"Microsoft treats their customers like criminals, and doesn't give a shit what their policies do to the little guy"
The "little" guy is running on a $1000+ 21" flat screen monitor huh? Dang, and I thought my 20" LCD at 1600x1200 from Dell for $420 made me a "big" guy. Back to the drawing board I guess.
And I suppose when they go to HD-DVD and people have to upgrade their $1000 DVD players (yes, some still sell for that) to a new model or they get "downgraded" resolution, we'll all start this tantrum again . . .
The part of this whole thing that slashdotters are failing to realize is that Longhorn will, at best, be out in another year, at which point the current series of motherboards, videocards, etc will be more or less obsoleted against runnig the current generation of eye-candy rich OS's. The move towards 64-bit, PCI express, dual-core technology, etc is taking hold so fast that the current generation of PC's won't stand much of a chance of running Longhorn at a reasonable speed anyway, regardless of the resolution of content you're attempting to play back. Furthermore, the increased "cost" of a "new" monitor is nearly insignificant when you consider that corporations like Dell give the monitors away with system purchases. The linux debate is nearly mute by default since almost everything practically has to be reverse engineered to run on Linux anyway, you're lucky if you can even get the latest quicktime versions running (and that takes work, not out of the box) so I'm assuming that the new high resolution content we're bickering about won't be mereley limited to a new monitor for Linux users.
In short, in a nation where:
I bought my car but the government says I can't drive it at more than 65 MPH on the freeway,
I bought my house and land but the government wants taxes for its use,
I bought my gun but I can't hunt birds in the city I live in,
it seems a little naive that we're whining that the media industry wants us to watch our computer-based content on our computer.
I'm not sure I understand what the big deal is about. Intel wrote their OWN compiler optimized for their OWN product. Almost every compiler made performs slightly better on one platform or another. My company uses Lahey, PGI, Pathscale, IBM, and Intel compilers and it takes a lot of testing with each compiler to find the one that works best for a given architecture.
I guess everyone's real complaint isn't that they aren't optimizing it for AMD, but that they are purposefully sabotaging it on the AMD. My opinion is that there is nothing they can fault Intel for. According to Intel's webpage for the C++ Compiler for Windows, "Achieve outstanding application performance on Intel® processors using Intel® C++ Compiler for Windows*. The Compiler plugs into industry-leading development environments for out-of-the-box productivity." And in a footnote on that same page, "Performance depends upon the specific computer systems, components and/or measurement methods used; your results will vary."
Face it, when you buy a biased technology (read IPOD), you get the compatibility and the functionality that the large company (read Apple) wants you to have. Intel is hardly the marketplace dominator in the compiler industry.
And as a flame: stop whining that AMD's are faster than Intel's when all you have to back it up is a framerate from a Carmack game. I've used both, and I can show you a handful of instances on either platform where they blow the other away. As always, use the right tool for the job. Enough said.
I suppose this can be viewed from a few different angles. The first being that "proper" English, as defined by your second-grade teacher is most prudent in professional publications, where your viewing audience is expected to fully grasp and comprehend every word that you have written. The second is the "common tongue" English, the one that is used on a daily basis to convey a possibly less important thought or idea to 50,000 monkeys at 50,000 keyboards.
I find it sad to say that the majority of the responses to this thread alone would fail if held up to the linguistic rubric cast down by the Board of Education. Improper capitalization of proper nouns, the use of ellipses to represent temporal pauses insted of absent verbage, etc. are just a few of the examples ever present on this page. It's not as though I expect everyone to have Webster's mastery over the proper spelling of all of the words they could every possibly wish to use. However, I think that simple errors such as "it's" as opposed to "its" is downright uncalled for and sloppy. Sentences such as "I'm not writing a fucking paper, it's an response in a damn forum" should be thrown right out for the poor wielding of the word "an".
But I digress: everything has a proper time and a proper place, and if you're stressed for time and decide to shorten words like "your" into "ur" then so be it. However, understand that like everything else that Americans are criticized for, you're making a mockery of your respect for your own culture. Furthermore, make a point not to be hypocritical the next time you hear the phrase "Can you show how get hotel" from someone doing their best to talk to you in your native language for which you have no respect.
Ordinarily I wouldn't bother . . .but for this:
on
Windows XP N a Bust
·
· Score: 1
OK. So usually I stay out of the Microsoft / Linux debates. I've been running Linux for everything short of gaming (although Doom 3 is quite nice) for over 10 years now. And I had my fair share of problems with BOTH OS's in terms of configuring, getting media to play, drivers, etc. Anyway, on to the point:
I can sort of understand the antitrust "feeling" surrounding Microsoft. Hey, they did a great job of creating a product that appealed to the masses, with some great advertising and product "positioning" it became the dominant player in the OS world in short span of time. Courts now want to say that since they've developed an all inclusive package people's need for 3rd party software has dwindled and Microsoft needs to strip down their OS to the point of having a mouse and a command line so that you're "forced" to explore all of your options for screen icons, media players, text editors, web browsers, etc without showing favoritism to Microsoft. I have several problems with this narrow minded view:
1) At what point can you say that a component SHOULD or MUST be removed to allow for competition.
2) What is considered the minimum functionality to qualify as an OS.
For instance, with RedHat being the dominant player in the enterprise linux field, is it "discriminating" or "unfair" that they bundle XMMS as their default media player. I am hardly inclined to download freeamp or beep if XMMS is on their by default.
My favorite was when they tried to argue that Internet Explorer shouldn't be included. Because it's SO easy for me to power up a new windows install and "download" the latest Netscape without being able to "browse" to the Netscape website first (yes, i know the address for their FTP site), but come on, really. Are they going to take away Notepad next to allow for competition with GVIM?
I guess what I'm trying to say is, competiting companies need to do their part to advertise and convince people that alternatives exist, but it's wrong to force Microsoft to remove functionality from an OS that I've paid for. How can you define unfair business practices in the software world definitively?
I don't know how many times I've come to slashdot to see the latest "AMD beats Intel in [fill-in] benchmark!!" or vica versa. It's as bad as car ads on TV touting "Most power in its class!" when you have no idea what class they're talking about and all of them claim the same thing.
I have yet to see a truly objective benchmark comparison between Intel and AMD but in the business world, performance goes far beyond what some 3D benchmark or MP3 encoding application can do.
My company works in the nuclear industry doing heavy floating point based applications. We've tried everything from the POWER5, SPARCS, Pentium 1-4's, Pentium M's, AMD Opterons, etc. According to the SPEC performance numbers, the POWER5 should have blown away anything else we could have gotten our hands on: it didn't. In fact, it was 3 times slower than our P4's. The fastest Opterons (the 250's at the time) were 1.5x slower than our 3.4 GHz Prescott's, and far less responsive as they didn't have the hyperthreaded "virtual cpu" to handle the minor OS overhead while crunching on our problems at the same time. And the new 600 series P4's with 2MB of cache are almost twice as fast as the opterons, ON OUR APPLICATION.
The point i'm trying to make is this: before making any large purhcase, it's best to get your hands on loaners from several different venders. You don't know how your application is going to perform until you try it with YOUR compiler and YOUR program.
One last example is something that doesn't get shown in benchmarks, but with dual opterons we expected it to be able to run two instances of our application at once with only a minimal performance hit. It ran about 4x slower, why? Turns out that our program uses large amounts of disk I/O, and with the AMD dual processor architecture the 2nd processor has to interrupt the 1st processor to get to the PCI bus. Just a head's up.
Before you blow everything out of proportion, take a second to look at a few things from a different perspective:
1) The end user of Linspire is most probably a windows user trying to switch to something cheaper. The odds of Linspire being heavily used in a multiuser environment are bleak at best.
2) He makes a valid point, the most valuble information on your computer are things stored in your home directory. Credit card information, social security, emails, etc. Guess what . . . `rm -rf` will eliminate all of that even if you aren't root. Who cares if you accidentally wipe an X library, a reinstall will fix that, it won't get back your emails and resumes.
3) Everyone's argument for the flaw of running as root seem to stem from services running as root, which is something the enduser of an operating system like Linspire shouldn't be expected to fix anyway, nor will most Linspire users be running apache servers and mysql servers, I'm just guessing at that.
A windows user or a linux newbie doesn't want to remember several account passwords just to change the IP address of their computer, or to reboot, or mount an external hard drive, or start Samba, etc. They want to know that they have permission to do those things out of the box. That's how windows is set up, that's what they want. Security should be handled by turning chrooted service invocation, firewalling, etc.
This isn't FreeBSD, tailor to your customers and make them happy, without them you don't have a business.
I realize that there are umpteen thousand benchmarks out there "proving" that the AMD processor outperforms the Intel processor in almost every graphics and video game test known to man. However, in the business world this is far from a necessity. As a personal experience, our company was looking for a platform to handle a memory and floating point intensive home-brew program that runs on the latest generation of CPU's in about 48 hours. Since the program uses about 6 GB of disk space and 2 GB of memory at execution we thought the AMD might have an advantage with its onboard memory controller so we gave it a shot, in small tests it performed admirably so we bought 10 of them from IBM and SUN (x326 and v20z respectively). When we finally got a chance to run our full size problems, they slowed down.
In comparison, the latest 2MB cache model of the Intel Penitum 4 runs almost TWICE as fast as our Opteron 250's. Not only that, but the hyperthreading also allows it to actually respond to other OS operations at the same time. The AMD's on the other hand are quite unresponsive when CPU intensive tasks are taking place.
Lastly, a closer looks at the CPU architecture for the AMD platform shows a weakness in multiple CPU implementations. All slave CPU's must go through the master CPU to gain access to the PCI bus. While this isn't critical for memory based programs, if you have two disk bound programs running, the first CPU will get little work done as it stops execution to allow the hypertransport bus to pipe data to the slave CPU.
Sorry if that was a lot of crap on your screen, maybe a better summary is, real world performance for YOUR company cannot be measured by any benchmark that Intel, IBM, Sun, Tom's Hardware, can tell you. Each platform has its shortcomings and all-in-all, Dell has chosen to support Intel, which for my company is the right move. So don't jump down their throats for chosing a "inferior" chip, or not addressing the needs of gamers. Save your flaming for the tech support department, from what i hear, they could use it.
I hope the RIAA finds you and explains it to you. Getting something for nothing when everyone else has to pay for it is illegal, period, regardless of whether you "would have paid for it" if you couldn't get it for free.
Not exactly. If I download 1,000 MP3's (truly many people have more than this), and each song sells for $0.99 then I have just stolen $1,000 from someone. Wording it as "money they can potentially make" is just a nice way of saying "money they didn't make cause someone took it away from them by illegally downloading music." Whether they had it in the first place and then lost it, or just didn't get it at all doesn't make it legal or even "more legal."
Finally, someone without their head up their ass responding to this article.
I understand where everyone is coming from, "Hey, we had a good thing going and they took it away from us. We were walking into 7/11 stores and taking a penny from the penny tray, sure, every once in a while someone stole a couple million from a bank, but they just got the wrong directions to the 7/11."
I understand that SOME artists allow bootlegged material to be redistributed. Somewhere this has to be posted because usually the label has the final say since the label usually owns the songs. If the label and the artist have a legal agreement that the live recording can be redistributed free of charge then why not email/write to you artist and tell them to host it on their site. Then they can set up the torrent, you won't have to go mining the internet for a tracker site, and users can submit their recordings to the artist themselves.
However, what is probably going on is people think they are free to do whatever they want with a live recording and those people are in violation. Let's look at an example, I pay $9 to go to the latest Star Wars movie at the drive-in. It's a public showing, I paid to see it, therefore I'm going to video tape it. I get home, put that video up on the internet . ..OOPS, i've just violated copyright. Was there a disclaimer before the movie that said in french and english that I wasn't allowed to do that? No, they put that on home videos. Where then did it say it?
If you still think the last example was illegal, then consider someone at a concert doing the same thing. I'm no lawyer so I won't tell you what is legal and what isn't. But I'm sick of every IP and copyright violation that gets pursued resulting in 99% of the slashdot community feeling it is an attack on freedom and the pursuit of happiness. You don't like it, write your own music, make your own movies. But if you do like it, then you're stuck with the fact that they are the only ones capable of doing that and they are free to charge whatever they want. Shit, nobody is getting up in arms about the gas companies charging me $3 a gallon for gas, talk about violation. Pay your $9.99 for your CD or listen to the radio.
In short, yes. Any code compiled for x86_64 will run on these chips, which, as previously stated, have actually been out for at least a week. The prescott cores that make up the 64-bit chips also have 2MB of L2 cache now.
So, after some 25 years, half a dozen releases, countless hours of computer time "enhancing" the movie, plenty of George's wasted time "enhancing" the movie, and what are we left with a DVD edtion featuring:
1) gray boxes still floating around tie fighters
2) Death Star computer plans to plan an attack that look like an Atari game from the 80's
3) No bloopers reel
4) No added footage of Carrie Fisher (oops, Princess Leia) in her bikini.
Guess we'll have to wait for the Ultra Special Edition in 2007, or the Director's Cut in 2009, or the Fox Collector's unrated version in 2012 . . .
Ok ok, so I understand that some of you haven't read the books and believe that the additional scenes in FotR were trivial. But come on, leaving out the reforging of Aragorn's sword by the elves? Tolkein's poetry? Crack open the book for one minute and see how many poems you come across. This man invented (documented) 10,000 years of history, constructed a couple languages from scratch, and wrote countless songs and poems to complete the world of Lord of the Rings and Jackson all but throws it away. The extended edition of Lord of the Rings did exactly what I wanted it to, it completed the parts of the movie that I thought were missing from the book. It will be a harder challenge for TTT:EE to do the same, but I look forward to the "small" details being put back in so that the people who have read and enjoyed the books can see it in action.
That's great that that prices keep coming down, regardless of quality. But the real problem here is the fact that it has gotten to the point where we feel more comfortable throwing away a 30 pound printer that has seen a 1,000 page workload to buy a new one. All of these printers go somewhere (read landfill), not that many people would care sitting snuggly in their mansions printing off the latest slashdot article so they don't have to stare at their $1000 monitor to read it, cause that would be hard on the eyes. We still have our HP LaserJet II (I know, along with half the readers on here) and likewise it continues to print to this day, not to mention that it was one of the first printers I can remember seeing under the driver list on Linux. Not to mention our HP 4Si (Duplex:-) ) and our HP2100 that print with great quality. Most people just need to realize that eventually all of this wastefullness is going to catch up with us, so just shell out the extra $100 and buy a printer that will last more than a year. Believe it or not it'll save you and the rest of us in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
"Microsoft treats their customers like criminals, and doesn't give a shit what their policies do to the little guy"
The "little" guy is running on a $1000+ 21" flat screen monitor huh? Dang, and I thought my 20" LCD at 1600x1200 from Dell for $420 made me a "big" guy. Back to the drawing board I guess.
And I suppose when they go to HD-DVD and people have to upgrade their $1000 DVD players (yes, some still sell for that) to a new model or they get "downgraded" resolution, we'll all start this tantrum again . . .
The part of this whole thing that slashdotters are failing to realize is that Longhorn will, at best, be out in another year, at which point the current series of motherboards, videocards, etc will be more or less obsoleted against runnig the current generation of eye-candy rich OS's. The move towards 64-bit, PCI express, dual-core technology, etc is taking hold so fast that the current generation of PC's won't stand much of a chance of running Longhorn at a reasonable speed anyway, regardless of the resolution of content you're attempting to play back. Furthermore, the increased "cost" of a "new" monitor is nearly insignificant when you consider that corporations like Dell give the monitors away with system purchases. The linux debate is nearly mute by default since almost everything practically has to be reverse engineered to run on Linux anyway, you're lucky if you can even get the latest quicktime versions running (and that takes work, not out of the box) so I'm assuming that the new high resolution content we're bickering about won't be mereley limited to a new monitor for Linux users.
In short, in a nation where:
I bought my car but the government says I can't drive it at more than 65 MPH on the freeway,
I bought my house and land but the government wants taxes for its use,
I bought my gun but I can't hunt birds in the city I live in,
it seems a little naive that we're whining that the media industry wants us to watch our computer-based content on our computer.
I'm not sure I understand what the big deal is about. Intel wrote their OWN compiler optimized for their OWN product. Almost every compiler made performs slightly better on one platform or another. My company uses Lahey, PGI, Pathscale, IBM, and Intel compilers and it takes a lot of testing with each compiler to find the one that works best for a given architecture.
I guess everyone's real complaint isn't that they aren't optimizing it for AMD, but that they are purposefully sabotaging it on the AMD. My opinion is that there is nothing they can fault Intel for. According to Intel's webpage for the C++ Compiler for Windows, "Achieve outstanding application performance on Intel® processors using Intel® C++ Compiler for Windows*. The Compiler plugs into industry-leading development environments for out-of-the-box productivity." And in a footnote on that same page, "Performance depends upon the specific computer systems, components and/or measurement methods used; your results will vary."
Face it, when you buy a biased technology (read IPOD), you get the compatibility and the functionality that the large company (read Apple) wants you to have. Intel is hardly the marketplace dominator in the compiler industry.
And as a flame: stop whining that AMD's are faster than Intel's when all you have to back it up is a framerate from a Carmack game. I've used both, and I can show you a handful of instances on either platform where they blow the other away. As always, use the right tool for the job. Enough said.
I suppose this can be viewed from a few different angles. The first being that "proper" English, as defined by your second-grade teacher is most prudent in professional publications, where your viewing audience is expected to fully grasp and comprehend every word that you have written. The second is the "common tongue" English, the one that is used on a daily basis to convey a possibly less important thought or idea to 50,000 monkeys at 50,000 keyboards.
I find it sad to say that the majority of the responses to this thread alone would fail if held up to the linguistic rubric cast down by the Board of Education. Improper capitalization of proper nouns, the use of ellipses to represent temporal pauses insted of absent verbage, etc. are just a few of the examples ever present on this page. It's not as though I expect everyone to have Webster's mastery over the proper spelling of all of the words they could every possibly wish to use. However, I think that simple errors such as "it's" as opposed to "its" is downright uncalled for and sloppy. Sentences such as "I'm not writing a fucking paper, it's an response in a damn forum" should be thrown right out for the poor wielding of the word "an".
But I digress: everything has a proper time and a proper place, and if you're stressed for time and decide to shorten words like "your" into "ur" then so be it. However, understand that like everything else that Americans are criticized for, you're making a mockery of your respect for your own culture. Furthermore, make a point not to be hypocritical the next time you hear the phrase "Can you show how get hotel" from someone doing their best to talk to you in your native language for which you have no respect.
OK. So usually I stay out of the Microsoft / Linux debates. I've been running Linux for everything short of gaming (although Doom 3 is quite nice) for over 10 years now. And I had my fair share of problems with BOTH OS's in terms of configuring, getting media to play, drivers, etc. Anyway, on to the point: I can sort of understand the antitrust "feeling" surrounding Microsoft. Hey, they did a great job of creating a product that appealed to the masses, with some great advertising and product "positioning" it became the dominant player in the OS world in short span of time. Courts now want to say that since they've developed an all inclusive package people's need for 3rd party software has dwindled and Microsoft needs to strip down their OS to the point of having a mouse and a command line so that you're "forced" to explore all of your options for screen icons, media players, text editors, web browsers, etc without showing favoritism to Microsoft. I have several problems with this narrow minded view: 1) At what point can you say that a component SHOULD or MUST be removed to allow for competition. 2) What is considered the minimum functionality to qualify as an OS. For instance, with RedHat being the dominant player in the enterprise linux field, is it "discriminating" or "unfair" that they bundle XMMS as their default media player. I am hardly inclined to download freeamp or beep if XMMS is on their by default. My favorite was when they tried to argue that Internet Explorer shouldn't be included. Because it's SO easy for me to power up a new windows install and "download" the latest Netscape without being able to "browse" to the Netscape website first (yes, i know the address for their FTP site), but come on, really. Are they going to take away Notepad next to allow for competition with GVIM? I guess what I'm trying to say is, competiting companies need to do their part to advertise and convince people that alternatives exist, but it's wrong to force Microsoft to remove functionality from an OS that I've paid for. How can you define unfair business practices in the software world definitively?
I don't know how many times I've come to slashdot to see the latest "AMD beats Intel in [fill-in] benchmark!!" or vica versa. It's as bad as car ads on TV touting "Most power in its class!" when you have no idea what class they're talking about and all of them claim the same thing.
I have yet to see a truly objective benchmark comparison between Intel and AMD but in the business world, performance goes far beyond what some 3D benchmark or MP3 encoding application can do.
My company works in the nuclear industry doing heavy floating point based applications. We've tried everything from the POWER5, SPARCS, Pentium 1-4's, Pentium M's, AMD Opterons, etc. According to the SPEC performance numbers, the POWER5 should have blown away anything else we could have gotten our hands on: it didn't. In fact, it was 3 times slower than our P4's. The fastest Opterons (the 250's at the time) were 1.5x slower than our 3.4 GHz Prescott's, and far less responsive as they didn't have the hyperthreaded "virtual cpu" to handle the minor OS overhead while crunching on our problems at the same time. And the new 600 series P4's with 2MB of cache are almost twice as fast as the opterons, ON OUR APPLICATION.
The point i'm trying to make is this: before making any large purhcase, it's best to get your hands on loaners from several different venders. You don't know how your application is going to perform until you try it with YOUR compiler and YOUR program.
One last example is something that doesn't get shown in benchmarks, but with dual opterons we expected it to be able to run two instances of our application at once with only a minimal performance hit. It ran about 4x slower, why? Turns out that our program uses large amounts of disk I/O, and with the AMD dual processor architecture the 2nd processor has to interrupt the 1st processor to get to the PCI bus. Just a head's up.
Before you blow everything out of proportion, take a second to look at a few things from a different perspective:
1) The end user of Linspire is most probably a windows user trying to switch to something cheaper. The odds of Linspire being heavily used in a multiuser environment are bleak at best.
2) He makes a valid point, the most valuble information on your computer are things stored in your home directory. Credit card information, social security, emails, etc. Guess what . . . `rm -rf` will eliminate all of that even if you aren't root. Who cares if you accidentally wipe an X library, a reinstall will fix that, it won't get back your emails and resumes.
3) Everyone's argument for the flaw of running as root seem to stem from services running as root, which is something the enduser of an operating system like Linspire shouldn't be expected to fix anyway, nor will most Linspire users be running apache servers and mysql servers, I'm just guessing at that.
A windows user or a linux newbie doesn't want to remember several account passwords just to change the IP address of their computer, or to reboot, or mount an external hard drive, or start Samba, etc. They want to know that they have permission to do those things out of the box. That's how windows is set up, that's what they want. Security should be handled by turning chrooted service invocation, firewalling, etc.
This isn't FreeBSD, tailor to your customers and make them happy, without them you don't have a business.
I realize that there are umpteen thousand benchmarks out there "proving" that the AMD processor outperforms the Intel processor in almost every graphics and video game test known to man. However, in the business world this is far from a necessity. As a personal experience, our company was looking for a platform to handle a memory and floating point intensive home-brew program that runs on the latest generation of CPU's in about 48 hours. Since the program uses about 6 GB of disk space and 2 GB of memory at execution we thought the AMD might have an advantage with its onboard memory controller so we gave it a shot, in small tests it performed admirably so we bought 10 of them from IBM and SUN (x326 and v20z respectively). When we finally got a chance to run our full size problems, they slowed down.
In comparison, the latest 2MB cache model of the Intel Penitum 4 runs almost TWICE as fast as our Opteron 250's. Not only that, but the hyperthreading also allows it to actually respond to other OS operations at the same time. The AMD's on the other hand are quite unresponsive when CPU intensive tasks are taking place.
Lastly, a closer looks at the CPU architecture for the AMD platform shows a weakness in multiple CPU implementations. All slave CPU's must go through the master CPU to gain access to the PCI bus. While this isn't critical for memory based programs, if you have two disk bound programs running, the first CPU will get little work done as it stops execution to allow the hypertransport bus to pipe data to the slave CPU.
Sorry if that was a lot of crap on your screen, maybe a better summary is, real world performance for YOUR company cannot be measured by any benchmark that Intel, IBM, Sun, Tom's Hardware, can tell you. Each platform has its shortcomings and all-in-all, Dell has chosen to support Intel, which for my company is the right move. So don't jump down their throats for chosing a "inferior" chip, or not addressing the needs of gamers. Save your flaming for the tech support department, from what i hear, they could use it.
I hope the RIAA finds you and explains it to you. Getting something for nothing when everyone else has to pay for it is illegal, period, regardless of whether you "would have paid for it" if you couldn't get it for free.
Not exactly. If I download 1,000 MP3's (truly many people have more than this), and each song sells for $0.99 then I have just stolen $1,000 from someone. Wording it as "money they can potentially make" is just a nice way of saying "money they didn't make cause someone took it away from them by illegally downloading music." Whether they had it in the first place and then lost it, or just didn't get it at all doesn't make it legal or even "more legal."
Finally, someone without their head up their ass responding to this article.
.OOPS, i've just violated copyright. Was there a disclaimer before the movie that said in french and english that I wasn't allowed to do that? No, they put that on home videos. Where then did it say it?
I understand where everyone is coming from, "Hey, we had a good thing going and they took it away from us. We were walking into 7/11 stores and taking a penny from the penny tray, sure, every once in a while someone stole a couple million from a bank, but they just got the wrong directions to the 7/11."
I understand that SOME artists allow bootlegged material to be redistributed. Somewhere this has to be posted because usually the label has the final say since the label usually owns the songs. If the label and the artist have a legal agreement that the live recording can be redistributed free of charge then why not email/write to you artist and tell them to host it on their site. Then they can set up the torrent, you won't have to go mining the internet for a tracker site, and users can submit their recordings to the artist themselves.
However, what is probably going on is people think they are free to do whatever they want with a live recording and those people are in violation. Let's look at an example, I pay $9 to go to the latest Star Wars movie at the drive-in. It's a public showing, I paid to see it, therefore I'm going to video tape it. I get home, put that video up on the internet . .
If you still think the last example was illegal, then consider someone at a concert doing the same thing. I'm no lawyer so I won't tell you what is legal and what isn't. But I'm sick of every IP and copyright violation that gets pursued resulting in 99% of the slashdot community feeling it is an attack on freedom and the pursuit of happiness. You don't like it, write your own music, make your own movies. But if you do like it, then you're stuck with the fact that they are the only ones capable of doing that and they are free to charge whatever they want. Shit, nobody is getting up in arms about the gas companies charging me $3 a gallon for gas, talk about violation. Pay your $9.99 for your CD or listen to the radio.
In short, yes. Any code compiled for x86_64 will run on these chips, which, as previously stated, have actually been out for at least a week. The prescott cores that make up the 64-bit chips also have 2MB of L2 cache now.
Piping through wc seems like a tremendous waste of time and typing when a -c option to grep will do the same thing . . .
So, after some 25 years, half a dozen releases, countless hours of computer time "enhancing" the movie, plenty of George's wasted time "enhancing" the movie, and what are we left with a DVD edtion featuring: 1) gray boxes still floating around tie fighters 2) Death Star computer plans to plan an attack that look like an Atari game from the 80's 3) No bloopers reel 4) No added footage of Carrie Fisher (oops, Princess Leia) in her bikini. Guess we'll have to wait for the Ultra Special Edition in 2007, or the Director's Cut in 2009, or the Fox Collector's unrated version in 2012 . . .
Ok ok, so I understand that some of you haven't read the books and believe that the additional scenes in FotR were trivial. But come on, leaving out the reforging of Aragorn's sword by the elves? Tolkein's poetry? Crack open the book for one minute and see how many poems you come across. This man invented (documented) 10,000 years of history, constructed a couple languages from scratch, and wrote countless songs and poems to complete the world of Lord of the Rings and Jackson all but throws it away. The extended edition of Lord of the Rings did exactly what I wanted it to, it completed the parts of the movie that I thought were missing from the book. It will be a harder challenge for TTT:EE to do the same, but I look forward to the "small" details being put back in so that the people who have read and enjoyed the books can see it in action.
That's great that that prices keep coming down, regardless of quality. But the real problem here is the fact that it has gotten to the point where we feel more comfortable throwing away a 30 pound printer that has seen a 1,000 page workload to buy a new one. All of these printers go somewhere (read landfill), not that many people would care sitting snuggly in their mansions printing off the latest slashdot article so they don't have to stare at their $1000 monitor to read it, cause that would be hard on the eyes. We still have our HP LaserJet II (I know, along with half the readers on here) and likewise it continues to print to this day, not to mention that it was one of the first printers I can remember seeing under the driver list on Linux. Not to mention our HP 4Si (Duplex :-) ) and our HP2100 that print with great quality. Most people just need to realize that eventually all of this wastefullness is going to catch up with us, so just shell out the extra $100 and buy a printer that will last more than a year. Believe it or not it'll save you and the rest of us in the long run.