[5] Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth; and there were peals of thunder, voices, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake. [6] Now the seven angels who had the seven trumpets made ready to blow them. [7] The first angel blew his trumpet, and there followed hail and fire, mixed with blood, which fell on the earth; and a third of the earth was burnt up, and a third of the trees were burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up. [8] The second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea; [9] and a third of the sea became blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed. [10] The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the fountains of water. [11] The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many men died of the water, because it was made bitter.
Now, the whole chapter's effects sound sort of like an asteroid impact, but interestingly the effect of Wormwood does not particularly sound like an asteroid. Some have interpreted it as a futuristic war, with [5] bombs, [7] napalm, [8] nukes, and [10] biological/chemical weapons. In any case, Wormwood has precedent as the falling star of the apocalypse. This unfortunately means that we can't name the thing Wormwood unless that probability is revised to 1-\epsilon.
>>But copyright is more necessary to protect artists that produce digital goods (musicians, renderers, etc). If they had no protection, people would have very little to pay them anything.
Which is arguing from the principle of "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." When I buy something, I pay to get what I want at the best price I can; that is capitalism. I don't (in general) buy things because the person who made them needs to be subsidized. If we all followed that logic, either by mass delusion or government fiat, the economy would colapse. (After all, the people who sell penis pills over the internet need to eat just as the farmers and recording artists do! Think of the mimes!)
First, I am not against every form of communism, only some forms of it. Systems in which people can pool their resources for a project which benefits the group are perfectly fine by me. A music tax for the benefit of artists would be taking things too far, and this is what I referred to when I said "on this side of communism."
Price protection is not the same as communism. The goal of government protections is to ensure that a good or service which is beneficial to society can be produced when the market would otherwise not support it, and to ensure that the producers receive a reasonable proportion of the benefit. These are most often for common-goods systems or for over-elastic markets.
In common-goods systems, a single person's contribution of x returns more than x benifit to the society, but less than x to the individual. The equilibrium is therefore zero, which is sub-optimal. I hope that some day, copyright can be replaced by a common-goods system, because such systems tend to be better (in terms of efficiency) than elastic-market systems. Perhaps a system in which users pay a fee to have fast-downloading privelages from a server network would suffice, although with the bandwidth glut, this system could be unstable without some sort of contract.
In elastic-market systems, the market is glutted with suppliers, whose short-term best strategy is to keep supplying even if they are not turning a (sufficient) profit. Price protections are designed to protect those performing an important service (i.e., one which the market values highly), such as labor, so that they get a reasonable percentage of the utility which they bring to the market. If, for instance, the labor market were not protected (by minimum wage), we could easily see the return of de-facto slavery, as was present in the Great Depression. And I maintain that if the "content industries" [cringe] were not protected by some form of copyright, whether from the government or contracts with the consumer, Joe Sixpack with his CD burner and broadband connection would glut the market to the point where neither record labels nor artists could survive.
And don't even try to spring Nozickian logic on me. Nozick's theories overzealously protect fictitious rights, and benefit only those who have far too much power already.
I can't argue with your point on concerts; my information was from an old article in some magazine; I don't have time to recheck it, so I'll cede that point. If it is as you say, something should definitely be done about it, but I doubt that something is total deregulation. Cutting out the middlemen would be a good idea; perhaps this can be done with some sort of common-goods system.
No, I have not shifted my ground. My view is that for now (ie, until someone creates and deploys a viable alternative), copyright and patents are a necessary evil (evil, primarily, because they are prone to abuse).
I like patents less than I like copyrights. Only a few industries really depend on them anymore. Probably the most famous instance is the pharmaceuticals industry. Only a huge company has the resources to not only develop drugs, but to push them through trials and get government approval. Once they do that, if anyone can make the drug cheaply, the pharmaceutical company that developed it will be at a strong competitive disadvantage: it will have the same tech as the other companies, but be out in R&D.
As for copyright, this is only somewhat helpful in the printing industry, because few would photocopy a whole book; however, a publishing house could do it, which would hurt the author's profits. But copyright is more necessary to protect artists that produce digital goods (musicians, renderers, etc). If they had no protection, people would have very little to pay them anything. There's still concerts, but concerts often make little money once all the costs are taken out, and instead serve to promote the band (so that it can sell CDs).
"Digital artists would be screwed" = "There would be far less digital art." You can't pay a recording studio to get your music to CD, if you won't be able to sell those CDs. I know several bands which occasionally make a CD at the local studio; only by selling them do they recoup their costs. Some people would still buy CDs; some people would still create, but the recordings would be poorer; there would be much less of a niche for professional songwriters (many of whom are quite good, despite what the RIAA would have you think).
Software makers would be in similar trouble. Probably more trouble. You can't afford to pay programmers if just anyone can take a copy of what you create. Companies like RedHat can survive by selling services (such as tech support), but many others could not. Gaming companies in particular: they would all have to charge a fee like the MMORPGS do, or something like that.
Software companies and recording studios are paid to produce data. Removing copyright would cause a vast oversupply of precisely this kind of data, driving prices through the floor and ruining the market. Some markets just need this sort of protection. Farming does, as does the labor market (minimum wage). The world would not end if copyright wend away. But several industries, which in my opinion are worthwhile, would be crippled unless some sort of alternative were available.
Mike
--- Heh. No, I'm not the sysadmin. I don't plant landmines anyway. My specialty is in math and cs, which may turn out to be crypto and security protocols, and I think that having . in your path is a bad idea, especially if it's before/bin.
You can do this in/tmp or something. It's not the cleverest landmine, and it doesn't work if . is at the end (you'd have to make it cta or something then).
If I have access to their system (someone occasionally leaves an ssh open on my box), I prefer adding to their.bash_profile (or the like) a personalized message which removes itself after use. This generally uses a perl command like
Most of the innovation in fashion is done by people who sell designer clothes. They stand to profit a good deal by this, perhaps even more if others copy them.
Academics have tenure, they don't get any money for their ideas (unless they get patented, IP, etc), but rather for their teaching.
So yes, academics will still invent stuff, but that rather narrows the field, no? And digital artists would largely be screwed if copyright went away.
This should probably be: "Know someone with . before/bin in their path?"
Yes, I know this, and that makes this landmine largely ineffective. Of course, you can still make a file called "cta" or something, and hope the person makes a typo.
And yeah, putting . at the beginning of your path is pretty stupid.
* But it's the law.
* I hope the RIAA gets you.
* Then I suppose an idiot like you won't mind if I take your stuff!
The true problem with the "IP is dying" claim is not actually any of these. The problem is that while IP and copyright are clearly outdated, they serve a necessary function in our economy, that is, giving people an incentive to create art/useful programs.
While copyright/IP are increasingly inefficient means to accomplish this, there is no currently available substitute. Sure, there are street performer protocols, OSS funds, and other ways of earning a profit for freely distributable media, but ultimately, this is an extremely difficult problem in the free-market economy.
I, and anyone else on/., can certainly suggest plenty of protocols or economic systems to accomplish this, but none of them are particularly compelling and most of them probably wouldn't work at all.
Until there is a viable alternative on this side of communism, IP cannot be allowed to die.
If I buy a copy-protected CD that won't play on my Mac, can I download the songs in good conscience?
Certainly in good conscience. You've paid the label, you've supported the artist, you're allowed to play the song wherever; ethically, you have no reason not to download it.
And probably legally, too. The jury is still out on that, it'd be part of the fair-use laws. But I don't think the RIAA would sue you. Mostly they go after uploaders anyway, but they risk losing big if they force the courts to clarify whether this is legal or not.
Uh, actually this is irrefutable proof. It will miss a lot of songs, but it is virtually guaranteed to not give false positives.
No. If two people rip+encode the same song with, say, the default settings in iTunes, with the same model of drive, they're pretty likely to get the same mp3, and hence the same MD5sum.
The MP3 output should vary with the drive, ID3 tags, ripper, and MP3 encoder+settings, but many people use the same rippers and encoders, and keep default settings and ID3 tags. The chances are not too low that she did that.
Of course, we all know she's still guilty. The songs have "ripped by" tags set to some random guy on KaZaA, so she didn't rip them anyway. And with 900 songs, the odds do get pretty strong against this sort of luck...
go back to your crypto text looking for words like 'collision' and 'birthday attack'.
A birthday attack allows you to produce two files with the same hash in about the square-root of the normal expected time, if you have a lot (order of exabytes at least in the case of MD5) of memory.
However, they are comparing the sig to a *specific* rip on KaZaA. Even if she were trying to make a rip that matched something's MD5, this could only increase her speed by order of (#files on KaZaA), which brings it down to maybe 2^100 effort. In fact, she is presumably not trying, so her odds against with ~1000 files of even having one match are ~2^90:1.
Making another file with the same sig is easy, we did it as an assignment at school with text files instead of mp3s, but the point holds.
I very much doubt that you could do this if "sig" means "md5sum". If you mean a CRC (or other non-cryptographic checksum), or CBC-residue (where you know the key), yes, this is easy. If you mean a CRYPT residue (like UNIX uses), this is doable if you have a couple CPU-months to spare.
But I defy you, or anyone else, to show two different strings with the same MD5sum. While progress has been made in cryptanalyzing MD5, it is not yet broken (ie, nobody has been able to reduce the time required to break it from brute-force).
It was estimated in 1994 that a $10M machine could find a collision in MD5 in 24 days. Today this would probably be less than a million... but the only people likely to have this are not about to jump up and admit it.
I hope it forces them to make better games...
on
Razor Blade Games?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
...rather than games with better graphics.
Something that irks me about recent games is that many of them are unoriginal, have worse-than-average gameplay... and a huge graphics budget.
For instance, I find that WarCraft III gameplay is much, much worse than StarCraft (could just be my low-end machine with a crappy graphics card), and the heros and other additions don't make the game much more interesting.
Similarly, Diablo II was probably the most unoriginal RPG I've ever played; the graphics are excellent but the plot is thin and the gameplay is mediocre. (It's damn addictive, tho). Compare the Baldur's Gate series, which has worse graphics and decent gameplay, and a better plot.
Anyone here ever played Liero? An ancient, free 2d Worms-but-realtime shooter? That game was more fun than many of the FPS games I've played. The graphics were shit, but the controls were responsive, the weapons were balanced (and numerous, and MODable), and the modes were fun.
I think this article nicely pinpoints the problem with many games today. The graphics teams soak up all the budget, and the guys that write an actual plot into the game, balance it, and adjust the gameplay don't do anything. They add in an assload of really cool spells/weapons/whatever, but then nobody actually uses most of them because a few of them are overpowered.
Maybe I'm just like those oldtimers ranting for a return to the "good old" days, but I'd like to see creative new FPS, one with nontrivial tactics (haven't seen one since Counterstrike), and for once a well thought-out TBS game. Alpha Centauri was close, but like many games, they put in too many features. The features ended up unbalanced, buggy, and their interactions were poorly thought-out. As a result, play didn't scale well and the AI sucked.
The last benchmarks Apple put out were on an platform that isn't shipping, on a OS that won't ship when the platform ships,
Hence they are preliminary. And the OS doesn't matter much for these specific benchmarks. Only the scheduler, TLB miss handler/pager and idle tasks really matter at all. Idle tasks would be minimal in any case; the schedulers are probably the same in both systems; and the TLB miss handler and pager wouldn't be involved on much on something which uses so little memory as these SPECs.
using optimizations that can't be used for normal computing,
No, but they (or similar optimizations) can be (and are) used for games, photoshop filters, rendering libraries, and other CPU-eaters.
with a compiler that has been specifically tweeked to provided even more performance
No, they just added the timing specs and stuff so that it could optimize for the G5 at all. They didn't add any better optimization than it does for any other platform.
VS a slower than the fastest currently shipping CPU on a middle of the road motherboard/chipset,
It was Dell's flagship at the time.
with performance enhancing settings that are normally on, turned off,
That allegation turned out to be just plain false. They did not turn of SSE2, and they ran the tests both with and without hyperthreading and reported the fastest ones.
with an OS that doesn't ship with that system, placed out of the box onto that system using a generic compiler with minimal optimizations
It was the same compiler with the same optimizations, up to platform-specific stuff. If you call this cheating, fine, but I think that until the decent compilers (eg MetroWerks) have optimization settings for G5, this is the about fairest they can do.
which altogether costs less.
True. Apple's systems are fricking expensive.
Apple marketing lies through its teeth.
Everyone's marketing lies through their teeth. They benchmarks may not have been completely fair, but I'm willing to believe that they are close to fair, which is better than I could say for Apple's old "PhotoShop suite" benchmarks.
Compare their posted benchmarks of their own systems vs competitors benchmarks of their own systems and the new still not shipping Apple systems are slower than systems that have been shipping for months.
See above comment about preliminary benchmarks and no good compilers.
Apple makes a nice OS and nice computer boxes, but they just aren't as fast as comparably priced Intel/AMD boxes. That's just the way it is.
Some other slashdotter did a price comparison on this. He compared it against a home-built dual Opteron system with as close as possible to the same parts.
If you include their case (which would not be cheap on a PC either), hard drive, graphics card, DVD burner, RAM, and some of the other features of their chipsets, it turns out to be pretty comparable. Slightly (~20%) more expensive than if you were to build a comparable system from parts, but then systems custom-built from parts are cheaper anyway (because you are doing the labor). Plus, the Mac comes with an OS.
Given that the platform hasn't even shipped yet... I don't care whether *current* compilers support it better. Such a benchmark is *preliminary* by its very nature, and hobbling both machines to the same bad compiler is much better than extrapolating "effective" scores for "if we had a better compiler, it would look like..."
The G5 may in fact be good, but Apple is still certainly lying on their benchmarks.
Benchmarks are pretty much lies anyway. But I don't think they are lying more than anyone else.
There is no such thing as a 'standard SPEC' benchmark', as Apple is free to choose whatever compilers they want with whatever compilation settings they way.
No, but SPEC is a standard benchmark, as opposed to Apple's custom benchmarks of G4-optimized PhotoShop filters.
With the last round of Apple benchmarks a couple months ago it was shown that they seriously crippled the compiler on the PC side, thus tilting the benchmarks in their favor.
No. It was alleged that they seriously crippled the compiler. Specifically, that they disabled SSE2 and hyperthreading. The allegation that they disabled SSE2 was just plain false. And according to Apple, they did the tests with and without hyperthreading, and without HT their competition was faster, so they kept that one. And while they may spin things or doctor compilation settings, they don't straight-out lie about their procedures.
I have every reason to believe they did the same thing with these benchmarks.
I have every reason to believe that these are the same benchmarks.
Do they mean, won't initially run with G5 optimizations? Because the G5 is supposed to be binary-compatible with the G4... or does it check your proc version and then refuse to run?
First, I think this *IS* the same story as last time around, and the Reg is just slow on the uptake. So I'll be referring to the details of that.
Second, the benchmarks were made with GCC. GCC is, if anything, better on x86 platforms and gives the Xeon the advantage. It's not nearly as good as a MetroWerks or Intel compiler, which Dell uses to benchmark their systems.
See, Apple doesn't have a decent optimizing compiler yet. MW CodeWarrior will probably be good, but it's not modified yet for the G5. Apple has added in the G5 timings and stuff to GCC, but GCC's optimizations suck (getting better in GCC3.3, but still not great). High-end apps/games specifically for the G5 will be compiled with a good compiler, which should be out fairly soon (a month or two tops).
So what they want right now, and what is most fair right now, is a comparison between the two processors, not compilers. This means that they have to use the *same* compilers on both systems. So they used GCC. Expect their SPECs to rise as they get better compilers for the Mac.
There should be some bias, but not much; mostly it should be interference from the scheduler. These apps don't use much memory, so TLB misses and stuff shouldn't matter.
Windows never really has been that efficient in a dual processor situation.
IIRC they ran Linux on the Xeons. At least, they did in the original tests. Are these actually new?
... because this time they have a CPU that doesn't suck?
Seriously, we all knew that the later G3s and all the G4s were behind the competition for all but a few very specialized operations. That's why Apple dumped Motorola, and is now working with IBM.
The G5 doesn't suck. And for the first time, its FSB and memory bandwidth don't suck either. Apple's using standard SPEC benchmarks, and it looks from their writeup like they were fair. So give it a rest.
Slashdot Mirror
[see below]
Now, the whole chapter's effects sound sort of like an asteroid impact, but interestingly the effect of Wormwood does not particularly sound like an asteroid. Some have interpreted it as a futuristic war, with [5] bombs, [7] napalm, [8] nukes, and [10] biological/chemical weapons. In any case, Wormwood has precedent as the falling star of the apocalypse. This unfortunately means that we can't name the thing Wormwood unless that probability is revised to 1-\epsilon.
Vimes: Does this mean I'm going to die?
Death: POSSIBLY.
Vimes: You turn up when people are possibly going to die?
Death: OH YES. IT'S QUITE THE NEW THING. IT'S BECAUSE OF THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE.
Vimes: What's that?
Death: I'M NOT SURE.
>>But copyright is more necessary to protect artists that produce digital goods (musicians, renderers, etc). If they had no protection, people would have very little to pay them anything.
Which is arguing from the principle of "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." When I buy something, I pay to get what I want at the best price I can; that is capitalism. I don't (in general) buy things because the person who made them needs to be subsidized. If we all followed that logic, either by mass delusion or government fiat, the economy would colapse. (After all, the people who sell penis pills over the internet need to eat just as the farmers and recording artists do! Think of the mimes!)
First, I am not against every form of communism, only some forms of it. Systems in which people can pool their resources for a project which benefits the group are perfectly fine by me. A music tax for the benefit of artists would be taking things too far, and this is what I referred to when I said "on this side of communism."
Price protection is not the same as communism. The goal of government protections is to ensure that a good or service which is beneficial to society can be produced when the market would otherwise not support it, and to ensure that the producers receive a reasonable proportion of the benefit. These are most often for common-goods systems or for over-elastic markets.
In common-goods systems, a single person's contribution of x returns more than x benifit to the society, but less than x to the individual. The equilibrium is therefore zero, which is sub-optimal. I hope that some day, copyright can be replaced by a common-goods system, because such systems tend to be better (in terms of efficiency) than elastic-market systems. Perhaps a system in which users pay a fee to have fast-downloading privelages from a server network would suffice, although with the bandwidth glut, this system could be unstable without some sort of contract.
In elastic-market systems, the market is glutted with suppliers, whose short-term best strategy is to keep supplying even if they are not turning a (sufficient) profit. Price protections are designed to protect those performing an important service (i.e., one which the market values highly), such as labor, so that they get a reasonable percentage of the utility which they bring to the market. If, for instance, the labor market were not protected (by minimum wage), we could easily see the return of de-facto slavery, as was present in the Great Depression. And I maintain that if the "content industries" [cringe] were not protected by some form of copyright, whether from the government or contracts with the consumer, Joe Sixpack with his CD burner and broadband connection would glut the market to the point where neither record labels nor artists could survive.
And don't even try to spring Nozickian logic on me. Nozick's theories overzealously protect fictitious rights, and benefit only those who have far too much power already.
I can't argue with your point on concerts; my information was from an old article in some magazine; I don't have time to recheck it, so I'll cede that point. If it is as you say, something should definitely be done about it, but I doubt that something is total deregulation. Cutting out the middlemen would be a good idea; perhaps this can be done with some sort of common-goods system.
Did you have to buy their laptop? NO
Do they force you to sign the license or click accept? NO
Can you return the laptop, get money back and buy another product? YES
And really, how problematic is this license really, to me it looks like a ordinary Windows EULA.
The problem here is that Dell requires him to certify that he has read, and agrees to, a license that he cannot possibly have read.
In other words, they are requiring him to
1) lie, and
2) agree to a license that he has not read.
The EULA is entirely unenforceable for this reason, but it is still technically illegal to click through the license.
Do they force him to click through? No. But they force anyone who wants a Dell laptop to illegally click through.
This barcode tatoo on the back of my neck is going to seem So Dated.
Yeah, it seems everyone's getting one on their forehead or right hand these days.
You, sir, will be reported to the American Association Against Acronym Abuse.
No, I have not shifted my ground. My view is that for now (ie, until someone creates and deploys a viable alternative), copyright and patents are a necessary evil (evil, primarily, because they are prone to abuse).
/bin.
I like patents less than I like copyrights. Only a few industries really depend on them anymore. Probably the most famous instance is the pharmaceuticals industry. Only a huge company has the resources to not only develop drugs, but to push them through trials and get government approval. Once they do that, if anyone can make the drug cheaply, the pharmaceutical company that developed it will be at a strong competitive disadvantage: it will have the same tech as the other companies, but be out in R&D.
As for copyright, this is only somewhat helpful in the printing industry, because few would photocopy a whole book; however, a publishing house could do it, which would hurt the author's profits. But copyright is more necessary to protect artists that produce digital goods (musicians, renderers, etc). If they had no protection, people would have very little to pay them anything. There's still concerts, but concerts often make little money once all the costs are taken out, and instead serve to promote the band (so that it can sell CDs).
"Digital artists would be screwed" = "There would be far less digital art." You can't pay a recording studio to get your music to CD, if you won't be able to sell those CDs. I know several bands which occasionally make a CD at the local studio; only by selling them do they recoup their costs. Some people would still buy CDs; some people would still create, but the recordings would be poorer; there would be much less of a niche for professional songwriters (many of whom are quite good, despite what the RIAA would have you think).
Software makers would be in similar trouble. Probably more trouble. You can't afford to pay programmers if just anyone can take a copy of what you create. Companies like RedHat can survive by selling services (such as tech support), but many others could not. Gaming companies in particular: they would all have to charge a fee like the MMORPGS do, or something like that.
Software companies and recording studios are paid to produce data. Removing copyright would cause a vast oversupply of precisely this kind of data, driving prices through the floor and ruining the market. Some markets just need this sort of protection. Farming does, as does the labor market (minimum wage). The world would not end if copyright wend away. But several industries, which in my opinion are worthwhile, would be crippled unless some sort of alternative were available.
Mike
---
Heh. No, I'm not the sysadmin. I don't plant landmines anyway. My specialty is in math and cs, which may turn out to be crypto and security protocols, and I think that having . in your path is a bad idea, especially if it's before
If I have access to their system (someone occasionally leaves an ssh open on my box), I prefer adding to their
Most of the innovation in fashion is done by people who sell designer clothes. They stand to profit a good deal by this, perhaps even more if others copy them.
Academics have tenure, they don't get any money for their ideas (unless they get patented, IP, etc), but rather for their teaching.
So yes, academics will still invent stuff, but that rather narrows the field, no? And digital artists would largely be screwed if copyright went away.
Running bzip2, gcc, gzip, etc on BOTH platforms. Some of these are actually used...
This should probably be: "Know someone with . before /bin in their path?"
Yes, I know this, and that makes this landmine largely ineffective. Of course, you can still make a file called "cta" or something, and hope the person makes a typo.
And yeah, putting . at the beginning of your path is pretty stupid.
And the responses are allong the lines of:
/., can certainly suggest plenty of protocols or economic systems to accomplish this, but none of them are particularly compelling and most of them probably wouldn't work at all.
* But it's the law.
* I hope the RIAA gets you.
* Then I suppose an idiot like you won't mind if I take your stuff!
The true problem with the "IP is dying" claim is not actually any of these. The problem is that while IP and copyright are clearly outdated, they serve a necessary function in our economy, that is, giving people an incentive to create art/useful programs.
While copyright/IP are increasingly inefficient means to accomplish this, there is no currently available substitute. Sure, there are street performer protocols, OSS funds, and other ways of earning a profit for freely distributable media, but ultimately, this is an extremely difficult problem in the free-market economy.
I, and anyone else on
Until there is a viable alternative on this side of communism, IP cannot be allowed to die.
If I buy a copy-protected CD that won't play on my Mac, can I download the songs in good conscience?
Certainly in good conscience. You've paid the label, you've supported the artist, you're allowed to play the song wherever; ethically, you have no reason not to download it.
And probably legally, too. The jury is still out on that, it'd be part of the fair-use laws. But I don't think the RIAA would sue you. Mostly they go after uploaders anyway, but they risk losing big if they force the courts to clarify whether this is legal or not.
Uh, actually this is irrefutable proof. It will miss a lot of songs, but it is virtually guaranteed to not give false positives.
No. If two people rip+encode the same song with, say, the default settings in iTunes, with the same model of drive, they're pretty likely to get the same mp3, and hence the same MD5sum.
The MP3 output should vary with the drive, ID3 tags, ripper, and MP3 encoder+settings, but many people use the same rippers and encoders, and keep default settings and ID3 tags. The chances are not too low that she did that.
Of course, we all know she's still guilty. The songs have "ripped by" tags set to some random guy on KaZaA, so she didn't rip them anyway. And with 900 songs, the odds do get pretty strong against this sort of luck...
A birthday attack allows you to produce two files with the same hash in about the square-root of the normal expected time, if you have a lot (order of exabytes at least in the case of MD5) of memory.
However, they are comparing the sig to a *specific* rip on KaZaA. Even if she were trying to make a rip that matched something's MD5, this could only increase her speed by order of (#files on KaZaA), which brings it down to maybe 2^100 effort. In fact, she is presumably not trying, so her odds against with ~1000 files of even having one match are ~2^90:1.
Making another file with the same sig is easy, we did it as an assignment at school with text files instead of mp3s, but the point holds.
I very much doubt that you could do this if "sig" means "md5sum". If you mean a CRC (or other non-cryptographic checksum), or CBC-residue (where you know the key), yes, this is easy. If you mean a CRYPT residue (like UNIX uses), this is doable if you have a couple CPU-months to spare.
In fact, David Wagner (at Princeton) reports thatBut I defy you, or anyone else, to show two different strings with the same MD5sum. While progress has been made in cryptanalyzing MD5, it is not yet broken (ie, nobody has been able to reduce the time required to break it from brute-force).
It was estimated in 1994 that a $10M machine could find a collision in MD5 in 24 days. Today this would probably be less than a million... but the only people likely to have this are not about to jump up and admit it.
...rather than games with better graphics.
Something that irks me about recent games is that many of them are unoriginal, have worse-than-average gameplay... and a huge graphics budget.
For instance, I find that WarCraft III gameplay is much, much worse than StarCraft (could just be my low-end machine with a crappy graphics card), and the heros and other additions don't make the game much more interesting.
Similarly, Diablo II was probably the most unoriginal RPG I've ever played; the graphics are excellent but the plot is thin and the gameplay is mediocre. (It's damn addictive, tho). Compare the Baldur's Gate series, which has worse graphics and decent gameplay, and a better plot.
Anyone here ever played Liero? An ancient, free 2d Worms-but-realtime shooter? That game was more fun than many of the FPS games I've played. The graphics were shit, but the controls were responsive, the weapons were balanced (and numerous, and MODable), and the modes were fun.
I think this article nicely pinpoints the problem with many games today. The graphics teams soak up all the budget, and the guys that write an actual plot into the game, balance it, and adjust the gameplay don't do anything. They add in an assload of really cool spells/weapons/whatever, but then nobody actually uses most of them because a few of them are overpowered.
Maybe I'm just like those oldtimers ranting for a return to the "good old" days, but I'd like to see creative new FPS, one with nontrivial tactics (haven't seen one since Counterstrike), and for once a well thought-out TBS game. Alpha Centauri was close, but like many games, they put in too many features. The features ended up unbalanced, buggy, and their interactions were poorly thought-out. As a result, play didn't scale well and the AI sucked.
You're kidding right?
Nope.
The last benchmarks Apple put out were on an platform that isn't shipping, on a OS that won't ship when the platform ships,
Hence they are preliminary. And the OS doesn't matter much for these specific benchmarks. Only the scheduler, TLB miss handler/pager and idle tasks really matter at all. Idle tasks would be minimal in any case; the schedulers are probably the same in both systems; and the TLB miss handler and pager wouldn't be involved on much on something which uses so little memory as these SPECs.
using optimizations that can't be used for normal computing,
No, but they (or similar optimizations) can be (and are) used for games, photoshop filters, rendering libraries, and other CPU-eaters.
with a compiler that has been specifically tweeked to provided even more performance
No, they just added the timing specs and stuff so that it could optimize for the G5 at all. They didn't add any better optimization than it does for any other platform.
VS a slower than the fastest currently shipping CPU on a middle of the road motherboard/chipset,
It was Dell's flagship at the time.
with performance enhancing settings that are normally on, turned off,
That allegation turned out to be just plain false. They did not turn of SSE2, and they ran the tests both with and without hyperthreading and reported the fastest ones.
with an OS that doesn't ship with that system, placed out of the box onto that system using a generic compiler with minimal optimizations
It was the same compiler with the same optimizations, up to platform-specific stuff. If you call this cheating, fine, but I think that until the decent compilers (eg MetroWerks) have optimization settings for G5, this is the about fairest they can do.
which altogether costs less.
True. Apple's systems are fricking expensive.
Apple marketing lies through its teeth.
Everyone's marketing lies through their teeth. They benchmarks may not have been completely fair, but I'm willing to believe that they are close to fair, which is better than I could say for Apple's old "PhotoShop suite" benchmarks.
Compare their posted benchmarks of their own systems vs competitors benchmarks of their own systems and the new still not shipping Apple systems are slower than systems that have been shipping for months.
See above comment about preliminary benchmarks and no good compilers.
Apple makes a nice OS and nice computer boxes, but they just aren't as fast as comparably priced Intel/AMD boxes. That's just the way it is.
Some other slashdotter did a price comparison on this. He compared it against a home-built dual Opteron system with as close as possible to the same parts.
If you include their case (which would not be cheap on a PC either), hard drive, graphics card, DVD burner, RAM, and some of the other features of their chipsets, it turns out to be pretty comparable. Slightly (~20%) more expensive than if you were to build a comparable system from parts, but then systems custom-built from parts are cheaper anyway (because you are doing the labor). Plus, the Mac comes with an OS.
Given that the platform hasn't even shipped yet... I don't care whether *current* compilers support it better. Such a benchmark is *preliminary* by its very nature, and hobbling both machines to the same bad compiler is much better than extrapolating "effective" scores for "if we had a better compiler, it would look like..."
For now, it *is* the best comparison.
The G5 may in fact be good, but Apple is still certainly lying on their benchmarks.
Benchmarks are pretty much lies anyway. But I don't think they are lying more than anyone else.
There is no such thing as a 'standard SPEC' benchmark', as Apple is free to choose whatever compilers they want with whatever compilation settings they way.
No, but SPEC is a standard benchmark, as opposed to Apple's custom benchmarks of G4-optimized PhotoShop filters.
With the last round of Apple benchmarks a couple months ago it was shown that they seriously crippled the compiler on the PC side, thus tilting the benchmarks in their favor.
No. It was alleged that they seriously crippled the compiler. Specifically, that they disabled SSE2 and hyperthreading. The allegation that they disabled SSE2 was just plain false. And according to Apple, they did the tests with and without hyperthreading, and without HT their competition was faster, so they kept that one. And while they may spin things or doctor compilation settings, they don't straight-out lie about their procedures.
I have every reason to believe they did the same thing with these benchmarks.
I have every reason to believe that these are the same benchmarks.
Do they mean, won't initially run with G5 optimizations? Because the G5 is supposed to be binary-compatible with the G4... or does it check your proc version and then refuse to run?
First, I think this *IS* the same story as last time around, and the Reg is just slow on the uptake. So I'll be referring to the details of that.
Second, the benchmarks were made with GCC. GCC is, if anything, better on x86 platforms and gives the Xeon the advantage. It's not nearly as good as a MetroWerks or Intel compiler, which Dell uses to benchmark their systems.
See, Apple doesn't have a decent optimizing compiler yet. MW CodeWarrior will probably be good, but it's not modified yet for the G5. Apple has added in the G5 timings and stuff to GCC, but GCC's optimizations suck (getting better in GCC3.3, but still not great). High-end apps/games specifically for the G5 will be compiled with a good compiler, which should be out fairly soon (a month or two tops).
So what they want right now, and what is most fair right now, is a comparison between the two processors, not compilers. This means that they have to use the *same* compilers on both systems. So they used GCC. Expect their SPECs to rise as they get better compilers for the Mac.
There should be some bias, but not much; mostly it should be interference from the scheduler. These apps don't use much memory, so TLB misses and stuff shouldn't matter.
Windows never really has been that efficient in a dual processor situation.
IIRC they ran Linux on the Xeons. At least, they did in the original tests. Are these actually new?
... because this time they have a CPU that doesn't suck?
Seriously, we all knew that the later G3s and all the G4s were behind the competition for all but a few very specialized operations. That's why Apple dumped Motorola, and is now working with IBM.
The G5 doesn't suck. And for the first time, its FSB and memory bandwidth don't suck either. Apple's using standard SPEC benchmarks, and it looks from their writeup like they were fair. So give it a rest.
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