It is, but it's hard to boycott something that most people don't have a clear understanding of. Lets face it, 80% of the people have no idea what the difference between XP and Vista is, or even what Vista even is. Furthermore, even if they do know what Vista is, they would assume it's better because it's newer (that's what I thought when I upgraded from 98SE to ME, what a disaster). There's really no chance in informing the average customer.
But, if Vista pisses off businesses, then MS has a real problem on their hands. Businesses are already reluctant to change. They're definitely going to reject Vista if it makes them less productive. At least I'm hoping that's how it would turn out.
Isn't there a way to develop a virus that can spread through these compromised computers, but instead of doing the damage, it fixes the leaks? These compromised computers have some sort of back-door left open right?
I wonder what they're going to say when it's brutally apparent that ALL software players can be compromised. From what I can see, they have a few options, and none of them are pretty.
- play the cat and mouse game, and have the keys updated on the players while revoking the old keys.
From the article:
However, Jacob said convicting someone is difficult.
"You have to prove that the person was camcording and using it to generate revenue. It is virtually impossible to do that," he said." Unless you can assign blame to the person recording in your theatre, your law doesn't have any teeth."
So basically, they want to be able to convict people without evidence? Is this guy out of his mind?
This is total BS. Has anyone been to any country in South East asia? I've been to Malaysia recently, and I had a hard time finding legit DVD stores. 99% of DVDs I saw were pirated DVDs.
When I found a place where legit DVDs and CDs were being sold, I immediately realized why people don't buy legit movies/CDs. They're WAAAY overpriced. CDs/DVDs were being sold for the same price as in Canada. I saw a CD for 45RM (which is about $15 CDN). Which is fine for me, but the average Malaysian makes 3 to 5 times less money than an average Canadian.
Imagine paying $50 for a CD. That's what it's like for a Malaysian to buy a legit CD/DVD. Of course they're going to pirate. No one can afford to buy a legit CD/DVD.
Can you imagine the huge hit on performance that would be? Every memory access has to be accompanied by a decrypt, every memory write accompanied with an encrypt. It will set back PC performance by many years. Plus, it'll have to be done in hardware, which is out of Microsoft's scope.
You underestimate the movie companies. The next step is to encrypt the the data on the disc, and throw away all the keys. This way, no one can decrypt it. Not even the pirates! There is one side effect though, no one can watch the movie either. Oh well, it's a fair compromise.
Hollywood shouldn't be worried about this hack. They really should be worried about people actually buying these discs. What are the early adopter customers with the "non-secure" HDTVs supposed to do? Throw out their HDTV, and buy a new one so they can watch HD content? It's a real slap in the face of the customers... I hope both formats fail, and a new, non-restrictive format appears.
This isn't new... Solid-state heat pumps already exist. It's a matter of how efficient they are. Note that when they say they turn heat into electricity, this only works when there's a temperature differential. I believe this effect is called the Peltier effect. Look it up on google.
Newspapers frequently publish libelous stories that aren't true, then later publish a correction and an apology buried somewhere in the next issue of the paper. Especially when it comes to celebrities or other famous people. How should it be the responsibility of the hosting site to censor their users, as newspaper writers don't even bother researching their facts?
Information on the internet from ordinary users, has to be treated like information you get from a drunkard at a bar. You have no idea if it's true.
That's why radio is on the decline. I can't stand listening to radio anymore. They loop whatever 10 songs that are popular at the moment, every day, in the morning, in the evening, the same f-ing songs! Thank god my commute to work is only 10 minutes. I built myself an iPod hookup to my car, and I listen to my iPod in shuffle mode. It's much better than listening to song X for the millionth time.
If my commute was longer than 30 minutes each way, I would definitely get Sirius satellite radio. I find it a big pain to swap music in and out of my iPod, since my iPod isn't big enough to hold my music collection. Also, since I don't listen to the radio anymore, I don't hear any new music. I do have to switch to regular crappy radio to hear some of the new stuff that's out.
At more than $300 price difference, I think people will be very hesitant to buy a PS3. Especially with Wii being much more innovative. Personally, I think Wii is going to kick-ass with their awesome new controller. I plan on buying a Wii sometime after the christmas rush. I hope my friends buy one first, so I can try it out!
I think computers will eventually contain an FPGA, which can be re-programmed to perform any task. For example, a physics processor can be programmed into the FPGA when a game launches, folding@home can program the FPGA to do specific vector calculations very quickly, encryption algorithms can be programmed in to perform encryption/decryption very quickly, etc.
FPGAs are getting quite powerful and are getting a lot cheaper. It definitely won't be as fast as a dedicated ASIC, but if programmed properly, it should be able to accelerate certain tasks significantly.
Linux is under GPL. No one owns the IP for Linux. How can MS sue? I guess MS has so many patents, it's inevitable that Linux does something that's patented by MS.
Yeah, I'm in total agreement with you, this makes no sense at all.
From the article: A LEAD DEVELOPER on the Open Source Wine project, Tom Wickline, has warned that Microsoft's deal with Novell is a cunning plan by Vole to take control over the commercial customer's use of Free Software.
It seems to me they're really confused at the concept of free software. There's absolutely no way MS can stop companies from using open source software. For example, I use WinMerge, an open source visual diff program (which, btw, is awesome). So article claims that MS can shutdown WinMerge, and force people to pay and license for the use MS's own shitty visual diff program? That's ridiculous. That means if some programmer comes up with a useful tool, and generously makes the source available to the world, MS can sue him/her for patent infringement, make their own version of the tool and license it? That's the most insane thing I've ever heard.
This is probably one of the worst, non-nonsensical article I've ever read.
That's a really good point. Is it possible that the decline in downloading is related to the declining quality in music coming out?
I sense a big shakeup in the music industry, where the artists start taking control of the money they generate, instead of the big record companies gobbling it up to enrich a few unworthy executives.
It seems like this type of product would be marketed towards the budget segment, which really doesn't care about graphics performance. However, the huge advantage of having a GPU on the same silicon as the CPU would be a big boost in performance. The low cost advantage has already been attained with the integrated graphics chipsets (like nForce). So that would mean this might be marketed towards the high-performance crowd.
But I highly doubt that nVidia will be able to get a CPU out that out-performs an Intel or AMD, which the high-performance junkies would want. Intel and AMD put a HUGE amount of money into research, development, and fabrication to attain their performance. This is going to be interesting to watch. Hopefully nVidia doesn't dig themselves into a hole with this attempt.
AMD and Intel have their own fabs that are at the leading edge of semiconductor technology. I highly doubt that nVidia will open up a fab for their chips. But who knows, IBM may produce their chips for them.
I think the better option would be to have a graphics chip fit into a Socket 939 on a dual socket motherboard, with an AMD chip. It will have a high-speed link through hyper-transport, and would act just like a co-processor. I'm no chip designer, so I have no idea what the pros/cons of this are, or if it's even possible.
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It is, but it's hard to boycott something that most people don't have a clear understanding of. Lets face it, 80% of the people have no idea what the difference between XP and Vista is, or even what Vista even is. Furthermore, even if they do know what Vista is, they would assume it's better because it's newer (that's what I thought when I upgraded from 98SE to ME, what a disaster). There's really no chance in informing the average customer.
But, if Vista pisses off businesses, then MS has a real problem on their hands. Businesses are already reluctant to change. They're definitely going to reject Vista if it makes them less productive. At least I'm hoping that's how it would turn out.
I wonder if they included the blue-screen-of-death feature that I've enjoyed for such a long time.
Isn't there a way to develop a virus that can spread through these compromised computers, but instead of doing the damage, it fixes the leaks? These compromised computers have some sort of back-door left open right?
I wonder what they're going to say when it's brutally apparent that ALL software players can be compromised. From what I can see, they have a few options, and none of them are pretty.
- play the cat and mouse game, and have the keys updated on the players while revoking the old keys.
- disallow software players all together.
- admit defeat and forget about revoking keys.
So the marketing department is telling the engineers to do something impossible. Sounds like a scene from a Dilbert comic.
From the article:
However, Jacob said convicting someone is difficult.
"You have to prove that the person was camcording and using it to generate revenue. It is virtually impossible to do that," he said." Unless you can assign blame to the person recording in your theatre, your law doesn't have any teeth."
So basically, they want to be able to convict people without evidence? Is this guy out of his mind?
This is total BS. Has anyone been to any country in South East asia? I've been to Malaysia recently, and I had a hard time finding legit DVD stores. 99% of DVDs I saw were pirated DVDs. When I found a place where legit DVDs and CDs were being sold, I immediately realized why people don't buy legit movies/CDs. They're WAAAY overpriced. CDs/DVDs were being sold for the same price as in Canada. I saw a CD for 45RM (which is about $15 CDN). Which is fine for me, but the average Malaysian makes 3 to 5 times less money than an average Canadian. Imagine paying $50 for a CD. That's what it's like for a Malaysian to buy a legit CD/DVD. Of course they're going to pirate. No one can afford to buy a legit CD/DVD.
Can you imagine the huge hit on performance that would be? Every memory access has to be accompanied by a decrypt, every memory write accompanied with an encrypt. It will set back PC performance by many years. Plus, it'll have to be done in hardware, which is out of Microsoft's scope.
I've been telling all my friends buying new PCs to avoid Vista as well, until at least the first service pack is released.
You underestimate the movie companies. The next step is to encrypt the the data on the disc, and throw away all the keys. This way, no one can decrypt it. Not even the pirates! There is one side effect though, no one can watch the movie either. Oh well, it's a fair compromise.
Hollywood shouldn't be worried about this hack. They really should be worried about people actually buying these discs. What are the early adopter customers with the "non-secure" HDTVs supposed to do? Throw out their HDTV, and buy a new one so they can watch HD content? It's a real slap in the face of the customers... I hope both formats fail, and a new, non-restrictive format appears.
This isn't new... Solid-state heat pumps already exist. It's a matter of how efficient they are. Note that when they say they turn heat into electricity, this only works when there's a temperature differential. I believe this effect is called the Peltier effect. Look it up on google.
Newspapers frequently publish libelous stories that aren't true, then later publish a correction and an apology buried somewhere in the next issue of the paper. Especially when it comes to celebrities or other famous people. How should it be the responsibility of the hosting site to censor their users, as newspaper writers don't even bother researching their facts?
Information on the internet from ordinary users, has to be treated like information you get from a drunkard at a bar. You have no idea if it's true.
That's why radio is on the decline. I can't stand listening to radio anymore. They loop whatever 10 songs that are popular at the moment, every day, in the morning, in the evening, the same f-ing songs! Thank god my commute to work is only 10 minutes. I built myself an iPod hookup to my car, and I listen to my iPod in shuffle mode. It's much better than listening to song X for the millionth time.
If my commute was longer than 30 minutes each way, I would definitely get Sirius satellite radio. I find it a big pain to swap music in and out of my iPod, since my iPod isn't big enough to hold my music collection. Also, since I don't listen to the radio anymore, I don't hear any new music. I do have to switch to regular crappy radio to hear some of the new stuff that's out.
At more than $300 price difference, I think people will be very hesitant to buy a PS3. Especially with Wii being much more innovative. Personally, I think Wii is going to kick-ass with their awesome new controller. I plan on buying a Wii sometime after the christmas rush. I hope my friends buy one first, so I can try it out!
I think computers will eventually contain an FPGA, which can be re-programmed to perform any task. For example, a physics processor can be programmed into the FPGA when a game launches, folding@home can program the FPGA to do specific vector calculations very quickly, encryption algorithms can be programmed in to perform encryption/decryption very quickly, etc.
FPGAs are getting quite powerful and are getting a lot cheaper. It definitely won't be as fast as a dedicated ASIC, but if programmed properly, it should be able to accelerate certain tasks significantly.
Linux is under GPL. No one owns the IP for Linux. How can MS sue? I guess MS has so many patents, it's inevitable that Linux does something that's patented by MS.
Yeah, I'm in total agreement with you, this makes no sense at all.
From the article: A LEAD DEVELOPER on the Open Source Wine project, Tom Wickline, has warned that Microsoft's deal with Novell is a cunning plan by Vole to take control over the commercial customer's use of Free Software.
It seems to me they're really confused at the concept of free software. There's absolutely no way MS can stop companies from using open source software. For example, I use WinMerge, an open source visual diff program (which, btw, is awesome). So article claims that MS can shutdown WinMerge, and force people to pay and license for the use MS's own shitty visual diff program? That's ridiculous. That means if some programmer comes up with a useful tool, and generously makes the source available to the world, MS can sue him/her for patent infringement, make their own version of the tool and license it? That's the most insane thing I've ever heard.
This is probably one of the worst, non-nonsensical article I've ever read.
Maybe there was no media coverage because no one cares.
That's a really good point. Is it possible that the decline in downloading is related to the declining quality in music coming out?
I sense a big shakeup in the music industry, where the artists start taking control of the money they generate, instead of the big record companies gobbling it up to enrich a few unworthy executives.
You missed the point... replace "939" with "AM2"...
It seems like this type of product would be marketed towards the budget segment, which really doesn't care about graphics performance. However, the huge advantage of having a GPU on the same silicon as the CPU would be a big boost in performance. The low cost advantage has already been attained with the integrated graphics chipsets (like nForce). So that would mean this might be marketed towards the high-performance crowd.
But I highly doubt that nVidia will be able to get a CPU out that out-performs an Intel or AMD, which the high-performance junkies would want. Intel and AMD put a HUGE amount of money into research, development, and fabrication to attain their performance. This is going to be interesting to watch. Hopefully nVidia doesn't dig themselves into a hole with this attempt.
AMD and Intel have their own fabs that are at the leading edge of semiconductor technology. I highly doubt that nVidia will open up a fab for their chips. But who knows, IBM may produce their chips for them.
I think the better option would be to have a graphics chip fit into a Socket 939 on a dual socket motherboard, with an AMD chip. It will have a high-speed link through hyper-transport, and would act just like a co-processor. I'm no chip designer, so I have no idea what the pros/cons of this are, or if it's even possible.
The article date is probably correct. The article references numbers from 2001 and 2002.
That's really unfortunate. Some of those Japanese shows are hilarious, and watching videos from foreign shows is a great glimpse into another culture.