on pricing issues you'll see a big chunk taken out of the piracy market as a result. Especially commercial bootleggers who might see a bright future in investing in the hardware to mass-produce illegitimate copies of software they can retail at $69.95-$499 and higher. Dropping the price in that category drastically would take much of the wind out of the sails of a commercial pirate who has to spend the bucks to setup a successful CD-bootlegging operation. At $19.95 it gets even better, and the pirate has even less incentive.
That's why it's always been difficult for me to believe software piracy is anywhere near as bad as these companies make it out. If it was they'd be lowering prices to drive the bootleggers out of business. Instead of protection against pirates it seems more a case of these companies wanting to build greed-protection mechanisms instead.
Frankly, why should MS care if some hobbyist decides to mod his xBox to run Linux? Linux won't run any of the xBox software MS would receive a royalty for anyway, and in that case selling an xBox to a Linux hobbyist is one more xBox sale MS would not have made otherwise. (Granted I am not such a person so it's possible I've missed something material here.)
We have elections far more often than copyrights go extinct, whether it's copyrights under the old law, the newer law, or the law being debated right now.
Congress can repeal anything it passes. Laws are repealed with regularity.
The American President's chief power under the Constitution is that of Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, but even that power has been hamstrung by Congress. The President is more a figurehead than anything else, and a lightning rod when times get bad.
The President has no control over the Supreme Court, remember. In fact, the Supreme Court, the Congress, and the President are the three branches of government in the US. If the Supreme Court upholds the Constitutionality of the of the copyright law it will only be because it finds no Constitutional grounds to prevent Congress from enacting such a law.
The President has no power to pass laws himself. Legislation requires a majority in both Houses of Congress. Even if the President vetos a law, Congress may override that veto.
Does the US Federal government have too much control and power over the lives of its citizens? I would say yes. However, it must never be forgotten who put the politicians in office who have enacted these laws--voting citizens, and those citizens who did not vote.
The crisis that bodies like the Supreme Court always face in a Democracy is in deciding which shall prevail, the will of the people, or the Constitution of the United States. Even in an American Democracy, the two are not always the same.
The P4 already enjoys really bad prediction penalties, which can only be offset by the highest memory bandwidth possible, so I don't know that L3 would actually help very much. Aside from that the added expense will keep this from happening any time soon in the main consumer market where every company is Scrooge.
HyperThreading to me is the biggest con since MMX and AGP x (?) for 3D cards. It *requires* multithreaded applications to even work, the HyperT cpus eat more voltage and run hotter than cpus without it and as a result require different motherboard support than the slower-than 3.06GHz nonHyperT P4s. This thing won't even be as useful to a desktop user as a dual cpu Mac currently is for your average Mac user. In fact, if you need to run multithreaded applications (of which there are almost none in the standard software marketplace) you are *far* better off going dual-cpu SMP, and the performance difference would eat HyperT alive. What a con job this is turning out to be.
Last, I wouldn't categorize HyperTransport, as "cheap, consumer crap," exactly...;) I think it's amazing to see it working down to the consumer desktop--High-end server systems have enjoyed its benefit for years.
Actually, the P4 3.06GHz cpus Intel is preparing to release run a fair bit hotter than the latest Athlon XP stepping from AMD--24/2600 +'s. INteresting to see a P4 actually displacing more heat than an Athlon.
For starters the Mac market worldwide commands less than a 3% slice of the market--many of the Macs in use today are older Macs (witness the extremes Apple's going to to entice, and then eventually force, its user base to go OSX or else move to another platform.)
On top of that you've all the attendant support and software issues that go with supplying support for this kind of service. When you have better than 90% of the market buying your products from a basically standardized Windows market, it's not worth it for these companies to gear up for Mac support with its attendant issues for a very small slice of an already very small segment of market share.
It's amusing to hear Mac users talk about "conspiracy" lurking behind every door when the fact is they just haven't faced the facts of what comes with being a member of a very small market. You often have to wait months or years to get software and services provided the much larger Windows market, and sometimes you don't get them at all. This situation is by no means unique or unprecedented. It would be nice if some of these erstwhile critics undertook the expense of doing something like this for the Mac themselves for a change. Easy it is to crticize, much more difficult to actually do something.
I read over the Armadillo site a good while ago, and I confess the basics of the ultimate goal seem a bit elusive. The only picture of the manned module I saw resembled a section of sewer pipe. I know the ultimate goal is to get a human payload up 50 miles or so, but...what then? Does a chute pop open and the thing simply return to earth, the passengers not even glimpsing space because of the lack of a porthole? If so it seems curious indeed as the passengers might get the same "experience" hopping into one of NASA's centrifugal G-force trainers, and be a whole lot safer for it, besides.
Yep, the sad thing is that the world is full of people like this, who think the only thing "safe" has a government "USDA" stamp of approval on it. Airplanes fall out of the sky daily (well, sometimes) and this guy's scared to death of a chair with toy rocket motors on it that lifts a single human being 15 feet off the ground. I've known people just like that, unfortunately, who can't see the forest for the tree.
The P4 was an initial disaster for Intel--the cpu hardly anybody wanted. But it wasn't just because of its low performance and IPC, it was because of its dependence on Rdram in the beginning. A mistake which Intel has since remedied.
The fact is that for the past three years Intel has done a lot more wrong than right, stretching all the way back to the infamous re-called 1.13GHz P3--it's the first time in my memory that a shipping cpu was ever recalled by the manufacturer.
In fact, it wasn't until the Northwood P4 2.53GHz variant that Intel started doing some things "right"--and that's been for only a few months now. Basically, It took Intel until Northwood to catch AMD's Athlon in performance, and the clock started ticking in 1999--so it took Intel the better part of 3 years to catch the Athlon.
Everybody knew that the low IPC in the P4 would be made up for, eventually, in sheer clock speed--that wasn't debated as far as I can recall. What hardly anyone suspected was that AMD would be able to extend the Athlon architecture so well against Intel's Pentium architectures. Indeed, with a new stepping of the Thoroughbred core which started shipping only last week, The Athlon holds its own against the P4 and will do so up to the 3GHz level and maybe beyond. After that comes Hammer, which supposedly will start shipping at close to the MHz range where Athlon XP leaves off, ~2.4GHz. Only thing is that Hammer will be at least 25% faster than Athlon XP clock for clock, which makes it considerably faster than NOrthwood clock for clock, yet it will have no trouble scaling up in MHz.
OK, it's Sunday night and I'm rambling so good night all.
"The Internet will ultimately be more about information than transactions."
Heh...I don't think this is much of a prediction as this has always constituted the Internet as I've known it.
The problem with your position relative to the Creationist, and his position relative yours, is that neither of you can prove the negative concerning the other's opinion. Therefore, both opinions are necessarily constrained to the area of faith as opposed to scientifically verifiable fact.
Of the two doctrines, I tend to to think evolution is the more dangerous because it pretends to be something it is not--it pretends to be science when in fact it is naught but a philosophy. Creationism on the other hand makes no bones about the fact it thinks the earth and the systems upon it are but the artifacts of intelligent creation, and therefore is clear in its interpretation of the data, at least from a completely objective and scientific point of view.
That's the central problem with attempting to divine evolution from the "fossil record"--as a record it is open to divergent forms of interpretation. Evolutionists would be wise to recall that when relying on such things to illustrate their opinions. A true scientist knows the difference between belief and verifiable fact--a poor one does not. I think that's true on both sides of the issue.
There's not a single evolutionist scientist anywhere who has been able to show how life spontaneously generates from inanimate chemicals--not a single instance where even in controlled experiments where the dice are loaded in ways never found in nature has this ever occurred. To me the entire notion is a scientific throwback almost akin to the dark ages when such things as spontaneous generation were routinely believed factual.
The theory of evolution is nothing less than the belief that life spontaneously generates from non-life. I find it amazing that such things are believed in, but hardly surprising--after all it was once taught in the world's most prestigious universities that the world was flat. JUst because we live today does not mean that popular science is any more accurate or truthful than the flat worlders.
Everything ascribed to evolution screams "intelligence." Evolutionists play word games and call this intelligence "nature" and ascribe its intelligent results to "Darwinism"--without, it seems, even looking with any depth at the implications. The blind are often blind because they choose it, not because they are. When evolutionists stop acting like priests in the temple and start acting like objective scientists who make deductions based on the data, I might start listening to them.
First of all, I know Apple is "working on it" with IBM. That still doesn't mean that Apple will find the chip suitable. "Working on" never means anything--you should certainly know that. Let's see what Apple *announces*--that's a whole lot more important than idle, wishful conjecture, I think. Let's also see IBM finalize the specs and show up with some *final* silicon in hand. Any idea when that will be? I didn't think so.
Secondly, your "blind journalist," the guy who wrote the article that's the center of this thread, is as big a Mac zealot as they come--for journalists--who aren't supposed to be zealots about anything, really. (Something called objectivity is supposed to apply.)
Now, lets finish up with your cpu remarks. I think it's fine and dandy that you like the PPC architecture better. That, however, doesn't do diddly squat for people who choose their OS's and hardware based on its *software compatability.* Most people don't know enough about esoteric cpu design to appreciate what you appreciate. They appreciate tangible things like software they can see on the shelves, and widely available hardware upgrades from 3rd parties--that kind of thing.
Where you're blind, and I think a bit stupid as well, is you simply have no idea what a BOON this would be for Apple--it would thrust them square in the middle of a huge and thriving market in so many obvious ways that it's hard to count them.
Further, *never again* would Apple be at the mercy of a minority cpu maker like Motorola. Let's say that IBM takes initial development of this chip in a direction Apple doesn't like later on--golly, gee, Apple's gone from the frying pan into the fire yet again. AGAIN! Do you think Steve Jobs wants to be saddled with a second Motorola? I don't think so.
Here's a clue for you. IBM's commitment to OS/2 was but a pale shadow of Microsoft's to Windows--that why OS/2 never went anywhere (sorry, I was there and know better--OS/2 didn't crap out because of some laughable nefarious Microsoft plot--it crapped out because IBM quit before they got the ball rolling. THIS is the company Apple wants to tie its cpu fate to?) If I was Jobs I would think long and hard about that. You see, Apple might survive one more major cpu shift--if Apple is forced to do it again in five years because IBM decides it's got better things to do than worry about PPC development for Apple, it's Deja Vu all over again.
OTOH, if Apple goes with, say, Hammer, Apple will never have to worry about switching cpus--ever again--because x86, like it or not, drives the market and is exactly what Apple competes with. No longer would Apple ever have to use pitiful photoshop microbenches to try and convince people its fairly slow present PPCs are fast enough to overcome clock leads of 2GHz or more (leads, not total MHz.) They certainly are not--and every body knows it. That would be a thorn Apple would never have to face again--it would appease investors--it would do all manner of good things for Apple.
As far as appeasing the traditionalist Mac users who irrationally hate everything x86 and can't help it, so steeped are they in propaganda Apple now needs to shed--these are the people Apple needs to eventually dump if the company ever wants anything more than 3% of the world market for PCs. Appeasing the faithful might well keep the red ink away right now--but it does nothing to help the company grow--without growth Apple may as well hang it up.
The last time IBM developed a PPC cpu there was a big hubub about Apple using it--with the usual blind Apple fans thinking that Apple was the reason IBM developed the chip. It's no different this time.
Couple of things...first, the IBM chip is at least a year away from complete development--IBM hasn't yet released all of the specs. Secondly, as I understand it, this particular PPC will have four processor cores on each die with a scalability of eight--meaning it could be run in dual cpu configurations. How this will fit into Apple's plans is beyond guessing at this point. Just because something is called "PPC" is no reason to think it will easily work within the Mac architecture.
IBM's stated goal with development of the cpu is to build and ship its own Linux-powered entry level servers--although IBM has used the word "desktop" as well, I think we should take that with a grain of salt until IBM has some silicon everyone can look at. The hubbub about Apple adoption comes almost exclusively from zealous Apple fans who have no earthly idea what IBM's cpu will be good for because apart from knowing IBM calls it a "PPC" they know little else about it.
Last time it was size, expense, heat and lack of AltiVec which nixed Apple's use of IBM's PPC. What will it be this time? We'll probably know more when IBM finalizes the cpu's specifications.
Personally, if Apple does become bright enough to move to x86, I'd rather they go to AMD's upcoming Hammer, provided Hammer pans out to meet expectations AMD has created around the cpu. It ought to easily outperfom a P4 and it would give Apple 64-bit capability (great for the corporate server market) when and if Apple might want to use it.
A couple of years ago when I found out I could buy a cable modem for $100 and easily hook it up myself, and when I compared the $55 per month for Earthlink and a separate phone line I was paying, to the $45 per month I'd have to pay for an @Home double-IP-address account, going broadband was a very easy decision. Now that Comcast has taken over the service it's been terrific--almost never goes down--and the difference in service is like night and day compared to dial-up. Anyone who has any degree of daily involvement with computer tech and the Internet is going to go broadband. Price certainly isn't a barrier and hasn't been for some time, at least in my area.
That's "everyone *who* posted"....sheesh, I wish people would get that right..
...it's not a hard grammar rule at all.
"that" is for things...
"who/whom/whose" is for persons/people
...and the fact that you can turn off serial # identification by way of a simple bios option, I don't think it should be forgotten that Intel's initial plan was to hardwire the s# so that it would not be bios configurable. Only after puclic complaint did they rework it to allow bios configurability and make it optional.
As I see it a similar s# scheme, in conjunction with software, would be the only approach that might actually work. It would be difficult indeed to deny your actions if they can be directly correlated to a unique cpu serial number which cannot be defeated. (However, the conjunctive software might well be defeated, but that's another issue.)
On the topic of AMD I think they are as likely to reject such a plan as they rejected it for Athlon the first time Intel introduced it. The only thing in this regard which has a chance is the current cpu s# which is bios configurable, and that I'm not even sure about (too many loopholes there to ensure 100% reliability for transaction security.)
...politely and articulately expressing my disdain for the bill he's co-sponsoring and urging him to drop his support. Not surprisingly, I have yet to receive a reply.
What baffles me is that nowhere in Coble's constituency is there the slightest motivation for this legislation. Therefore, whatever, Coble's motivation, it must come from outside his constituency. In a sense, this is par for the course among politicians who seek to grasp and become a part of issues they do not understand so as to bask in the limelight of national publicity.
However, it is also dangerous when politicians allow their personal ambitions to cloud and color their political agendas. Coble has his Democratic counterparts, to be sure (an old and genteel southern Democrat from South Carolina whose name I cannot quite recall at the moment, who clearly does not distinguish between a ram chip and a disk drive, is also using anti-computer, anti-geek sentiment to propel himself into the national limelight. Ok, now I remember. His name is Hollings.)
Anyway, assuming that these people are merely using these issues as political footballs for their own personal gain is the lighter side of the assumption. We're indeed in trouble if there's more to it than that.
As to the Grubb-Coble faceoff, the issue here is really over the Coble legislation. Should Coble quietly withdraw his support, I fear poor Ms. Grubb would soon go unappreciated.
Here's the revised link: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5489
Who ever thought that Microsoft's competitors had anyone's good in mind apart from their own????....;)
Answer to all three: Don't use the Internet for piracy.
If I take your meaning correctly, I think this is an absurd sentiment. The question in this case is "Who owns the IP from the wedding, the bride and groom, or the photographer?" (Who was, incidentally, hired, btw.)
Obviously, and certainly, the photographer does not own the IP. Whether you call the photographer a "creator" or "hired labor" seems to me utterly beside the point and a game of semantics. If I work for company A under contract, and I "create" software while fulfilling my contracted duties for which I am paid a salary, company A owns the IP, not me.
It strikes me that "who owns the IP" has nothing whatever to do with "creating."
One last point: we aren't dealing with a painter here who sets up his easel in the park and does an incredible painting. We're dealing with a person who hires out services to make a living, and who was hired by a specific party to cover a specific event, the event itself neither paid for or orchestrated by the photographer. If anyone ought to own the negatives, it's the bride and groom.
This fellow simply made the mistake of being too cavalier with his wedding photography arrangements. He definitely did not think through what he wanted beforehand. If you'll notice, everything "digital" he asked for came after the fact--after the shots were already taken. That was his chief mistake. All photograhers are not going to behave like the one he hired--who was a bit of a traditionalist snob, if you ask me. Most photographers are interested in charging for their time--not the prints (except for a reasonable fee, of course.) This photographer might not have agreed to his terms up front--but certainly another--who needed the work--would have.
And his notion about "IP" is laughable. If anyone owns the "IP" from his wedding--he does. It's his wedding--his friends--and they have all the right in the world to take all the photos they wish at his wedding (as long as he permits.) The photographer, however, has no rights. The photographer's place is akin to a programmer who is hired by a company to write software--when the software is done the company, not the programmer, owns the rights to the software. The programmer is compensated by salary, etc.
My daughter is a photographer by hobby--she actually got a formal degree in graphics (the traditional kind.) She uses both digital and film. She loves digital for its convenience but still uses film to set a mood that, so far, digital can't match. She is a natural for framing the subject artistically even with a digital camera--I could not do as well--I don't have that particular talent. So this photographer objecting to his friends taking their photos after she "set up" the shots seems to tell me she is a mediocre photographer because it's not just the "set up" that counts--the framing of the photo once that's done is critical. What, did this woman expect his friends to buy their pictures of his wedding from her, too?
What a disappointment. I hate Q3--and the sort of gameplay that even looks like Q3--which this does in spades. What a waste of gorgeous scenery.
Sheesh...don't people know that a game for Windows will be written for the D3d or OGL APIs, or both? And that any videocard with decent DX/OGL WIndows drivers should therefore be able to run it? I wonder what they think the purpose of the APIs is in the first place?
First, I would think that forcing companies to dump their source into the public domain would play hell with the security of state-owned computer systems using such software. Every hacker from here to Timbuktu would then have all of the information he needed to successfully hack the systems.
Second--it's difficult to understand the problem. OS's like M$ sells cost money. OS's like Linux cost very little $ to no money at all. Isn't the fact that Open Source is almost "free" incentive enough for companies to adopt it? Why do we need to legislate to try and turn commercial software companies into Open Source companies? What's the point, as you presently don't have to buy the commercial software if you don't want it?
Is this some sort of disguised initiative to try and make all software "free" ultimately? If so, it's definitely doomed to failure because programmers who don't eat aren't much motivated to write code for free.