As mentioned by others, any content that is meant to be viewed or heard can never be secure to the point that piracy can't happen.
It would be naive to think that Hollywood isn't aware of that, what they want to control are the channels by which a consumer pays for the content. If you can get the consummer to pay for the content in several different ways without allowing them to reuse content across formats and viewing mediums, then you stand to make more money.
Looking purely at die size, one can expect manufacturing costs of the p4 and ppc970 as being roughly equal:
PowerPC 970 1.8 GHz, 0.13um, 121 mm2, 52 million transitors
Pentium 4 2.8 GHz, 0.13um, 131 mm2, 55 million transistors
As long as IBM is not using the exotic materials of the power4, then the main advantage Intel has for pricing is that their R&D can be spread over many more chips.
What the R&D costs of the ppc 970 are is interesting, especially since IBM is trying to position themselves as a maker of custom chips leveraging their ppc ISA and the experience gained through their big bucks power series.
Just like dropping bags of chips, mars wrappers, old newspapers, a bit of your sandwich isn't vandalism. But it sure is covered by anti-littering laws! Just because something can be easily removed doesn't mean it costs the city nothing!
The American automobile infrastructure has evolved to the point where we are stuck with its success. How? We have problems with raising fuel prices to account for highway deaths and emergency service as well as polution since it would unfairly hit the poor who have no adequate public transit to get to work. We won't see the expansion of a interstate toll system to pay for the maintenance of roads as the trucking industry has a huge sway, despite the fact that road damage comes mostly from higher weight vehicles. So instead we pay for all of it through income taxes regardless of usage patterns.
What will a governor do, add another lane to a highway to increase capacity or spend the money on new high speed rails with wider curves and imminent domain purchases and all the legal crap that comes from forcibly getting land from people (remember high-speed needs new rail layout to achieve speed).
Having a subsidized transit system is vital since the increase in activity between locations can only strengthen the service industry and economy. But spending the subsidy all in one area provides diminishing returns, and returns on investment should be taken account of. You can have a 10 lane highway, but if it feeds into one lane exits, you still get congestion.
This train may address the poor state of American railways, but does nothing to change the political climate that is the real chokepoint.
A question about SPECfp and SPECint, do they test the performance only of the integer and floating point ALUs or take in account Single Instruction Multiple Data execution units? I mean if the SPEC benchmarks ignore the performance brought by 1/3 of the overall chip real estate, then they are poor overall judges of what can be done with either the G4 or upcomming ppc 970. On a desktop you are unlikely to run apps that all cater to one type of performance criteria such as integer performance. Specialized markets seem to be the targets of benchmarks in the first place. So far as a consumer it is all about how it feels, and that is just so subjective!
If PowerPC keeps lagging in performance year after year, then Apple does have what it takes to make a transition. Apple has decent hardware abstraction layer in OS X, it has its native development tools allready ported to x86, it inherits knowledge from Next developers who were doing dual binaries to support several Next architectures.
It is worth reminding people that Apple back in 1999 was talking of the Yellow Box, a full port of the Cocoa development environment for x86 to interest developers to create dual binaries that could run on either a wintel based computer or a Mac computer.
Now, why this won't happen now. Traditional window developers won't be interested in doing dual binaries and shifting their development environment to Cocoa. Traditional Mac developers are for now still stuck using Carbon, the transition environment from system 9 to OS X. And until these developers aren't at least on Cocoa, Apple will kill itself in doing a radical hardware switch.
But I can envision (not in the next two years) a time when Apple could have the flexibility to transition without creating a tremendous heartache to its loyal developers. Also, even if Apple has its own dedicated architecture based on an Intel or AMD chip, the cocoa environment will suddenly be more attractive to regular Wintel developers, since we probably aren't talking full dual binaries.
Slashdot Mirror
As mentioned by others, any content that is meant to be viewed or heard can never be secure to the point that piracy can't happen. It would be naive to think that Hollywood isn't aware of that, what they want to control are the channels by which a consumer pays for the content. If you can get the consummer to pay for the content in several different ways without allowing them to reuse content across formats and viewing mediums, then you stand to make more money.
Looking purely at die size, one can expect manufacturing costs of the p4 and ppc970 as being roughly equal: PowerPC 970 1.8 GHz, 0.13um, 121 mm2, 52 million transitors Pentium 4 2.8 GHz, 0.13um, 131 mm2, 55 million transistors As long as IBM is not using the exotic materials of the power4, then the main advantage Intel has for pricing is that their R&D can be spread over many more chips. What the R&D costs of the ppc 970 are is interesting, especially since IBM is trying to position themselves as a maker of custom chips leveraging their ppc ISA and the experience gained through their big bucks power series.
Just like dropping bags of chips, mars wrappers, old newspapers, a bit of your sandwich isn't vandalism. But it sure is covered by anti-littering laws! Just because something can be easily removed doesn't mean it costs the city nothing!
The American automobile infrastructure has evolved to the point where we are stuck with its success. How? We have problems with raising fuel prices to account for highway deaths and emergency service as well as polution since it would unfairly hit the poor who have no adequate public transit to get to work. We won't see the expansion of a interstate toll system to pay for the maintenance of roads as the trucking industry has a huge sway, despite the fact that road damage comes mostly from higher weight vehicles. So instead we pay for all of it through income taxes regardless of usage patterns. What will a governor do, add another lane to a highway to increase capacity or spend the money on new high speed rails with wider curves and imminent domain purchases and all the legal crap that comes from forcibly getting land from people (remember high-speed needs new rail layout to achieve speed). Having a subsidized transit system is vital since the increase in activity between locations can only strengthen the service industry and economy. But spending the subsidy all in one area provides diminishing returns, and returns on investment should be taken account of. You can have a 10 lane highway, but if it feeds into one lane exits, you still get congestion. This train may address the poor state of American railways, but does nothing to change the political climate that is the real chokepoint.
A question about SPECfp and SPECint, do they test the performance only of the integer and floating point ALUs or take in account Single Instruction Multiple Data execution units? I mean if the SPEC benchmarks ignore the performance brought by 1/3 of the overall chip real estate, then they are poor overall judges of what can be done with either the G4 or upcomming ppc 970. On a desktop you are unlikely to run apps that all cater to one type of performance criteria such as integer performance. Specialized markets seem to be the targets of benchmarks in the first place. So far as a consumer it is all about how it feels, and that is just so subjective!
If PowerPC keeps lagging in performance year after year, then Apple does have what it takes to make a transition. Apple has decent hardware abstraction layer in OS X, it has its native development tools allready ported to x86, it inherits knowledge from Next developers who were doing dual binaries to support several Next architectures.
It is worth reminding people that Apple back in 1999 was talking of the Yellow Box, a full port of the Cocoa development environment for x86 to interest developers to create dual binaries that could run on either a wintel based computer or a Mac computer.
Now, why this won't happen now. Traditional window developers won't be interested in doing dual binaries and shifting their development environment to Cocoa. Traditional Mac developers are for now still stuck using Carbon, the transition environment from system 9 to OS X. And until these developers aren't at least on Cocoa, Apple will kill itself in doing a radical hardware switch.
But I can envision (not in the next two years) a time when Apple could have the flexibility to transition without creating a tremendous heartache to its loyal developers. Also, even if Apple has its own dedicated architecture based on an Intel or AMD chip, the cocoa environment will suddenly be more attractive to regular Wintel developers, since we probably aren't talking full dual binaries.