Re:The real purpose of DeCSS
on
DeCSS Update
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· Score: 2
I've heard the argument that DeCSS isn't useful for piracy--this is mostly crap. Sure, professional pirates could already copy DVDs bit-for-bit, but home users can't since there's a small section that's pre-burned on most DVD-RAMS that prevents that. DeCSS is useful for ripping DVDs so they can be encoded in MPEG-(pick a number) format, and then distributed through your local warez d00d.
Apparently, you've heard the wrong argument vis-a-vis DeCSS and small-scale piracy.
DeCSS has nothing to do with small-scale piracy because programs which intercepted the decoded video/audio streams off a DVD (so long as it was playing in a licensed DVD player) already existed, and indeed have existed all the way since 1997, when DVD was in its infancy. The result one gets from these programs is just about identical to the result one gets from "running" DeCSS on a DVD; in both cases, it just takes running some other software to turn the files in DVD format (forget the name) to avi or MPEG or whatever. The only difference (as far as the pirate is concerned) is that these programs are much easier to use than DeCSS. Theoretically they may cause some small signal degredation over pure DVD (because the video stream is captured at the level of the video card driver, after it has been passed through the electrical noise inside your computer); however, compared to the quality loss inherent in recombining the audio and video streams and saving the result in a (usually lossy) compressed format for transport over the Internet, this loss of quality is negligible.
And indeed, it's no surprise that such programs are widely available; the only way to stop them would be if the DVD video and audio streams remained encrypted while they passed through your computer, until they were decrypted by special hardware decryption units in your video card and sound card. Luckily for all of us, this is impossible, because PC's are built on open components and open standards, and thus cannot hide anything from their users for long. As it stands now, the only hardware component in most people's PC's which is purposely engineered to hide its operations from its owner is the DVD-ROM; but as this example shows, the PC will be a functionally open platform until all of its components are closed.
The scary news is that things are heading that way. The next standard for digital video-to-monitor signals (pushed by such friends of the consumer as Intel) includes support for encryption. Amongst other things, this means that we will lose the ability to take screenshots of our own desktops if such a standard is adopted!
My bet, though, is that it won't be. If it is, it is at Intel's own peril. The success of the PC is almost entirely due to the fact that it is an open system, and the fair competition that fact has engendered.
But in any case, the simple fact is that, until the PC has been hijacked from us, "secure" formats--be they DVD, Microsoft's WMA, Liquid Audio, or whatever passes for SDMI or DVD-Audio--will never be secure.
Bottom line, who doesn't believe that if John Carmack left ID tomorrow he would be able to continue working on what he wants
Well...considering he's just stated that what he wants to be working on is Doom III, me; Doom is of course id's intellectual property. On the other hand, from a technical standpoint--which is what JC does anyways--your point still stands. Besides, assuming his leaving was mutual and relatively amicable, Kevin and Adrian might let John's new company use the Doom name anyways (like they're letting Xatrix make a new Wolfenstein).
Half Life and Kingpin blow Q2 out of the water. I'm tired of the run and shoot and run and shoot and run and shoot and run and shoot and run and shoot and run and shoot gameplay of id games.
Then you might be pleasantly surprised by Doom III. According to what John has said, it will be designed to give a completely immersive single-player experience--which strongly suggests that it will be very different from the Quake series, which were all designed with multiplayer in mind. Indeed, if I had to guess I'd say it will be most like...well, Half Life. (Of course, with its mods HL has some pretty badass online play too.)
Not to mention the overhead of paying record executives' bloated salaries, the cost the record company pays for publicity and marketing, the cost of the record store's overhead, the cost of the clerks at the record store...
Even at $5 for an album instead of $15 (actually, the current average list price for a CD is $18 IIRC), the artist would typically be making 3-6 times as much per sale.
Basically, you've backed your argument down from "copyright infringement does cause actual economic harm" to "copyright infringement does cause actual economic harm in the case of avant-garde "classical" recordings." Now, your point that, besides per-disc duplication and distribution costs--which the Internet has rendered anachronistic--there are also very significant one-time economic costs involved in making a music recording is a very important and valid one. Still, when you base this on a segment of the music industry as unrepresentative as avant-garde classical music, you're asking for trouble.
Specifically, the recording costs for this sort of music is much higher than for mainstream music, and the sales figures are much much *much* lower--thus the economic impact of the "one-time fees" appears much larger than it is in most cases. But of course the comparison is meaningless: I can guarantee you that there are very, very few avant-garde classical sales which have been lost to Napster of all things. First off, the target demographics are very different. Second, if an album only sells 2000 copies, what do you think the chances are that someone will rip it and share it on Napster?? And third, more than most music, avant-garde classical music demands a very high quality stereo system to be fully appreciated--much higher quality than anything possible with mp3 played out of computer speakers.
So we've established that this sort of music is irrelevent to the issue at hand. The question becomes, do your points still stand? And the answer is, for the most part, no. There is absolutely no way in hell that the recording budget for anything but the highest of high-profile, surest of sure pop superhits would ever approach anything near $500,000. Absolutely ridiculous. After all, you still haven't answered my main critique on your numbers: if recording costs are 66% of the cost structure of a CD, how is a band supposed to ever pay it off with just a 10% royalty?? The argument that many bands never get out of debt to their record company only answers this objection part way. And frankly, it doesn't offer much support for keeping the music industry the way it is.
As for whether mp3 actually increases or decreases sales, I think we agree that any effect is relatively small, although possibly still significant. I don't believe the correlation is as direct as you would have it--that is, while I would have no problem believing that mp3 might decrease overall CD sales by your 1-5% (reasonable numbers), I don't think that the mp3s downloaded necessarily come from the CD's that would have been bought. Rather, I think that the way most people use their mp3s is different enough that it competes with CD's not as a direct replacement--if that were true, college students wouldn't buy CD's anymore at all--but rather as a replacement for one's time. The distinction, while abstract, is significant since what we're arguing about here is the moral implications of downloading mp3s of copyrighted music.
To put it another way, you phrased your argument like this: Posters here have declared that they own NO CD's, or haven't bought ANY CD's since they started pirating MP3's. So MP3's are _definitely_ viewed as a subsitute for CD's.
Well how would you respond to the following statement: "Ever since I took up skydiving, I haven't watched any TV." According to your logic, skydiving must therefore be a substitute for TV and thus skydivers are ripping off the networks, and ought to compensate them or maybe be thrown in jail, or perhaps just hang their heads in shame at their immoral hobby. After all, TV shows cost a whole lot to film, and their production is predicated on the prediction that enough people will sit and watch them instead of jumping out of planes!
Of course it's an absurd analogy, as mp3s are certainly a more direct substitute for CD's than skydiving is for TV. But from observing many many mp3 "pirates" (including, of course, myself), I would say that the substitution is not as direct as one would think, and thus that any moral claim against mp3s based on unrecuperated recording costs is tenuous at best, even if mp3s as a whole cause more recording costs to go unrecuperated as a whole. If anything, I would guess that mp3s *increase* the sales of the particular CD's they are ripped from, but *decrease* the sales of other CD's.
First off, I don't believe your figures. After all, if it costs $10/sale for recording costs for the typical classical CD as you say, then why is like half of the classical CD market those discs which sell at a list price of $3.99? I realize these are lower quality (thus cheaper) recordings, typically with less well known (cheaper) orchestras, but according to your figures, the cost of the recording and the orchestras would have to be negative.
Also, while I don't know too much about the economics of the classical recording industry, I do know that for mainstream records, the artists are the ones who have to pay for the recording costs. (The label basically loans them the recording time, equipment, etc, but they have to pay them back. That's why Lars said record labels are like banks.) As I understand it, this comes directly out of the artists' cut of the profits, which is typically about 10% of the sale price of a CD. Thus your contention that recording costs contribute to 66% of a typical CD's cost structure seems a bit problematic.
Oh, and also, I followed the link you provided (to a record company website; nice trustworthy source you got there) and it says that the cost of making a symphonic record can be as much as 50,000 pounds (about $70,000), NOT 500,000.
So first, your figures are completely and utterly wrong. But don't worry: it's only an order of magnitude.;)
But that's besides the point. Basically this is the central thesis of your argument: See, since the record had an expectation of a certain number of buyers, the costs were allocated to cover them. Which is the point exactly: for the vast majority of "music pirates" (arrrrr mateys!), downloading mp3s does not replace buying CDs. If you want to listen to a whole album (without 1 second gaps between tracks which are supposed to flow together), or to have it sound good (i.e. not subjected to a horrendously noisy electrical environment, pumped out a cheap sound card and into speakers which, if they're good, are designed primarily for magnetic shielding and playing games), or to support the artists who make music you really like, you buy the CD. Indeed, despite billions of files traded on Napster, CD sales went up last year, as did CD prices (of course, the RIAA has been found guilty of price gouging by the FTC, but that's another story, which, according to you, didn't happen).
If you want to listen to pop music in the background while you surf the web or work, you get mp3s. If you want to listen to something new that you otherwise wouldn't pop $18 for and take the chance that you won't like it, you get the mp3 and buy it if it's cool. If you want to find b-sides, live performances, unsigned or indie label bands, or music only available in certain regions of the US or in foreign countries, you use Napster. For most dastardly "music pirates", mp3 replaces the radio, not their stereo. The only difference is you get to choose the order songs play in, you don't have to listen to ads or DJ drivel, and you don't have to conform to the top 40. To make an analogy, "pirated" mp3 (for 95% of its users) is a lot closer to a TiVo than it is to busting into Blockbuster with a sawed-off shotgun and clearing out the New Releases.
The point is, your argument rests on the flawed premise that every person downloading an mp3 is one less person buying the CD. Now, some people have argued that Napster actually promotes CD sales, because it's essentially free and effective marketing, especially for CD's most people would never hear of otherwise. I happen to believe that mp3 will hurt CD sales slightly, all things equal. But this is not because listening to mp3s will replace listening to CD's for more than a very small handful of people, but rather because it provides another way of spending their time. In other words, the popularity of mp3 might hurt CD sales in the same way that a new crop of extremely popular video games would hurt CD sales--people will just spend some of their time doing something else, namely using their computers.
Now, looking down the road it seems pretty plausible that mp3 will be eventually replaced by a better-than-CD quality format (but not, of course, before a couple years after CD's are replaced by DVD-audio or (hopefully) SACD), and stereo equipment will start being able to interface with your computer, or even the Internet directly. Once that happens, you may have an argument. But I think you'll find that, contrary to what you must believe, most people pay for what something is economically worth. Even us pirates.
go into Tower and hold the place up for CD's (the moral equivalent).
For the gazillionth time...no it's not.
The CD you steal from Tower cost the record company some amount (probably around 20 cents) to buy, press. Add another 20 cents for painting the top. The case and little booklet probably add another 60 cents or so. Then they paid someone to drive that CD from the factory where it was made to Tower. Then Tower paid a good deal of money for it--probably on the order of 8 or 9 bucks. Plus, Tower needs to sell CDs because it has other costs--the cost of their building, the cost of paying people to work the registers, etc. Finally, if I steal a CD from Tower, then that's one less CD that they have, and one more CD that someone else cannot legally buy. If Tower ends up selling out of that CD, then there's someone in the world who drove all the way to the record store only to find out that they're all out of the CD they wanted because I took one of them; that person, too, has a legitimate grievance against me.
Now, when I "pirate" an mp3 off of Napster, the only resource I'm using is bandwidth, and I already pay for all the bandwidth I can get by my monthly ISP fee (or college tuition fee, as the case may be). Yes, my using the Internet's bandwidth theoretically slows down everyone else, but this is the same argument as saying the person who has to drive to the record store to get his music contributes to traffic and hydrocarbon emissions. I'm forcing someone else's computer to serve me a file, but they volunteered so that's hardly a grievance. The only person who directly loses anything of monetary value in the transaction is me--I lose 5 MB or so of disk space, which at today's prices is worth 5 or 10 cents.
Now, if the song I'm downloading isn't public domain, I'm perpetrating copyright infringement, and I'm arguably causing economic "harm" (actually lack of economic benefit, which is different) to the copyright owners (the record label, BTW, not the artist). But it most certainly is not morally equivalent to shoplifting the CD.
Fear of being caught is a major deterrent; with anonymity it is impossible to be caught (by definition). How many people who pirate MP3's would continue if their identity would be linked to each packet they transferred across the network, available to the public (including the copyright holder of the stolen work?)
Well, I'd love some anonymity on the Internet. As it is, due to Harvard's englightened policy of protecting its students' privacy, my IP address is dhandelm.student.harvard.edu. It's not quite the same as having my SS# at the header of every packet I send across the Internet, but it's pretty darn close. (First letter of my first name and first 7 letters of my last; a simple ph search on Harvard's website is all it takes to get my full name, age, address, email address, phone number...) And frankly, I couldn't care less if every packet of the tens (pushing hundreds?) of thousands of songs I've uploaded via Napster, iMesh, Gnutella, and my university LAN were forwarded directly to Edgar Bronfman's desk.
If they can (doubtful), they will get huge privacy invadement lawsuits and the next software that gets as popular as napster will have IP spoofing as a built in feature
Gnutella already does, if I understand it correctly. There's a little field on the Config page labeled "Force local IP to: ".
And honestly, people. As we all know, these programs are nothing more than FTP but automated and with some clever search features. (Well, technically not, but same idea.) They're declaring war on file transfers over the Internet? Good luck with that one...
The source code (the actual music sheets and lyrics) is out there and free as far as Lars is concerned.
Possibly. But not as far as the RIAA (or US copyright law, for that matter) is concerned, just FYI.
If Lars had a unique painting and made a few prints of it for his friends, would you complain?
If I could have enjoyed that painting at absolutely no cost to him at all, yes. The difference here is that paintings are currently scarce, just like recorded music used to be. But with the Internet, recorded music is no longer scarce. Using the legal system to force everyone to pretend that it still is distorts the market and prevents the widest possible distribution of people from enjoying art.
So the information is completely free. What are you complaining about? Oh... wait. You want HIS compiled version of the information done by Metallica (a beowulf cluster of Alphas) not the one done by you (a TRS-80).
Um...the point of the saying "information wants to be free" is that anything which can be transmitted at zero cost will proliferate to market saturation. Thus "information" in this context is anything which can be sent over the internet--which includes "compiled" recordings, not just (equally "pirated") sheet music. Binary software wants to be free, too, and if you spend any time looking you'll find that most of it is. The difference is that software companies are much more clued-in about the phenomenon and have added many non-"information" addons to their products, like official support, manuals, etc., in an effort to slow down warezing.
Well, it is his performance, so he can do it for you at your every whim, or do it when the hell he wants and charge you for it. If you were in his shoes, which would you prefer? Honestly, now?
I don't care. It shouldn't be his decision. He should have a larger say, but it shouldn't be his decision.
This whole thing is a battle about the future direction of the law, and whether we really want to criminalize behavior which most knowledgable citizens find completely ethical and in fact engage in. As such, this decision about where to take the law should be made by society as a whole, and in the interests of society as a whole. Now, those self-interests have to be enlightened, and thus ought to include some way of solving the problem of making sure musicians still have the resources and incentives to make the best music possible. But that doesn't mean the musicians get to decide. Society gets to decide, and our decision should be what's best for us, not for Lars.
Of course, most members of society are too poorly informed to care much, and thus it will probably be RIAA dollars that decide, at least in the short term. The war on copying will likely be long and drawn out, if not so ugly (after all, I have yet to see any ideas on how to crack down on Freenet that would even come close to surviving a Supreme Court challenge).
In the end, though, enough people will figure out that this is important, and their collective opinions will make the decision. It could be that most of them will end up agreeing with you. But I don't think so.
Yeah, Linux has great apps for every aspect of the Internet...except for what people actually spend 99% of their time on the Internet doing: browsing and email.
Email is of course a matter of preference, although the fact that until Evolution there won't be a good multi-pane GUI email/PIM program for Linux is a definite weakness of the platform overall. Pine may be good enough for you, but for someone whose job revolves around contacts, meetings, etc, it doesn't cut it.
As for browsing--which, for most, *is* the Internet--there's simply no comparison. IE 5 for the Mac is hands-down the best web browser ever made. (Except for the fact that most Macs only have 1 mouse button; of course, that's hardly IE 5's fault.) If you disagree with me, it's almost certainly because you haven't used it. And no, I'm not a Mac owner. In any case, Netscape for Linux (or anything for that matter) is objectively god-awful, and Mozilla, Konquerer, etc., while promising, are not ready for prime time yet.
Frankly, for the way most of the computer-using population (and the people for whom this article--and Corel Linux, while were at it--was targeted) use the Internet, the Mac is clearly the better platform.
Right on! Here's 172 Karma points (probably less after this post) backing you up, AC!
I've only got 74, but I support him all the way as well. For those who won't browse at 0 to see it, here's what the AC wrote:
The Slashdork crowd is pathetic. (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on 11:37 AM May 18th, 2000 CST (#83)
It's a real pity that Jeff had to be subjected to such (largely) insulting and arrogant questions.
This so-called community likes to think they are better than everyone else, and that no one outside this pathetic clique should be treated with any respect. Was it really necessary to say that his CSS work 'sucks'? Is it really necessary to insult him as being a 'hot shot' (something he didn't even call himself)? And talk of cardinal sins...well folks, how many of you are real working web designers?
The fact that the 'moderators' upped these insulting questions to '5-insightful' or whatever just speaks volumes about this place.
Newsflash, slashdorks: You don't represent the views of the Linux/*BSD community. You're just a bunch of whining nerds with overly-inflated egos.
Alas, if I had to use Netscape for Linux all day, I'd probably be so bitter that I'd want to lash out at someone who pushed for working browsers and aesthetic web page design too. IMO, the main reason everyone around here seems to want the web to just be gopher with hyperlinks, and email to consist only of one-size, one-color, unformatted fixed-width text, is because unfortunately that's what the current state of apps on Linux works best with. Right now, using Linux (or any Unix) as a platform for enjoying the multimedia aspects of the Internet works about as well as using Win98 for a web server. Every OS has strengths and weaknesses, and this interview unfortunately exposed how some of the current weaknesses of Unices have biased their users into thinking anything better is wrong.
Happily, KDE/Konquerer 2, Mozilla, and Evolution look like they just might bring this side of Linux into the modern world.
That's 74 now, *definitely* less after this post.;)
"In a few months, there will be exactly two browsers that get CSS-1 right: Mozilla/Nav 6 for all platforms, and IE5/Mac which we have now."
Bullshit.
*Right Now* Opera v3.6 gets CSS1 more 'right' than MSIE5.
Opera 3.6 gets CSS1 more right than IE5 FOR WINDOWS. Like he said, IE5 FOR MACINTOSH is the only browser currently shipping which supports CSS-1 completely. Yes, "completely" means more right than Opera.
In addition, it happens to have a pretty cool, very customizable interface. And it's the fastest rendering browser around. (This is just my subjective opinion, but IE5 for Mac is noticably faster than IE 5 Windows, which I am quite sure was the previous fastest browser available.)
In case anyone thinks I'm into Macs or something (God forbid!), no I don't own one, and no, I could never get used to surfing the web with only one mouse button. But trust me--if you haven't seen it, IE5 for Mac is one damn fine program.
As for Jeffrey Zeldman, believe it or not, he actually knows more about browser standards compliance than you do.
The entire Itanium platform is basically nothing more than a test platform for the next IA-64 chip, McKinley.
This is because Merced/Itanium is 2.5 years late, and poorly designed. It is struggling to hit a meagre 800MHz (it was designed to debut at 800MHz, but on.25u process and in 1998), and appears to have only 96k L2 cache and 64k L1 cache, because rather than reaping the predicted simplifications of moving to a VLIW design, the Itanium core has fallen into a stew of complexity which leaves very little room for large cache size, even at.18u. This project has chewed up and spit out all of Intel's seasoned engineers on their Santa Clara design team, and was basically finished up by a huge committee of inexperienced kids fresh out of college. Every knowledgeble independent hardware analyst I've seen has said that, while IA-64 has some potentially promising ideas behind it, Itanium is going to be an ugly plodding beast of a chip, and its only chance at success is through miraculous marketing. Too bad for Intel's marketing machine that they're trying to move into a new space (high-end servers) with Itanium, and thus the people buying these machines are going to be well-informed and used to buying from vendors other than Intel.
The good news for IA-64 is that McKinley, the successor to Itanium, is much more on track (it should be out in volume by Q2 or Q3 2001), and appears to be performing quite nicely. Incidentally (or not), McKinley has been designed almost entirely by a much smaller (and more experienced) team over at HP (where EPIC, the philosophy behind IA-64, was designed as well); about all Intel will have to do with it is the fabbing and the Intel Inside logo. Also, McKinley will have the advantage of being fabbed with a brand-new.13u process, which ought to leave it enough room for a real L1 and L2 cache, and allow for presentable clock speeds. Thus, most organizations are looking at Itanium as a sort of public beta for McKinley--they'll buy a couple to get used to the platform, start to develop software for it, and have a core understanding in place in case they decide to upgrade all of their high-end servers to McKinley in a year or so. Almost no one is planning on deploying Itanium as a long term solution, because it will simply not be cost effective for the mediocre performance it will have.
And thus the "race" to get a good IA-64 OS up and running really isn't all that important. MS will be sure to have W2K-64 "gold" well before McKinley is released, and that's all that really counts. Getting Linux on Itanium solid before W2K-64 goes gold will be nice, but it most certainly isn't going to win Linux a beachhead in the high-end corporate market, simply because most high-end corporate stuff can afford to wait for W2K-64 to be ready before they switch to IA-64.
On the other hand, a rather peculiar consequence of the IA-64 design is that applications need to be recompiled for each new processor core in order to take advantage of the EPIC features. (This is because, in IA-64, the compiler does most of the instruction scheduling, and not a scheduler in the CPU's logic; thus, the compiler better know how many functional units the CPU has, for example, or else it will schedule things all wrong.) This might seem to give an advantage to OSS, since one can just get a new compiler and recompile all of one's applications if one has the source to them. However, considering the market all of this is directed towards, I'm quite sure no one will have any trouble getting seperate versions of W2K or Oracle or whathaveyou optimized for Itanium or McKinley or any subsequent IA-64 chips.
For anyone who was expecting IA-64 to show up on the desktop anytime soon: don't. The first IA-64 chip scheduled to have a shot at the high-end consumer market is Deerfield, planned for 2004, but expected to come out later if at all. It would take a little bit to explain why, but EPIC is very much better suited to single-tasking machines running streamlined, well-tuned code--things like databases. It's just a poor fit for consumer applications. And anyways, if you want a neat Intel chip to get excited about, Willamette--the next desktop chip--looks way sexier than Itanium, and has a lot of cool design features (eg. double-pumped ALU, trace cache) which are just as innovative as IA-64's VLIW stuff.
Just to close things off, here's a couple links for those looking to learn more about Itanium and IA-64. (Even if the design doesn't pan out, some of the principles behind it are very interesting.)
Hannibal on IA-64 vs. Sun's MAJC: mostly about MAJC (very interesting in its own right!), but a good example of a different approach to VLIW than IA-64's. (Crusoe is yet another example of a completely different approach to VLIW.)
Paul DeMone's Itanium article on realworldtech.com (unfortunately, the site seems to be down at the moment, so I can't get a link): an impressive technical argument about why Itanium might not actually achieve higher ILP in actual conditions, along with an interesting historical parallel of why this wouldn't be the first time Intel pushed a radical new chip architecture and it completely flopped (I forget the name of the previous chip, but it's an interesting story).
Some good points. Basically it was just late and the original poster insulted me and happened to be completely wrong about some things; I didn't mean to get into an anti-Mac flamewar (believe me!)--because, for one thing, I actually like a whole lot about the Mac. I think there are plenty of good ideas in the OS that haven't yet been duplicated in any other (although there's plenty about the OS that hasn't changed in 16 years and it shows); I actually do think system design is a good thing, and Apple's is the best (except for the default keyboard and mouse); etc. I think the biggest reason for my rant, oddly enough, is that I'm extraordinarily impressed by what I've seen of OS X: awesome technologies like Quartz and Cocoa built on top of a BSD/Mach kernel with such an astoundingly pretty interface--what's not to like??
The hardware. Basically, I think I'm just disappointed that, if I do decide to go OS X with my next computer purchase, I'll know that I'm overpaying for the performance I'll get. Also, the fact that Apple continues to be disingenuous and trot out baldfaced lies about its "superior" performance is annoying as well. Finally, I thought it was relevant for this article to note that, contrary to popular opinion, a dual-G4, while pretty damn fast, is by no means world-changing. Indeed, it's slower than a quick dual-PIII, and let's not even get into the dual-Mustangs or dual-Willamettes that'll be available by the time these babies ship.
Having said that, your points fail to impress me too much. Like I said, the biggest point raised by the ArsTechnica Photoshop benchmarks isn't who wins which filter benchmark by 5 seconds, but the fact that the G3 took 2.5 times as long to open up the file. Like I said, only a small percentage of PS users actually run Gaussian Blurs, but you better believe they all open files. I'm willing to bet that any complete PS benchmark--that is, a script which starts timing, opens PS, opens a large file, runs some filters on it, saves it, opens another, runs more tests, etc, closes and then stops timing--will show a large advantage to the PC.
In any case, the fact that PS code used MMX and SSE early on doesn't "prove" to me that PS is equally optimitzed--even if you use assembly code, it's very possible to spend more time optimizing for one CPU than another, and from what I've heard, Adobe spends more time optimizing for Mac. The fact that PS 5.5 came out for the Mac a month or so before it did for PC also lends credence to this.
In any case, you're right to note that PS is a fairer test than, for example, Word 6 for Mac, which ported Windows API's instead of porting the program and thus performed terribly. That doesn't mean it's a fair test, though; there's plenty of shades between API porting and equal optimization. SPEC would be much closer, but "for some reason" Apple doesn't want to spend the time optimizing a compiler for it. I suppose that's their prerogative, though.
As for the 1MB half-speed L3 cache on the Mac, we now know that a smaller faster on-die cache beats a larger slower off-die cache on almost all consumer applications. That's why the Coppermine PIIIs (256k full-speed on-die cache) cream the Katmai's (512k 1/2-speed off-die-but-in-cartridge cache). A "backside"--i.e. L3--cache is considerably slower than even an off-die L2 cache, because of the considerably higher latencies incurred in communicating across a bus (even a dedicated one) rather than across the chip cartridge. Generally, L3 caches have only proven to be useful in applications like databases, although I suppose it's better than nothing.
Just because AltiVec is a superset of SSE/3DNow! doesn't mean it wouldn't have been designed differently if the G4 were a desktop chip instead of an embedded DSP chip. For one thing, certain instructions may have been better optimized than others. But the largest point is that for desktop applications, AltiVec is overkill. It's great, but it tends to run ahead of the Mac's i/o subsystem, and it just takes up more space than it's worth. More space means higher costs, lower yields, and lower clock-speeds. All things being equal, AltiVec is the best desktop SIMD around; the problem is that as a design consideration for a desktop CPU, it's not worth it.
And finally...I thought I'd heard ATi's Mac drivers finally improved? I know they were terrible at first, but I could have sworn I'd heard they were nearly up to PC quality now. In any case, I'd love to see some detailed (i.e. at many different quality levels and resolutions on a couple different CPU's) Q3:A benchmarks for the Mac; it's generally possible to determine when the limiting factor of a test is the CPU and when it's the video card hardware and when it's the drivers, so these tests, if properly interpreted, could give us a good deal more insight even if ATi's drivers were bad. (I'd rather see the tests on a 3dfx card anyways, since their drivers are better on both Mac and PC.)
If I were you, I'd have a mid-range Thunderbird at the top of my list. It will debut at 700-1000 Mhz, and probably hit 1.1 GHz soon thereafter, so we're probably talking somewhere in the 800-900 MHz range. The process will have a lot of headroom in it, so you'll probably be best off getting a 700 MHz T-bird or Duron and overclocking it, assuming you're comfortable with that.
The big question with this system is whether DDR is worth it. The actual cost of DDR should be barely more than the cost of PC133--it's just as easy to make, but it might cost a bit more because of limited supply. Instead the "cost" of going DDR is measured in time; DDR mobos don't look to be available until late this summer, a month or three after T-bird is released. If you can wait, don't buy until you see the first benchmarks of T-bird on DDR vs. T-bird with PC133. Don't make your decision on benchmarks of the PIII with DDR, which will probably be available sooner: the PIII's chip-to-Northbridge bandwidth is only 1.07 GHz/sec, so it is usually saturated by PC133. DDR ought to show a bigger performance increase on the T-bird's EV6 bus, which will run at 266 to match the DDR. On the other hand, don't plan on going DDR before you check out the benchmarks; no one really knows exactly how well it will perform.
As far as chipsets, you want to be looking at a VIA KZ133 if you're sticking with PC133 (NOT the KX133, which is apparently incompatible with the T-bird), and probably a KZ266 if you're going DDR, although there may be other DDR chipsets available for T-bird as well, most notably Micron's Samurai chipset.
The big unknown in the future x86 market is Intel's new Willamette core. It probably won't be out in volume until January or so, and thus might not be an option for you. On the other hand, they'll be looking to do a paper release in late summer or early fall to compete for press time with AMD, so we should have a good idea of how well it'll perform months before we can actually buy one. (And maybe if you're lucky and willing to pay a lot, you might even be able to buy one in 2000!)
The reason I mention it is that while the general consensus seems to be that Willy won't be such a huge deal, Paul De Mone, one of the most respected semiconductor analysts on the net, has had some very positive things to say about it. If you're interested after reading the two mondo articles there (and if you're any kind of hardware geek, I can't see how you won't be), you might want to check out what he's had to say about Willamette in Ace's Hardware's technical forum. Frankly, Paul really knows what he's talking about, and he seems to think Willamette will solidly give Intel back the performance crown. Whether Intel will use that as an excuse to price Willy out of the upper-mainstream market where you're looking to buy is another question entirely.
Any other variables I should be asking about?
Well, depending on what you're looking to do with this computer (and with what OS), the video card is probably the most important component these days--certainly more important than chipset and arguably more important than CPU. If you want good 3D performance, then at the moment that means running Windows. Period. This is changing relatively quickly, though, so it may be less of an issue when you get your computer. (It will NOT be a non-issue.) 3dfx has always had some of the better Linux drivers, so if you're going Linux one of the new V5 cards is probably your best bet. nVidia is well known for having terrible, and closed, Linux drivers, although they claim that that's changing. If you're going to be running Windows, a DDR nVidia GeForce 1 is probably going to be the best bet to match your computer (i.e. just-below-really-high-end).
If you're going to be running Windows games a lot, then this will be the most important part of your purchase, hands down. The two obvious choices will be the V5 and the GeForce 2; the GF2 is a bit faster with full-screen anti-aliasing off, while the V5 is faster with it on. The GF2 (and GF1) has T&L to speed up future high-poly games; the V5 has Glide which provides the fastest play in games like Ultima IX and anything using the Unreal engine (Unreal Tournament, plus many upcoming games like Duke 4). To really decide, however, you should go to some indepth benchmarks from a gaming site and look at the resolutions/settings you'll be playing at in the games you'll be playing and see which card performs better. Also ATI has a card aimed at the high-end 3D market due out this summer.
If you don't need good 3D, take a look at an ATI card for great DVD playback (depending on your ethical opinion thereof), TV-tuner, and general features, or take a look at a Matrox G400 for top-notch quality and the best dual-monitor support around.
Other than that, you should be fine performance-wise. (I'm sure I don't need to tell you that the monitor is the most important piece of equipment for overall computer satisfaction, and that a nice keyboard and mouse are close behind.) Of course, for "general purpose developer's desktop plus scientific number crunching in the background"--i.e. compiling stuff and running distributed.net--IMO any computer sold today is more than adequate, although of course extra compiling speed is always nice, as is a higher ranking. In this case, I'd say the most important factor is how much cache is typically consumed by compiling. (Anyone care to inform me?) If it's a low-cache amount low-memory access activity, go with a Celeron or Duron; if it's low-cache amount high-memory access, go with a Duron; if it's medium-cache amount, go with a T-bird or Coppermine; if it uses up a whole lot of cache you may be better off with an Athlon "Classic" or a Katmai PIII for the money.
No, you do the profiling/FDPR on the train workload, which may or may not be similar to the ref workload, which is the input you run against for the report.
Thanks for the info. Still, the point stands: the Itanium (and any other VLIW processor which includes branch prediction hints in its ISA) will gain a hugely unfair advantage from this rule compared to any processor which does its branch prediction itself instead of relying on the compiler to do it for it. While ISV's will technically be able to do this sort of optimization on their own code, it is very unlikely that any will (most don't even use "normal" compiler optimizations now), and if they do, their programs will need to be reprofiled and then recompiled to take advantage of any new IA-64 chips. (Of course, I suppose that's the case anyways.;)
They list the compiler and all of the optimization flags, and the change in flags between base and peak for all runs...
The SPEC tests are great for requiring documentation, no doubt about it. And the base runs do allow a lot fewer compiler optimizations than the peak runs.
However, the base rules still allow running the suite, analyzing the data for optimization purposes, and recompiling for the "real" run. On all current architectures (that I can think of), this is not such a big deal. This is because branch prediction is handled by the CPU, not the compiler. On Itanium--where the ISA includes branch prediction "hints"--this means that Intel can run the suite once, find and record every branch taken, and then run it again having told the chip exactly which branches will be taken, always. No branch mispredictions at all. (If I understand correctly; in any case, there are certainly unfairly few with this technique.) And this is allowed under SPEC "base"!
Anyways, SPEC is a suspect benchmark in any case. The UltraSPARC has always underperformed the Alpha on SPEC, and yet does much better in the marketplace. Much of this is due to marketing, of course, but the fact is that a good SPEC performer does not necessarily make a good server, nor does it necessarily make a good consumer/enthusiast box.
That aside, I still can't find any specInt or specFP #s... which are a fairly good representation...
That's because SPEC doesn't run on MacOS. Thus the only PowerPC SPEC scores available are for high end IBM type systems, which have far superior i/o systems to Macs, and thus ought to perform much better on memory-intensive benchmarks like SPEC.
Unfortunately, the latest high-speed PIIIs kick the crap out of them, as do the actually-purchasable GHz Athlons. AltiVec is a great SIMD design, but even if there was enough software to take advantage of it, it'd be starved for data by the Mac's pitiful system bus in most real world conditions.
Basically, the only reasons to buy a Mac for your desktop is the OS, the color, or the fact that the new iMacs don't need fans. The only good points of the PowerPC architecture are low power consumption (which makes it a great laptop chip, and allows for the lack of a fan) and AltiVec (which, again, is starved by the poor i/o system).
For a much more detailed explanation of what I just said (including PPC vs. x86 SPEC comparisons), see Paul DeMone's excellent article.
As for the best SPEC/$ platform, right now it's far and away the GHz PIII. In the near future, it will be the Thunderbird on the low end and the new high-clocked Alphas (finally) for FP stuff. In the medium term, Willamette just might post some amazing SPEC results, although it's too early to tell. In any case, it's clear that the PPC architecture will lose badly for at least the next 12 months or so.
Besides, SPEC has a lot of things wrong with it as a benchmark, not least of which is the fact that even the SPEC "base" tests can be compiled based on optimizations from a previous test run (this is why Itanium will have good SPEC scores but terrible performance), and that it has no graphical component, and that it doesn't model typical code very well, unless you spend your time running scientific simulations all day.
On the other hand, if there were a better cross-platform benchmark, it would also show that the PPC sucks. As a CPU for a personal computer, that is. As well it should: it's designed for embedded/signal-processing applications.
So, what would happen if all those Metallica fans who own all the CDs for the MP3's they were trading stepped forward and gave counternotification?
This seems to be a common misconception about what Metallica did. They didn't ask for all the people who downloaded their music to be banned, but rather for all the people who were offering their music for download to be banned. In most cases, it's the same thing, since by default Napster shares the directory where it saves your downloads, but the two are very different in principle.
Even if you own the CD, you're not the copyright holder; under current copyright law, you're still infringing by making it available on Napster. The reason to make a counterclaim is that Metallica did not listen to the songs all 300,000-something people were sharing; rather, all the vaunted NetPD hackers did was write a bot (in contradiction with Napster's TOS, by the way) which searched for "Metallica" every couple of minutes, and left it connected to all the Napster servers for a weekend. Thus, anyone sharing an mp3 with the word "Metallica" in it got banned.
Now, I don't have to tell you that a lot of those mp3s weren't copyright infringing. For one thing, they would include plenty of concert bootlegs--which Metallica claims to encourage, by the way; whether they're still the copyright holders is a more difficult question. More obviously non-infringing would be things like "My band covering Master of Puppets by Metallica.mp3", or "Why Metallica sucks donkey balls--an oral essay spoken into my computer's 30-cent microphone.mp3" From what I've heard there may be many users on the list who were banned for providing exactly such content. Furthermore, Metallica compiled this list a couple weeks after they announced their suit; it's therefore quite likely that a bunch of people renamed files so as to look like Metallica files and shared them just for this reason.
For what reason you may ask? Well, in order to file a complaint under the DMCA to have something removed from a hosted server for copyright violations, you have to assert under penalty of perjury that it actually violates your copyright. In other words, if Metallica got you banned without first checking if the songs you shared were actually ones they had the copyright to, they are guilty of perjury. And from all indications, they did exactly that. Whether DMCA allows them to be fined for that, I dunno. (I'm assuming they won't get any jail time, although even assuming 99% of the files on Napster with Metallica in the file name are illegal, that leaves 3171 counts of perjury!) It sure as hell ought to, though.
On a final note, it'd be pretty awesome if everyone on the list filed a counterclaim, forcing Metallica to listen to all 317,000 of those songs. Of course, I happen to know that won't occur, since I decided to switch to Napigator instead.;-)
You can counter-sue Metallica for affirming under penalty of perjury (they did this for each of those 300,000 users) that you were infringing on their copyright. You are entitled to damages under the DMCA for this, BTW, and they just might be liable for criminal perjury charges.
Napster has a page set up for anyone who believes they were wrongly kicked off. napster.com seems to be down right now, so I can't get you a link, but rest assured you can get there easily by clicking on the link that comes up when you try to log on to Napster and get denied.
Fill out the form, take 'em to court, and teach them to be a bit more careful the next time they take the law into their own hands.
Can you please back this assertion up with even one citation?? If this virus could run from the preview pane, the information would be all over every media story on the virus.
But I don't even need to see the fact that every media source reporting the "preview pane" rumor has since retracted it to know that it's not true. I've read the damn virus code. I know how it works, and I know how the (since closed) preview pane vulnerability worked, and this simply ain't it.
1. A "malicious" bash script can not make itself run as root.
The original ILUVYOU trojan doesn't do anything that would require root on a Unix. All it does is send itself to everyone in your Outlook address book (equivalent to sending itself to everyone in your Pine address book), make changes to *your* registry to run itself upon reboot (equivalent to writing a script in a user's home directory), and write itself over.jpg,.mp3,.vb,.vbs, and.awholelotmore files (all these files would be in user space).
The FunnyJoke variation overwrites some system files, so that would arguably need root on a Unix.
2. I believe (may be wrong on this) that the thing "looks" like a text file if you have "known extensions hidden" as per default.
If you have "hide known extensions" enabled then it looks like it's named "blahblahblah.txt". Problem is, if it was really a txt file, it would just look like "blah blah blah", since...you have hide known extensions enabled. Tricky, yeah, but not really MS's fault. Furthermore, the little icon next to it looks like a.vbs icon, not a.txt icon.
Of the three, only BubbleBoy can be run automatically, and only then if the user is running an unpatched version of IE. (The patch has been on Windows Update since last fall.) Furthermore, a BubbleBoy type virus requires a reboot to do any damage (it can only write arbitrary code, not execute it).
Don't have time to find documentation, but I'm entirely positive of this.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard the argument that DeCSS isn't useful for piracy--this is mostly crap. Sure, professional pirates could already copy DVDs bit-for-bit, but home users can't since there's a small section that's pre-burned on most DVD-RAMS that prevents that. DeCSS is useful for ripping DVDs so they can be encoded in MPEG-(pick a number) format, and then distributed through your local warez d00d.
Apparently, you've heard the wrong argument vis-a-vis DeCSS and small-scale piracy.
DeCSS has nothing to do with small-scale piracy because programs which intercepted the decoded video/audio streams off a DVD (so long as it was playing in a licensed DVD player) already existed, and indeed have existed all the way since 1997, when DVD was in its infancy. The result one gets from these programs is just about identical to the result one gets from "running" DeCSS on a DVD; in both cases, it just takes running some other software to turn the files in DVD format (forget the name) to avi or MPEG or whatever. The only difference (as far as the pirate is concerned) is that these programs are much easier to use than DeCSS. Theoretically they may cause some small signal degredation over pure DVD (because the video stream is captured at the level of the video card driver, after it has been passed through the electrical noise inside your computer); however, compared to the quality loss inherent in recombining the audio and video streams and saving the result in a (usually lossy) compressed format for transport over the Internet, this loss of quality is negligible.
And indeed, it's no surprise that such programs are widely available; the only way to stop them would be if the DVD video and audio streams remained encrypted while they passed through your computer, until they were decrypted by special hardware decryption units in your video card and sound card. Luckily for all of us, this is impossible, because PC's are built on open components and open standards, and thus cannot hide anything from their users for long. As it stands now, the only hardware component in most people's PC's which is purposely engineered to hide its operations from its owner is the DVD-ROM; but as this example shows, the PC will be a functionally open platform until all of its components are closed.
The scary news is that things are heading that way. The next standard for digital video-to-monitor signals (pushed by such friends of the consumer as Intel) includes support for encryption. Amongst other things, this means that we will lose the ability to take screenshots of our own desktops if such a standard is adopted!
My bet, though, is that it won't be. If it is, it is at Intel's own peril. The success of the PC is almost entirely due to the fact that it is an open system, and the fair competition that fact has engendered.
But in any case, the simple fact is that, until the PC has been hijacked from us, "secure" formats--be they DVD, Microsoft's WMA, Liquid Audio, or whatever passes for SDMI or DVD-Audio--will never be secure.
Bottom line, who doesn't believe that if John Carmack left ID tomorrow he would be able to continue working on what he wants
Well...considering he's just stated that what he wants to be working on is Doom III, me; Doom is of course id's intellectual property. On the other hand, from a technical standpoint--which is what JC does anyways--your point still stands. Besides, assuming his leaving was mutual and relatively amicable, Kevin and Adrian might let John's new company use the Doom name anyways (like they're letting Xatrix make a new Wolfenstein).
Half Life and Kingpin blow Q2 out of the water. I'm tired of the run and shoot and run and shoot and run and shoot and run and shoot and run and shoot and run and shoot gameplay of id games.
Then you might be pleasantly surprised by Doom III. According to what John has said, it will be designed to give a completely immersive single-player experience--which strongly suggests that it will be very different from the Quake series, which were all designed with multiplayer in mind. Indeed, if I had to guess I'd say it will be most like...well, Half Life. (Of course, with its mods HL has some pretty badass online play too.)
Not to mention the overhead of paying record executives' bloated salaries, the cost the record company pays for publicity and marketing, the cost of the record store's overhead, the cost of the clerks at the record store...
Even at $5 for an album instead of $15 (actually, the current average list price for a CD is $18 IIRC), the artist would typically be making 3-6 times as much per sale.
Basically, you've backed your argument down from "copyright infringement does cause actual economic harm" to "copyright infringement does cause actual economic harm in the case of avant-garde "classical" recordings." Now, your point that, besides per-disc duplication and distribution costs--which the Internet has rendered anachronistic--there are also very significant one-time economic costs involved in making a music recording is a very important and valid one. Still, when you base this on a segment of the music industry as unrepresentative as avant-garde classical music, you're asking for trouble.
Specifically, the recording costs for this sort of music is much higher than for mainstream music, and the sales figures are much much *much* lower--thus the economic impact of the "one-time fees" appears much larger than it is in most cases. But of course the comparison is meaningless: I can guarantee you that there are very, very few avant-garde classical sales which have been lost to Napster of all things. First off, the target demographics are very different. Second, if an album only sells 2000 copies, what do you think the chances are that someone will rip it and share it on Napster?? And third, more than most music, avant-garde classical music demands a very high quality stereo system to be fully appreciated--much higher quality than anything possible with mp3 played out of computer speakers.
So we've established that this sort of music is irrelevent to the issue at hand. The question becomes, do your points still stand? And the answer is, for the most part, no. There is absolutely no way in hell that the recording budget for anything but the highest of high-profile, surest of sure pop superhits would ever approach anything near $500,000. Absolutely ridiculous. After all, you still haven't answered my main critique on your numbers: if recording costs are 66% of the cost structure of a CD, how is a band supposed to ever pay it off with just a 10% royalty?? The argument that many bands never get out of debt to their record company only answers this objection part way. And frankly, it doesn't offer much support for keeping the music industry the way it is.
As for whether mp3 actually increases or decreases sales, I think we agree that any effect is relatively small, although possibly still significant. I don't believe the correlation is as direct as you would have it--that is, while I would have no problem believing that mp3 might decrease overall CD sales by your 1-5% (reasonable numbers), I don't think that the mp3s downloaded necessarily come from the CD's that would have been bought. Rather, I think that the way most people use their mp3s is different enough that it competes with CD's not as a direct replacement--if that were true, college students wouldn't buy CD's anymore at all--but rather as a replacement for one's time. The distinction, while abstract, is significant since what we're arguing about here is the moral implications of downloading mp3s of copyrighted music.
To put it another way, you phrased your argument like this: Posters here have declared that they own NO CD's, or haven't bought ANY CD's since they started pirating MP3's. So MP3's are _definitely_ viewed as a subsitute for CD's.
Well how would you respond to the following statement: "Ever since I took up skydiving, I haven't watched any TV." According to your logic, skydiving must therefore be a substitute for TV and thus skydivers are ripping off the networks, and ought to compensate them or maybe be thrown in jail, or perhaps just hang their heads in shame at their immoral hobby. After all, TV shows cost a whole lot to film, and their production is predicated on the prediction that enough people will sit and watch them instead of jumping out of planes!
Of course it's an absurd analogy, as mp3s are certainly a more direct substitute for CD's than skydiving is for TV. But from observing many many mp3 "pirates" (including, of course, myself), I would say that the substitution is not as direct as one would think, and thus that any moral claim against mp3s based on unrecuperated recording costs is tenuous at best, even if mp3s as a whole cause more recording costs to go unrecuperated as a whole. If anything, I would guess that mp3s *increase* the sales of the particular CD's they are ripped from, but *decrease* the sales of other CD's.
First off, I don't believe your figures. After all, if it costs $10/sale for recording costs for the typical classical CD as you say, then why is like half of the classical CD market those discs which sell at a list price of $3.99? I realize these are lower quality (thus cheaper) recordings, typically with less well known (cheaper) orchestras, but according to your figures, the cost of the recording and the orchestras would have to be negative.
;)
Also, while I don't know too much about the economics of the classical recording industry, I do know that for mainstream records, the artists are the ones who have to pay for the recording costs. (The label basically loans them the recording time, equipment, etc, but they have to pay them back. That's why Lars said record labels are like banks.) As I understand it, this comes directly out of the artists' cut of the profits, which is typically about 10% of the sale price of a CD. Thus your contention that recording costs contribute to 66% of a typical CD's cost structure seems a bit problematic.
Oh, and also, I followed the link you provided (to a record company website; nice trustworthy source you got there) and it says that the cost of making a symphonic record can be as much as 50,000 pounds (about $70,000), NOT 500,000.
So first, your figures are completely and utterly wrong. But don't worry: it's only an order of magnitude.
But that's besides the point. Basically this is the central thesis of your argument: See, since the record had an expectation of a certain number of buyers, the costs were allocated to cover them. Which is the point exactly: for the vast majority of "music pirates" (arrrrr mateys!), downloading mp3s does not replace buying CDs. If you want to listen to a whole album (without 1 second gaps between tracks which are supposed to flow together), or to have it sound good (i.e. not subjected to a horrendously noisy electrical environment, pumped out a cheap sound card and into speakers which, if they're good, are designed primarily for magnetic shielding and playing games), or to support the artists who make music you really like, you buy the CD. Indeed, despite billions of files traded on Napster, CD sales went up last year, as did CD prices (of course, the RIAA has been found guilty of price gouging by the FTC, but that's another story, which, according to you, didn't happen).
If you want to listen to pop music in the background while you surf the web or work, you get mp3s. If you want to listen to something new that you otherwise wouldn't pop $18 for and take the chance that you won't like it, you get the mp3 and buy it if it's cool. If you want to find b-sides, live performances, unsigned or indie label bands, or music only available in certain regions of the US or in foreign countries, you use Napster. For most dastardly "music pirates", mp3 replaces the radio, not their stereo. The only difference is you get to choose the order songs play in, you don't have to listen to ads or DJ drivel, and you don't have to conform to the top 40. To make an analogy, "pirated" mp3 (for 95% of its users) is a lot closer to a TiVo than it is to busting into Blockbuster with a sawed-off shotgun and clearing out the New Releases.
The point is, your argument rests on the flawed premise that every person downloading an mp3 is one less person buying the CD. Now, some people have argued that Napster actually promotes CD sales, because it's essentially free and effective marketing, especially for CD's most people would never hear of otherwise. I happen to believe that mp3 will hurt CD sales slightly, all things equal. But this is not because listening to mp3s will replace listening to CD's for more than a very small handful of people, but rather because it provides another way of spending their time. In other words, the popularity of mp3 might hurt CD sales in the same way that a new crop of extremely popular video games would hurt CD sales--people will just spend some of their time doing something else, namely using their computers.
Now, looking down the road it seems pretty plausible that mp3 will be eventually replaced by a better-than-CD quality format (but not, of course, before a couple years after CD's are replaced by DVD-audio or (hopefully) SACD), and stereo equipment will start being able to interface with your computer, or even the Internet directly. Once that happens, you may have an argument. But I think you'll find that, contrary to what you must believe, most people pay for what something is economically worth. Even us pirates.
Arrrr!
Actualy, gnutella uses HTTP for file transfers (HTTP rockes :) and 'gnutellanet' for searching.
I know. That's why I added the caveat "well, technically not".
go into Tower and hold the place up for CD's (the moral equivalent).
For the gazillionth time...no it's not.
The CD you steal from Tower cost the record company some amount (probably around 20 cents) to buy, press. Add another 20 cents for painting the top. The case and little booklet probably add another 60 cents or so. Then they paid someone to drive that CD from the factory where it was made to Tower. Then Tower paid a good deal of money for it--probably on the order of 8 or 9 bucks. Plus, Tower needs to sell CDs because it has other costs--the cost of their building, the cost of paying people to work the registers, etc. Finally, if I steal a CD from Tower, then that's one less CD that they have, and one more CD that someone else cannot legally buy. If Tower ends up selling out of that CD, then there's someone in the world who drove all the way to the record store only to find out that they're all out of the CD they wanted because I took one of them; that person, too, has a legitimate grievance against me.
Now, when I "pirate" an mp3 off of Napster, the only resource I'm using is bandwidth, and I already pay for all the bandwidth I can get by my monthly ISP fee (or college tuition fee, as the case may be). Yes, my using the Internet's bandwidth theoretically slows down everyone else, but this is the same argument as saying the person who has to drive to the record store to get his music contributes to traffic and hydrocarbon emissions. I'm forcing someone else's computer to serve me a file, but they volunteered so that's hardly a grievance. The only person who directly loses anything of monetary value in the transaction is me--I lose 5 MB or so of disk space, which at today's prices is worth 5 or 10 cents.
Now, if the song I'm downloading isn't public domain, I'm perpetrating copyright infringement, and I'm arguably causing economic "harm" (actually lack of economic benefit, which is different) to the copyright owners (the record label, BTW, not the artist). But it most certainly is not morally equivalent to shoplifting the CD.
Fear of being caught is a major deterrent; with anonymity it is impossible to be caught (by definition). How many people who pirate MP3's would continue if their identity would be linked to each packet they transferred across the network, available to the public (including the copyright holder of the stolen work?)
Well, I'd love some anonymity on the Internet. As it is, due to Harvard's englightened policy of protecting its students' privacy, my IP address is dhandelm.student.harvard.edu. It's not quite the same as having my SS# at the header of every packet I send across the Internet, but it's pretty darn close. (First letter of my first name and first 7 letters of my last; a simple ph search on Harvard's website is all it takes to get my full name, age, address, email address, phone number...) And frankly, I couldn't care less if every packet of the tens (pushing hundreds?) of thousands of songs I've uploaded via Napster, iMesh, Gnutella, and my university LAN were forwarded directly to Edgar Bronfman's desk.
If they can (doubtful), they will get huge privacy invadement lawsuits and the next software that gets as popular as napster will have IP spoofing as a built in feature
Gnutella already does, if I understand it correctly. There's a little field on the Config page labeled "Force local IP to: ".
And honestly, people. As we all know, these programs are nothing more than FTP but automated and with some clever search features. (Well, technically not, but same idea.) They're declaring war on file transfers over the Internet? Good luck with that one...
The source code (the actual music sheets and lyrics) is out there and free as far as Lars is concerned.
... wait. You want HIS compiled version of the information done by Metallica (a beowulf cluster of Alphas) not the one done by you (a TRS-80).
Possibly. But not as far as the RIAA (or US copyright law, for that matter) is concerned, just FYI.
If Lars had a unique painting and made a few prints of it for his friends, would you complain?
If I could have enjoyed that painting at absolutely no cost to him at all, yes. The difference here is that paintings are currently scarce, just like recorded music used to be. But with the Internet, recorded music is no longer scarce. Using the legal system to force everyone to pretend that it still is distorts the market and prevents the widest possible distribution of people from enjoying art.
So the information is completely free. What are you complaining about? Oh
Um...the point of the saying "information wants to be free" is that anything which can be transmitted at zero cost will proliferate to market saturation. Thus "information" in this context is anything which can be sent over the internet--which includes "compiled" recordings, not just (equally "pirated") sheet music. Binary software wants to be free, too, and if you spend any time looking you'll find that most of it is. The difference is that software companies are much more clued-in about the phenomenon and have added many non-"information" addons to their products, like official support, manuals, etc., in an effort to slow down warezing.
Well, it is his performance, so he can do it for you at your every whim, or do it when the hell he wants and charge you for it. If you were in his shoes, which would you prefer? Honestly, now?
I don't care. It shouldn't be his decision. He should have a larger say, but it shouldn't be his decision.
This whole thing is a battle about the future direction of the law, and whether we really want to criminalize behavior which most knowledgable citizens find completely ethical and in fact engage in. As such, this decision about where to take the law should be made by society as a whole, and in the interests of society as a whole. Now, those self-interests have to be enlightened, and thus ought to include some way of solving the problem of making sure musicians still have the resources and incentives to make the best music possible. But that doesn't mean the musicians get to decide. Society gets to decide, and our decision should be what's best for us, not for Lars.
Of course, most members of society are too poorly informed to care much, and thus it will probably be RIAA dollars that decide, at least in the short term. The war on copying will likely be long and drawn out, if not so ugly (after all, I have yet to see any ideas on how to crack down on Freenet that would even come close to surviving a Supreme Court challenge).
In the end, though, enough people will figure out that this is important, and their collective opinions will make the decision. It could be that most of them will end up agreeing with you. But I don't think so.
Yeah, Linux has great apps for every aspect of the Internet...except for what people actually spend 99% of their time on the Internet doing: browsing and email.
Email is of course a matter of preference, although the fact that until Evolution there won't be a good multi-pane GUI email/PIM program for Linux is a definite weakness of the platform overall. Pine may be good enough for you, but for someone whose job revolves around contacts, meetings, etc, it doesn't cut it.
As for browsing--which, for most, *is* the Internet--there's simply no comparison. IE 5 for the Mac is hands-down the best web browser ever made. (Except for the fact that most Macs only have 1 mouse button; of course, that's hardly IE 5's fault.) If you disagree with me, it's almost certainly because you haven't used it. And no, I'm not a Mac owner. In any case, Netscape for Linux (or anything for that matter) is objectively god-awful, and Mozilla, Konquerer, etc., while promising, are not ready for prime time yet.
Frankly, for the way most of the computer-using population (and the people for whom this article--and Corel Linux, while were at it--was targeted) use the Internet, the Mac is clearly the better platform.
And congratulate /. on another violation of the DMCA.
Napster hack
Right on! Here's 172 Karma points (probably less after this post) backing you up, AC!
;)
I've only got 74, but I support him all the way as well. For those who won't browse at 0 to see it, here's what the AC wrote:
The Slashdork crowd is pathetic. (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on 11:37 AM May 18th, 2000 CST (#83)
It's a real pity that Jeff had to be subjected to such (largely) insulting and arrogant questions.
This so-called community likes to think they are better than everyone else, and that no one outside this pathetic clique should be treated with any respect. Was it really necessary to say that his CSS work 'sucks'? Is it really necessary to insult him as being a 'hot shot' (something he didn't even call himself)? And talk of cardinal sins...well folks, how many of you are real working web designers?
The fact that the 'moderators' upped these insulting questions to '5-insightful' or whatever just speaks volumes about this place.
Newsflash, slashdorks: You don't represent the views of the Linux/*BSD community. You're just a bunch of whining nerds with overly-inflated egos.
Alas, if I had to use Netscape for Linux all day, I'd probably be so bitter that I'd want to lash out at someone who pushed for working browsers and aesthetic web page design too. IMO, the main reason everyone around here seems to want the web to just be gopher with hyperlinks, and email to consist only of one-size, one-color, unformatted fixed-width text, is because unfortunately that's what the current state of apps on Linux works best with. Right now, using Linux (or any Unix) as a platform for enjoying the multimedia aspects of the Internet works about as well as using Win98 for a web server. Every OS has strengths and weaknesses, and this interview unfortunately exposed how some of the current weaknesses of Unices have biased their users into thinking anything better is wrong.
Happily, KDE/Konquerer 2, Mozilla, and Evolution look like they just might bring this side of Linux into the modern world.
That's 74 now, *definitely* less after this post.
"In a few months, there will be exactly two browsers that get CSS-1 right: Mozilla/Nav 6 for all platforms, and IE5/Mac which we have now."
Bullshit.
*Right Now* Opera v3.6 gets CSS1 more 'right' than MSIE5.
Opera 3.6 gets CSS1 more right than IE5 FOR WINDOWS. Like he said, IE5 FOR MACINTOSH is the only browser currently shipping which supports CSS-1 completely. Yes, "completely" means more right than Opera.
In addition, it happens to have a pretty cool, very customizable interface. And it's the fastest rendering browser around. (This is just my subjective opinion, but IE5 for Mac is noticably faster than IE 5 Windows, which I am quite sure was the previous fastest browser available.)
In case anyone thinks I'm into Macs or something (God forbid!), no I don't own one, and no, I could never get used to surfing the web with only one mouse button. But trust me--if you haven't seen it, IE5 for Mac is one damn fine program.
As for Jeffrey Zeldman, believe it or not, he actually knows more about browser standards compliance than you do.
The entire Itanium platform is basically nothing more than a test platform for the next IA-64 chip, McKinley.
.25u process and in 1998), and appears to have only 96k L2 cache and 64k L1 cache, because rather than reaping the predicted simplifications of moving to a VLIW design, the Itanium core has fallen into a stew of complexity which leaves very little room for large cache size, even at .18u. This project has chewed up and spit out all of Intel's seasoned engineers on their Santa Clara design team, and was basically finished up by a huge committee of inexperienced kids fresh out of college. Every knowledgeble independent hardware analyst I've seen has said that, while IA-64 has some potentially promising ideas behind it, Itanium is going to be an ugly plodding beast of a chip, and its only chance at success is through miraculous marketing. Too bad for Intel's marketing machine that they're trying to move into a new space (high-end servers) with Itanium, and thus the people buying these machines are going to be well-informed and used to buying from vendors other than Intel.
.13u process, which ought to leave it enough room for a real L1 and L2 cache, and allow for presentable clock speeds. Thus, most organizations are looking at Itanium as a sort of public beta for McKinley--they'll buy a couple to get used to the platform, start to develop software for it, and have a core understanding in place in case they decide to upgrade all of their high-end servers to McKinley in a year or so. Almost no one is planning on deploying Itanium as a long term solution, because it will simply not be cost effective for the mediocre performance it will have.
This is because Merced/Itanium is 2.5 years late, and poorly designed. It is struggling to hit a meagre 800MHz (it was designed to debut at 800MHz, but on
The good news for IA-64 is that McKinley, the successor to Itanium, is much more on track (it should be out in volume by Q2 or Q3 2001), and appears to be performing quite nicely. Incidentally (or not), McKinley has been designed almost entirely by a much smaller (and more experienced) team over at HP (where EPIC, the philosophy behind IA-64, was designed as well); about all Intel will have to do with it is the fabbing and the Intel Inside logo. Also, McKinley will have the advantage of being fabbed with a brand-new
And thus the "race" to get a good IA-64 OS up and running really isn't all that important. MS will be sure to have W2K-64 "gold" well before McKinley is released, and that's all that really counts. Getting Linux on Itanium solid before W2K-64 goes gold will be nice, but it most certainly isn't going to win Linux a beachhead in the high-end corporate market, simply because most high-end corporate stuff can afford to wait for W2K-64 to be ready before they switch to IA-64.
On the other hand, a rather peculiar consequence of the IA-64 design is that applications need to be recompiled for each new processor core in order to take advantage of the EPIC features. (This is because, in IA-64, the compiler does most of the instruction scheduling, and not a scheduler in the CPU's logic; thus, the compiler better know how many functional units the CPU has, for example, or else it will schedule things all wrong.) This might seem to give an advantage to OSS, since one can just get a new compiler and recompile all of one's applications if one has the source to them. However, considering the market all of this is directed towards, I'm quite sure no one will have any trouble getting seperate versions of W2K or Oracle or whathaveyou optimized for Itanium or McKinley or any subsequent IA-64 chips.
For anyone who was expecting IA-64 to show up on the desktop anytime soon: don't. The first IA-64 chip scheduled to have a shot at the high-end consumer market is Deerfield, planned for 2004, but expected to come out later if at all. It would take a little bit to explain why, but EPIC is very much better suited to single-tasking machines running streamlined, well-tuned code--things like databases. It's just a poor fit for consumer applications. And anyways, if you want a neat Intel chip to get excited about, Willamette--the next desktop chip--looks way sexier than Itanium, and has a lot of cool design features (eg. double-pumped ALU, trace cache) which are just as innovative as IA-64's VLIW stuff.
Just to close things off, here's a couple links for those looking to learn more about Itanium and IA-64. (Even if the design doesn't pan out, some of the principles behind it are very interesting.)
Hannibal at Ars Technica on IA-64: a bit old, but a very well written overview of the design theory behind EPIC.
Hannibal on IA-64 vs. Sun's MAJC: mostly about MAJC (very interesting in its own right!), but a good example of a different approach to VLIW than IA-64's. (Crusoe is yet another example of a completely different approach to VLIW.)
Paul DeMone's Itanium article on realworldtech.com (unfortunately, the site seems to be down at the moment, so I can't get a link): an impressive technical argument about why Itanium might not actually achieve higher ILP in actual conditions, along with an interesting historical parallel of why this wouldn't be the first time Intel pushed a radical new chip architecture and it completely flopped (I forget the name of the previous chip, but it's an interesting story).
Some good points. Basically it was just late and the original poster insulted me and happened to be completely wrong about some things; I didn't mean to get into an anti-Mac flamewar (believe me!)--because, for one thing, I actually like a whole lot about the Mac. I think there are plenty of good ideas in the OS that haven't yet been duplicated in any other (although there's plenty about the OS that hasn't changed in 16 years and it shows); I actually do think system design is a good thing, and Apple's is the best (except for the default keyboard and mouse); etc. I think the biggest reason for my rant, oddly enough, is that I'm extraordinarily impressed by what I've seen of OS X: awesome technologies like Quartz and Cocoa built on top of a BSD/Mach kernel with such an astoundingly pretty interface--what's not to like??
The hardware. Basically, I think I'm just disappointed that, if I do decide to go OS X with my next computer purchase, I'll know that I'm overpaying for the performance I'll get. Also, the fact that Apple continues to be disingenuous and trot out baldfaced lies about its "superior" performance is annoying as well. Finally, I thought it was relevant for this article to note that, contrary to popular opinion, a dual-G4, while pretty damn fast, is by no means world-changing. Indeed, it's slower than a quick dual-PIII, and let's not even get into the dual-Mustangs or dual-Willamettes that'll be available by the time these babies ship.
Having said that, your points fail to impress me too much. Like I said, the biggest point raised by the ArsTechnica Photoshop benchmarks isn't who wins which filter benchmark by 5 seconds, but the fact that the G3 took 2.5 times as long to open up the file. Like I said, only a small percentage of PS users actually run Gaussian Blurs, but you better believe they all open files. I'm willing to bet that any complete PS benchmark--that is, a script which starts timing, opens PS, opens a large file, runs some filters on it, saves it, opens another, runs more tests, etc, closes and then stops timing--will show a large advantage to the PC.
In any case, the fact that PS code used MMX and SSE early on doesn't "prove" to me that PS is equally optimitzed--even if you use assembly code, it's very possible to spend more time optimizing for one CPU than another, and from what I've heard, Adobe spends more time optimizing for Mac. The fact that PS 5.5 came out for the Mac a month or so before it did for PC also lends credence to this.
In any case, you're right to note that PS is a fairer test than, for example, Word 6 for Mac, which ported Windows API's instead of porting the program and thus performed terribly. That doesn't mean it's a fair test, though; there's plenty of shades between API porting and equal optimization. SPEC would be much closer, but "for some reason" Apple doesn't want to spend the time optimizing a compiler for it. I suppose that's their prerogative, though.
As for the 1MB half-speed L3 cache on the Mac, we now know that a smaller faster on-die cache beats a larger slower off-die cache on almost all consumer applications. That's why the Coppermine PIIIs (256k full-speed on-die cache) cream the Katmai's (512k 1/2-speed off-die-but-in-cartridge cache). A "backside"--i.e. L3--cache is considerably slower than even an off-die L2 cache, because of the considerably higher latencies incurred in communicating across a bus (even a dedicated one) rather than across the chip cartridge. Generally, L3 caches have only proven to be useful in applications like databases, although I suppose it's better than nothing.
Just because AltiVec is a superset of SSE/3DNow! doesn't mean it wouldn't have been designed differently if the G4 were a desktop chip instead of an embedded DSP chip. For one thing, certain instructions may have been better optimized than others. But the largest point is that for desktop applications, AltiVec is overkill. It's great, but it tends to run ahead of the Mac's i/o subsystem, and it just takes up more space than it's worth. More space means higher costs, lower yields, and lower clock-speeds. All things being equal, AltiVec is the best desktop SIMD around; the problem is that as a design consideration for a desktop CPU, it's not worth it.
And finally...I thought I'd heard ATi's Mac drivers finally improved? I know they were terrible at first, but I could have sworn I'd heard they were nearly up to PC quality now. In any case, I'd love to see some detailed (i.e. at many different quality levels and resolutions on a couple different CPU's) Q3:A benchmarks for the Mac; it's generally possible to determine when the limiting factor of a test is the CPU and when it's the video card hardware and when it's the drivers, so these tests, if properly interpreted, could give us a good deal more insight even if ATi's drivers were bad. (I'd rather see the tests on a 3dfx card anyways, since their drivers are better on both Mac and PC.)
If I were you, I'd have a mid-range Thunderbird at the top of my list. It will debut at 700-1000 Mhz, and probably hit 1.1 GHz soon thereafter, so we're probably talking somewhere in the 800-900 MHz range. The process will have a lot of headroom in it, so you'll probably be best off getting a 700 MHz T-bird or Duron and overclocking it, assuming you're comfortable with that.
The big question with this system is whether DDR is worth it. The actual cost of DDR should be barely more than the cost of PC133--it's just as easy to make, but it might cost a bit more because of limited supply. Instead the "cost" of going DDR is measured in time; DDR mobos don't look to be available until late this summer, a month or three after T-bird is released. If you can wait, don't buy until you see the first benchmarks of T-bird on DDR vs. T-bird with PC133. Don't make your decision on benchmarks of the PIII with DDR, which will probably be available sooner: the PIII's chip-to-Northbridge bandwidth is only 1.07 GHz/sec, so it is usually saturated by PC133. DDR ought to show a bigger performance increase on the T-bird's EV6 bus, which will run at 266 to match the DDR. On the other hand, don't plan on going DDR before you check out the benchmarks; no one really knows exactly how well it will perform.
As far as chipsets, you want to be looking at a VIA KZ133 if you're sticking with PC133 (NOT the KX133, which is apparently incompatible with the T-bird), and probably a KZ266 if you're going DDR, although there may be other DDR chipsets available for T-bird as well, most notably Micron's Samurai chipset.
The big unknown in the future x86 market is Intel's new Willamette core. It probably won't be out in volume until January or so, and thus might not be an option for you. On the other hand, they'll be looking to do a paper release in late summer or early fall to compete for press time with AMD, so we should have a good idea of how well it'll perform months before we can actually buy one. (And maybe if you're lucky and willing to pay a lot, you might even be able to buy one in 2000!)
The reason I mention it is that while the general consensus seems to be that Willy won't be such a huge deal, Paul De Mone, one of the most respected semiconductor analysts on the net, has had some very positive things to say about it. If you're interested after reading the two mondo articles there (and if you're any kind of hardware geek, I can't see how you won't be), you might want to check out what he's had to say about Willamette in Ace's Hardware's technical forum. Frankly, Paul really knows what he's talking about, and he seems to think Willamette will solidly give Intel back the performance crown. Whether Intel will use that as an excuse to price Willy out of the upper-mainstream market where you're looking to buy is another question entirely.
Any other variables I should be asking about?
Well, depending on what you're looking to do with this computer (and with what OS), the video card is probably the most important component these days--certainly more important than chipset and arguably more important than CPU. If you want good 3D performance, then at the moment that means running Windows. Period. This is changing relatively quickly, though, so it may be less of an issue when you get your computer. (It will NOT be a non-issue.) 3dfx has always had some of the better Linux drivers, so if you're going Linux one of the new V5 cards is probably your best bet. nVidia is well known for having terrible, and closed, Linux drivers, although they claim that that's changing. If you're going to be running Windows, a DDR nVidia GeForce 1 is probably going to be the best bet to match your computer (i.e. just-below-really-high-end).
If you're going to be running Windows games a lot, then this will be the most important part of your purchase, hands down. The two obvious choices will be the V5 and the GeForce 2; the GF2 is a bit faster with full-screen anti-aliasing off, while the V5 is faster with it on. The GF2 (and GF1) has T&L to speed up future high-poly games; the V5 has Glide which provides the fastest play in games like Ultima IX and anything using the Unreal engine (Unreal Tournament, plus many upcoming games like Duke 4). To really decide, however, you should go to some indepth benchmarks from a gaming site and look at the resolutions/settings you'll be playing at in the games you'll be playing and see which card performs better. Also ATI has a card aimed at the high-end 3D market due out this summer.
If you don't need good 3D, take a look at an ATI card for great DVD playback (depending on your ethical opinion thereof), TV-tuner, and general features, or take a look at a Matrox G400 for top-notch quality and the best dual-monitor support around.
Other than that, you should be fine performance-wise. (I'm sure I don't need to tell you that the monitor is the most important piece of equipment for overall computer satisfaction, and that a nice keyboard and mouse are close behind.) Of course, for "general purpose developer's desktop plus scientific number crunching in the background"--i.e. compiling stuff and running distributed.net--IMO any computer sold today is more than adequate, although of course extra compiling speed is always nice, as is a higher ranking. In this case, I'd say the most important factor is how much cache is typically consumed by compiling. (Anyone care to inform me?) If it's a low-cache amount low-memory access activity, go with a Celeron or Duron; if it's low-cache amount high-memory access, go with a Duron; if it's medium-cache amount, go with a T-bird or Coppermine; if it uses up a whole lot of cache you may be better off with an Athlon "Classic" or a Katmai PIII for the money.
Hope this helped!
No, you do the profiling/FDPR on the train workload, which may or may not be similar to the ref workload, which is the input you run against for the report.
;)
Thanks for the info. Still, the point stands: the Itanium (and any other VLIW processor which includes branch prediction hints in its ISA) will gain a hugely unfair advantage from this rule compared to any processor which does its branch prediction itself instead of relying on the compiler to do it for it. While ISV's will technically be able to do this sort of optimization on their own code, it is very unlikely that any will (most don't even use "normal" compiler optimizations now), and if they do, their programs will need to be reprofiled and then recompiled to take advantage of any new IA-64 chips. (Of course, I suppose that's the case anyways.
They list the compiler and all of the optimization flags, and the change in flags between base and peak for all runs...
The SPEC tests are great for requiring documentation, no doubt about it. And the base runs do allow a lot fewer compiler optimizations than the peak runs.
However, the base rules still allow running the suite, analyzing the data for optimization purposes, and recompiling for the "real" run. On all current architectures (that I can think of), this is not such a big deal. This is because branch prediction is handled by the CPU, not the compiler. On Itanium--where the ISA includes branch prediction "hints"--this means that Intel can run the suite once, find and record every branch taken, and then run it again having told the chip exactly which branches will be taken, always. No branch mispredictions at all. (If I understand correctly; in any case, there are certainly unfairly few with this technique.) And this is allowed under SPEC "base"!
Anyways, SPEC is a suspect benchmark in any case. The UltraSPARC has always underperformed the Alpha on SPEC, and yet does much better in the marketplace. Much of this is due to marketing, of course, but the fact is that a good SPEC performer does not necessarily make a good server, nor does it necessarily make a good consumer/enthusiast box.
That aside, I still can't find any specInt or specFP #s... which are a fairly good representation...
That's because SPEC doesn't run on MacOS. Thus the only PowerPC SPEC scores available are for high end IBM type systems, which have far superior i/o systems to Macs, and thus ought to perform much better on memory-intensive benchmarks like SPEC.
Unfortunately, the latest high-speed PIIIs kick the crap out of them, as do the actually-purchasable GHz Athlons. AltiVec is a great SIMD design, but even if there was enough software to take advantage of it, it'd be starved for data by the Mac's pitiful system bus in most real world conditions.
Basically, the only reasons to buy a Mac for your desktop is the OS, the color, or the fact that the new iMacs don't need fans. The only good points of the PowerPC architecture are low power consumption (which makes it a great laptop chip, and allows for the lack of a fan) and AltiVec (which, again, is starved by the poor i/o system).
For a much more detailed explanation of what I just said (including PPC vs. x86 SPEC comparisons), see Paul DeMone's excellent article.
As for the best SPEC/$ platform, right now it's far and away the GHz PIII. In the near future, it will be the Thunderbird on the low end and the new high-clocked Alphas (finally) for FP stuff. In the medium term, Willamette just might post some amazing SPEC results, although it's too early to tell. In any case, it's clear that the PPC architecture will lose badly for at least the next 12 months or so.
Besides, SPEC has a lot of things wrong with it as a benchmark, not least of which is the fact that even the SPEC "base" tests can be compiled based on optimizations from a previous test run (this is why Itanium will have good SPEC scores but terrible performance), and that it has no graphical component, and that it doesn't model typical code very well, unless you spend your time running scientific simulations all day.
On the other hand, if there were a better cross-platform benchmark, it would also show that the PPC sucks. As a CPU for a personal computer, that is. As well it should: it's designed for embedded/signal-processing applications.
So, what would happen if all those Metallica fans who own all the CDs for the MP3's they were trading stepped forward and gave counternotification?
;-)
This seems to be a common misconception about what Metallica did. They didn't ask for all the people who downloaded their music to be banned, but rather for all the people who were offering their music for download to be banned. In most cases, it's the same thing, since by default Napster shares the directory where it saves your downloads, but the two are very different in principle.
Even if you own the CD, you're not the copyright holder; under current copyright law, you're still infringing by making it available on Napster. The reason to make a counterclaim is that Metallica did not listen to the songs all 300,000-something people were sharing; rather, all the vaunted NetPD hackers did was write a bot (in contradiction with Napster's TOS, by the way) which searched for "Metallica" every couple of minutes, and left it connected to all the Napster servers for a weekend. Thus, anyone sharing an mp3 with the word "Metallica" in it got banned.
Now, I don't have to tell you that a lot of those mp3s weren't copyright infringing. For one thing, they would include plenty of concert bootlegs--which Metallica claims to encourage, by the way; whether they're still the copyright holders is a more difficult question. More obviously non-infringing would be things like "My band covering Master of Puppets by Metallica.mp3", or "Why Metallica sucks donkey balls--an oral essay spoken into my computer's 30-cent microphone.mp3" From what I've heard there may be many users on the list who were banned for providing exactly such content. Furthermore, Metallica compiled this list a couple weeks after they announced their suit; it's therefore quite likely that a bunch of people renamed files so as to look like Metallica files and shared them just for this reason.
For what reason you may ask? Well, in order to file a complaint under the DMCA to have something removed from a hosted server for copyright violations, you have to assert under penalty of perjury that it actually violates your copyright. In other words, if Metallica got you banned without first checking if the songs you shared were actually ones they had the copyright to, they are guilty of perjury. And from all indications, they did exactly that. Whether DMCA allows them to be fined for that, I dunno. (I'm assuming they won't get any jail time, although even assuming 99% of the files on Napster with Metallica in the file name are illegal, that leaves 3171 counts of perjury!) It sure as hell ought to, though.
On a final note, it'd be pretty awesome if everyone on the list filed a counterclaim, forcing Metallica to listen to all 317,000 of those songs. Of course, I happen to know that won't occur, since I decided to switch to Napigator instead.
YES.
You can counter-sue Metallica for affirming under penalty of perjury (they did this for each of those 300,000 users) that you were infringing on their copyright. You are entitled to damages under the DMCA for this, BTW, and they just might be liable for criminal perjury charges.
Napster has a page set up for anyone who believes they were wrongly kicked off. napster.com seems to be down right now, so I can't get you a link, but rest assured you can get there easily by clicking on the link that comes up when you try to log on to Napster and get denied.
Fill out the form, take 'em to court, and teach them to be a bit more careful the next time they take the law into their own hands.
Can you please back this assertion up with even one citation?? If this virus could run from the preview pane, the information would be all over every media story on the virus.
But I don't even need to see the fact that every media source reporting the "preview pane" rumor has since retracted it to know that it's not true. I've read the damn virus code. I know how it works, and I know how the (since closed) preview pane vulnerability worked, and this simply ain't it.
Not the same deal.
.jpg, .mp3, .vb, .vbs, and .awholelotmore files (all these files would be in user space).
.vbs icon, not a .txt icon.
1. A "malicious" bash script can not make itself run as root.
The original ILUVYOU trojan doesn't do anything that would require root on a Unix. All it does is send itself to everyone in your Outlook address book (equivalent to sending itself to everyone in your Pine address book), make changes to *your* registry to run itself upon reboot (equivalent to writing a script in a user's home directory), and write itself over
The FunnyJoke variation overwrites some system files, so that would arguably need root on a Unix.
2. I believe (may be wrong on this) that the thing "looks" like a text file if you have "known extensions hidden" as per default.
If you have "hide known extensions" enabled then it looks like it's named "blahblahblah.txt". Problem is, if it was really a txt file, it would just look like "blah blah blah", since...you have hide known extensions enabled. Tricky, yeah, but not really MS's fault. Furthermore, the little icon next to it looks like a
Of the three, only BubbleBoy can be run automatically, and only then if the user is running an unpatched version of IE. (The patch has been on Windows Update since last fall.) Furthermore, a BubbleBoy type virus requires a reboot to do any damage (it can only write arbitrary code, not execute it).
Don't have time to find documentation, but I'm entirely positive of this.