Ugh, I know it's awful style to reply to my own comment (almost as bad as posting such a long-ass comment in the first place), but I found some mighty interesting X-Box info in this item at firingsquad.
First off, the 64 MB of RAM is shared between the GPU and the motherboard--less than ideal, but it certainly makes sense from cost considerations. Second, the GPU will be running at 300 MHz, which pretty much kicks ass (current GeForces generally run about 150 in their default configs).
Finally, the CPU, while based on the P3 (read, probably no SSE2), *will* have the quad-pumped "400 MHz" bus off the Willamette, as they have its memory bandwidth listed as 6.4 GB/sec. That strongly hints at the inclusion of RDRAM, as it's the only stuff that can really take advantage of that kind of bandwidth.
The have its performance specs listed at 300 million particles/sec, 150 million transformed & lighted polys/sec (no effects). Not bad at all.
Some more corrections/thoughts that seem to have gotten missed in this discussion so far:
1) It's not necessarily an AMD chip
Many of you seem to be under the impression that the X-Box will be using an Athlon variant (presumably a Spitfire), but the name of the CPU vendor was conspiciously left out of today's announcement. Indeed, according to this article at C|Net, MS has decided to go with Intel for the CPU instead of AMD as earlier rumored.
If I had to guess, I'd say this means a 600 MHz Coppermine modified to support Willamette's new SSE2 instructions, which look quite impressive. (Although the most impressive things I've read about them (see this article at Ace's) are in regards to their double-precision SIMD performance, and IIRC games almost always use single-precision floats.)
This makes sense because two of Willamette's other signature features--a 20-stage deep pipeline and a double-pumped ALU--don't make sense here; games don't need much in the way of integer performance, and the deep pipeline is only good for increasing clock speed (indeed, clockspeed being equal, it slows things down)--and is definitely not necessary to reach 600 MHz.
On the other hand, Willamette's "400 MHz" (really quad-pumped 100 MHz) bus might not be such a bad idea for a next-gen console. Indeed, it might be just the thing to keep the NV15 based graphics chip full of data. The problem, of course, is cost, cost, cost. Which leads me to my next point:
2) 600MHz isn't such a bad decision
Yeah, I know that by the time this thing comes out, new PC's will be sporting 2 GHz Willamettes and 1.8 GHz Athlons. However, there's one problem with all y'all going around saying that that means that the X-Box should have a much faster chip too; those 2 GHz chips are going to be selling for something like $800-$1000 a piece.
And then there's the problem of how chips are normally clocked versus how they need to be clocked for a fixed-spec market like a console. You see, when Intel (or AMD, or whoever) makes a chip, they don't stick a clock multiplier on it until it's done. They make the chip, then test it to see how fast it can reliably run (this depends on lots of factors, among them the quality of the particular piece of silicon; there's no way to definitively know this number without actually testing it), and then stick on a multiplier such that it runs at that speed (actually a speed bin or two lower, just to be safe). This means that some (very very very small) percentage of P3's ends up being smacked with a 10x multiplier and being sold as a 1GHz chip; some get an 8x multiplier and are sold at 800MHz; and some--but just a few--can't manage to run reliably at even 600 MHz (or whatever the lowest speed P3's are sold at these days is), and are tossed in the trash).
Now the thing is, all of this probability stuff is built into the price. You see, it costs Intel exactly the same--around $70, IIRC--to make that one chip that ends up being branded at 1 GHz as it does to make the one that gets sold at 600 MHz. The difference is, it takes a whole lot of chips before they make one that's good enough to run at 1 Ghz. And a bunch of them are lost to the trash bin along the way. That's why they charge different amounts for the faster chip--to make up for the fact that they're harder (but *not* more expensive) to make. And that's (partially) why even the cheapest P3's still cost about $200--far more than the cost to fab each particular one.
In the console market, though, that little trick just doesn't work. When you're fabbing CPU's for the X-Box, either it runs at 600MHz, or you throw it away. Furthermore, since the entire thing is only going to cost $300, the CPU better not cost more than, say, $35 or $40; after all, that $300 has to include 64 MB of (possibly Rambus??) RAM, the graphics chip you're buying from NVidia, which itself will have probably 32 MB and possible 64 MB of RAM (possibly DDR RAM); an 8 GB hard drive, a DVD drive, a motherboard, a stylish case, a controller, possibly a keyboard, probably pretty impressive sound support, and I'm sure a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting. Point being, you want to make sure you can make these chips run at 600 MHz with *very high yields* in comparison to the yields that Intel and AMD normally achieve.
Furthermore, with a kickass graphics chip (and especially one that has hardware T&L like the GeForce does and the NV15 will) the speed of the CPU is much less important. Indeed, as Kyle over at HardOCP showed (check here and here), with today's fastest chips, in real-world conditions it is sometimes faster to run with a GeForce's Hardware T&L turned *off* (i.e. so the CPU calculates T&L) than with it on! On the other hand, that same GeForce, when paired with a mediocre CPU, speeds things up tremendously. Of course, the T&L in the NV15 will be considerably improved, such that it will no doubt be a great help when paired with that 600 MHz chip. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's a waste when paired with those 2 GHz Willamettes everyone wants in the X-Box instead.
3) The X-Box will perform identically to a 600 MHz / 64 MB RAM PC of today--i.e. worse than a PS2
Absolutely definitely maybe not.
First the absolutely not: the real guts of the X-Box is not its 600 MHz CPU, but rather its NVidia based graphics chip. Even today, a pretty slow Celeron with a kickass graphics card--i.e. a DDR GeForce--will be pretty competitive with the latest Ghz P3 with a very respectible graphics card, say a Matrox G400, when it comes to running games. Indeed, in many situations (i.e. at high resolutions), it will run just as fast as that Ghz P3 with the same kickass GeForce--and much faster than the P3 with the Matrox--because at high resolutions (i.e. 1280 and 1600), the limiting factor is always the fill-rate of the video card. Course, this doesn't help if you're running at TV resolution, but you get my point: for games, the video card is *more* important than the CPU--and the GPU in the X-Box will be much better than any graphics card on the market today.
Next, the definitely: the X-Box, like all consoles, will only come in one spec. That means game developers can program their games knowing exactly what they'll be running on--and taking full advantage of that as much as possible. This means, amongst other things, that they won't have to design their games to look adequate across a wide range of resolutions and graphical detail levels, but can instead concentrate on making it look good and run fast at the one graphical level it will be run on. Secondly, this means that, like on any other console, developers will be able to dip below the API level and reap the speed benefits that come from being able to program a much lower levels, including hand-tuning important graphical code at the register-level in the GPU. This can only be done when you know that the specs of the machines that will run your game are all identical.
Now for the maybe: one of the major "points" of the X-Box is that it will be nearly compatible with normal PCs, which of course come in all shapes and flavors. The difficulty here is that, in order to maintain this compatibility, developers would need to stay at the API level, and would need to design their games from a hardware-agnostic point of view, which would remove most of the benefits of uniformity I just mentioned. However, I'd guess that what will most likely happen is that developers will keep most of their code at the D3D level, but still optimize the most important routines for the X-Box's GPU. The end result will be that X-Box games *will not* run on PC's (although PC games might run on X-Box??), but that it will still be considerably easier to port PC games to X-Box than to any other console. On the other hand, it's reportedly very easy to port PC games to the PS2, so maybe this advantage isn't as great as MS banked on. In any case, it's important to note that it's this same loss of the benefits of uniformity which has lead to almost no Dreamcast games making use of the Dreamcast's ability to run WinCE and hence pseudo-D3D. Indeed, I believe that MS has officially withdrawn their WinCE support of Dreamcast due to a complete and total lack of interest from Dreamcast developers.
4) It's Windows, and it's a PC, so it will be confusing, take forever to boot, and crash like crazy
This is almost certainly wrong. For one thing, the X-Box will be running a version of what up to now has been called Embedded NT--which should be extremely stipped down and quite reliable, as well as offering very short boot times. (Reportedly the PS2's boot time is quite long for a console--on the order of 5 seconds or so.) Furthermore, probably most Windows crashes come as a result of either bad drivers--which should never happen on a standardized machine like the X-Box--or as a result of problems with memory management of legacy code--again, no problem since there will be none--or with multitasking apps not behaving themselves--which won't be a problem since the X-Box will only run one thing at a time. Furthermore, 64 MB of RAM should be more than adequate, considering the lack of multitasking and the fact that the OS will be much much leaner than normal Windows or NT.
On the other hand, I have to say that the prospect of an 8-gig hard drive scares me a bit, if nothing else than because it offers the possibility of quite a lot more complexity and variations in end-users' actual setups. I doubt MS will allow anything like DLL hell to manifest itself, though; I'm sure the X-Box OS will keep every program's DLLs seperate and well managed, especially since this is a (more like the) feature of MS's upcoming-and-stupidly-named Windows ME.
Phew. So--do I think the X-Box will be phenomenally successful? No, not really, I don't. While I do believe that it will be more powerful that the PS2 on a theoretical level, I don't know if the difference will shine through in the games. Basically, there are two possibilities: most X-Box developers will try to keep their games as trivial ports from their PC counterparts, in which case they won't be able to take advantage of the uniformity of having a single machine to develop for, and thus the PS2 will be more impressive, or X-Box developers will try to "program to the metal", in which case they will be a year behind on the learning curve of low level programming, and thus their games will probably never decisively beat what's coming out for PS2 at the same time.
On the other hand, I think that it just might be successful (depends on if the PS2 actually conquers the world beforehand, as many predict), and I'd give it about equal odds to succeed as, say, Nintendo's Dolphin.
Like we (?) need specs... How different can it be from a standard (whatever that means) x86 machine?...The only thing that I could possibly imagine being different is the BIOS.
Erm...you're forgetting the negligible component called the graphics chip. Yes, it will be *based* on a then-current NVidia card, but it certainly be substantially different enough to require entirely different drivers. (Yes, all of NVidia's current drivers work across their entire line of chips, but that's just because they've specifically been designed to.) Furthermore, assuming this machine is DirectX only, they might tweak their chip quite a bit to run DirectX better. And I would certainly bet that, as part of their contract with NVidia, MS has insisted that this chip be a) incompatible with other NVidia drivers, and b) closed-spec. (The idea that MS couldn't do this because of the antitrust trial is clearly ridiculous, so I won't bother addressing that.)
So now we're stuck reverse-engineering OpenGL drivers for a chip with over 15 million transistors that may have been designed not to run OpenGL very well anyways. Good luck folks.
Course, they got BSD running on a Dreamcast, so what do I know?
I'm not sure I understand what's wrong with lookalike hardware? The PC industry is full of lookalike hardware and it's been a huge success.
Not in terms of games it's not. A PC that can run games that look as good and run as fast as, say, a $200 Dreamcast probably costs about $1000. A PC that runs games as reliably, and with as little aggravation and technical knowledge required as any console in history does not exist.
Yes, a huge part of the reason for this is that PC's are multipurpose, and have the overhead of a real OS, and all of that. But another large part of it is that it's damn hard to program for "lookalike" hardware--because in reality, to the programmer it doesn't look all that much alike. When a game programmer has to support every machine from a P2 200 with some crappy old integrated ATI 3d chip, up to the latest machines of today, and even try to anticipate the capabilities of machines that won't be out for another few months, well, that lowers his ability to take each machine to its full potential. For one thing, he has to program in variable levels of graphic detail, instead of designing a game to look best in one particular resolution/level of graphic detail. (And if you don't think that's a problem, just witness the number of *web pages* out there with notices like "this page looks best in 800 x 600 32-bit color".) For another, he has to deal with all number of different video cards, each of which supports the three major 3D API's--OpenGL, D3D, and Glide--to varying degrees and in varying qualities, or not at all. Not to mention the fact that every video card will have an installed base of probably at least 10 major different driver versions, (each of which supports those API's to differing levels of quality), with new drivers coming out every couple weeks or so.
And it's not just graphics. Take sound--many gamers have 3D positional sound cards, but if you want to make a game that requires a player to use sound cues to tell just where their opponent is then you've just made it a lot less fun for all the people who don't have 3D positional sound. So instead, most new games have 3D sound as an option, but don't take advantage of it to the degree that it really starts to affect gameplay.
Finally, lookalike hardware makes it so a game developer these days absolutely cannot program at any level lower than the API's, because there's just too much hardware to support. That's why a Dreamcast, with its much less powerful hardware, can compete with a decent PC in graphics performance, and why as programmers get more and more comfortable programming to the metal, it, like all consoles, will see graphics quality improve over the life of the console.
Now, this last point might not count in the case of the X-box which, while it will have one ironclad hardware spec, is designed to leverage its compatability with Windows API's. It's interesting to note that almost none of the Dreamcast games have made use of its much-balleyhooed ability to use WinCE and DirectX for sorta quasi Windows compatability--because the overhead involved removes the programmers ability to get more out of the hardware than he could on a PC.
Clearly the monopoly is in the best interest of the company that holds it (ie. Sony) but everybody else loses: the consumer, game manufacturers, and other console manufacturers.
Um...if the consumer loses, can you point me to a PC that offers anywhere near the game experience/price ratio of, say, a $200 Dreamcast and a few $40 games (take Crazi Taxi and Soul Calibur for starters)??? Or anywhere near a $100 Playstation??? In six months, do you think there'll be a PC for $300 that can compete with a PS2 (much less one for $2000)?? Now, of course, if you already have a PC lying around for other stuff, then sure, you can get a similar game experience--I happen to enjoy PC-style games better than console games. But if you have to choose between one or the other just on the basis of its value as a game machine, there is absolutely nowhere close to a comparison.
Furthermore, it ain't so bad for game manufacturers either. A million-selling game for the Playstation isn't such a rare thing--after all, less than 1.5% of the 70 million Playstation owners worldwide have to buy your game. Games that sell 10 million copies are not unheard of, and 5-million sellers are quite common.
In the PC gaming industry, on the other hand, selling 1 million copies is a pretty impressive achievement, and the vast majority of games don't make it. Games that sell 10 million copies are called Myst. Guess that's why nearly every major PC developer is moving resources over to PS2 development. (Sierra has announced that they will devote 60% of their resources to console development; Epic is hyping their PS2 port of the Unreal engine like mad, as is Monolith with their Lithtech 2.0 engine. Even id is porting the Q3 engine, and strongly exploring developing for PS2 themselves.)
As for your contention that the console monopoly is bad for other console manufactureres...well, you got one thing right.
I decided to try this out. Mainly to see if the patch MS posted a few months ago to stop this sort of thing (i.e. ActiveX inserting arbitrary code into your StartUp directory) actually did.
It doesn't. Apparently all it does is stop *unsigned* ActiveX from inserting arbitrary code. Now, while that's certainly an absurdly necessary thing to have done--and it does stop the most major abuses of that ActiveX hole (eg. the Bubbleboy Outlook/OE virus)--I think it's pretty damn ridiculous to assume that any program should be able to stick arbitrary code in my StartUp directory just because it's signed. Or that it should be able to make changes to my registry without asking, as gohip's code does as well. (But don't worry--when you download their program to fix your registry (which does work, BTW), it pops up a cryptic looking dialog box asking if you really truly want to make changes to your registry.)
The sad thing is (flamesuit on) I actually *like* a lot of the ideas behind ActiveX--namely that it might be a good idea to store applets on the client side instead of having to download them every time you visit a web page--and I've seen some pretty nice uses of it. (eg. the dynamic hierarchical news menu on MSNBC. Of course, being ActiveX, don't bother trying to check it out unless you're running IE 4 or 5 on a Windows box--last time I checked, it doesn't even work in IE 4.5 for Mac.)
Unfortunately, its outrageous lack of cross-platform compatability and its moronic-to-criminal lack of safe security privilages have nearly killed off some actually sorta neat technology. Oh well.
Anyways, I hope this incident will point out to some people who've pretended otherwise what a farce "signed" code is. On the web, you don't know who to trust. As anyone who thought about it could have predicted, the danger isn't some 1eet hax0r somehow piggy-backing his trojan onto your connection with some Nice Commercial Website...it's the Verisigned trojan that Nice Commercial Website is asking your permission to install.
Is anyone able to narrow that down a little bit???
If you look on the right side of this pic it appears to have an ARM running at 206 MHz, and 32 MB RAM. Not too shabby.
Course, to me it looks just like a WinCE ripoff but with crappy fonts (i.e. the "START/" button...), but what do I know. At least MP3 and a web browser are nice.
Frankly, we can do our own "code morphing" given an instruction set description and a patent license that goes with the chip. And it's not even clear that we'd need to do code morphing from something like the x86 - I think we'd be much more interested in designing our own instruction sets to work optimally for Linux.
Much as I respect you Bruce, and as impressed as I am with the OSS movement, this is precisely the reason why Transmeta doesn't want to open source their code or their native instruction set description. One of the main benefits of using code-morphing is that Transmeta can change the native VLIW instruction set on their chip very easily, without breaking compatability with any existing programs.
Indeed, the 3120 and the 5400 have completely different native instruction sets, IIRC. Any future Transmeta processors are likely to have their own native instruction sets as well. Even so, you'd better believe that if Transmeta went ahead and released complete specs for their chips, there'd be a bunch of open-source hackers who, desperate for that extra 20% performance fix, would code their own little Linux-TM3120 (which, considering the fact that it would probably require writing a version of gcc optimised for the 3120's VLIW instruction set, would be pretty darn nontrivial). Another bunch would have to do the same amount of work to come out with Linux-TM5400. And meanwhile, by the time either of these projects was finished, Transmeta would be shipping a bunch of new processors with completely different cores.
The point is, Transmeta forsees itself as finally solving the pesky problem of backwards-compatibility--but at the price of a small performance penalty. The important thing here is, they have to act a little bit like benevolent dictators to do this: in order to give us all something we want--freedom from compatibility issues--they have to take away some of our freedom elsewhere, by not releasing their native instruction sets.
The reason why this is so is because of that fundamental bane of OSS--people write OSS to scratch an itch. Now, usually their itch is an itch shared by many others--that's why OSS can have its phenomenal successes. However, in some cases, an one person's itch-scratching may be in conflict with the general software-using community as a whole.
And this is such an example. That is, if I just bought a TM5400-based laptop, and I want to run Linux on it, then I suddenly have an itch--the version of Linux I'm running on it isn't as optimized as it could be, because it's running in emulation through the code-morphing layer. The problem is that by scratching that itch--that is, writing Linux-TM5400--ruins a lot of other people's day. Specifically, it removes the benefit of backwards-compatibility for all.
All in all it's a pretty interesting issue, and maybe in a few years if Transmeta's way of doing things becomes more entrenched I might change my mind, but I figure that for the time being Transmeta's way of doing things is the right one, and I'd bet that Linus supports it all the way. After all, Linus has always said that he picked the GPL as the license for Linux not out of ideology but out of pragmatism--not because he thinks that all software ought to be open-sourced, but because he realized that Linux might be useful to others and become mildly successful if it was. While neither you nor I know exactly what the consequences would be if Transmeta open-sourced all of their (relevent) intellectual property, a much stronger case can be made that the result would be detrimental to the success of the Transmeta chip (I mean in terms of adoption, not Transmeta's financial success) rather than beneficial.
This is awfully cute, but of course doesn't change anything with regards to DeCSS being protected or unprotected speech. For one thing, if, say, Tom Clancey wanted to include in his latest book--all in the name of realism, of course--some illegally obtained blueprints for a neutron bomb, that wouldn't be protected by the 1st Amendment; or rather, his 1st Amendment protections would be overruled by national security concerns. (Indeed, IIRC he was asked to change several of his books because his informed guesses about certain top-secret weaponry were too accurate for the Navy's comfort...)
For another, courts have sometimes drawn the line as to whether code is speech or not by whether it is machine readable. As you point out in your post, your story is--it can be run through a Perl script and then compiled--and thus fails the test. Of course, with scanners and OCR, just about everything is machine readable these days, so that's just yet another corner of the law that technology has made obsolete.
Maybe because they're biased to the point that they don't report negative news about themselves (only about Linux related information).
No, I think it's because they're just slow. But then again, their primary mission isn't to provide the fastest news updates, but rather a forum to make their news "coverage"--that is, the article plus the comments--the most in-depth and interesting out there. And I think that, for the most part, they succeed.
Ars Technica seems to be much better at providing computer-related news now, and their site is cleaner too. I'm considering switching permanantly to them.
Don't get me wrong--I love Ars, and I've been a regular reader there for over a year. However, if you're considering switching because you want faster or more complete news coverage, you'll be very disappointed--they only update the site an average of around once a day (sometimes less often), and usually with only 4 or 5 articles. Meanwhile,/. may be a few hours behind on many stories, but they post around 20 or so a day, which is much better variety if you ask me. And while the Ars discussion boards are a lot more intelligent than most on the web, I find I just can't go without the power of/.'s customizable comments pages--I can view threads intelligently, I can browse at any threshold, I can see and respond to responses to my posts very easily: it's nice.
What I *do* love Ars for is their occasional original content, especially Hannibal's interesting and excellently written hardware articles. But I don't think they could cut it (for me, at least) as a primary news site.
Needless to say, a lot of folks who don't pay attention to status bars and address bars could fall prey to all sorts of exploits based on this that don't require "running" anything on the client machine that a typical security app could catch.
Actually, as the advisory points out, reading your status bar doesn't protect you, as what is written down there can be changed by Javascript. Thus, they advise everyone to type in all their links manually. Ick.
You say you'll get better fill rates with consoles
No. If you read my post, I actually said "gamers who enjoy buying a new video card every 4 months will still be able to push a higher fillrate or transform more polys/sec than the latest consoles"--that the latest PC's will always be technologically more on the cutting edge. I just said that the consoles would be close enough to keep up. (Indeed, the PS 2 looks to match all but the highest end PCs when it is first released. Of course, PC's will continue to improve over the life of the PS 2, but most people only want to buy something new every couple years anyways, and console developers can push their systems harder because they know that everyone will have identical systems.)
And, furthermore, that the newest games will come out on consoles at the same time as PC, if not first, or only on consoles. You speak of Half Life, System Shock 2, and Quake 3: well, Half Life is published by Sierra, who has stated that they'll be moving 60% of their resources to consoles; System Shock 2 is developed by Looking Glass, who I believe have discussed porting Thief 2 to PS 2, and published by EA, who focuses mainly on consoles already; and id is porting Q3 already and apparently considering developing their next title for consoles concurrently with PCs.
As for console versions being less detailed...this was certainly true with cartridge based consoles, which didn't have the storage space of PC games, but the PS 2 uses DVD as their media--when it comes out, DVD's *still* won't be standard enough on PC's for PC games to be developed for DVD only. Thus, it looks like the *console* games will be the more detailed ones, at least at first.
Open Source is very open (forgive the pun) in terms of what it applies to. I can Open Source my new Widget2000 code and only sell it to people who buy Widget2000 and require them to not reveal the source code to anyone else. Or I can Open Source it and post it on a public FTP site.
As someone else has pointed out, neither of those actions, by itself, meets the Open Source Definition.
Furthermore, as regards both the OSD--which is derived from Bruce Perens' Debian Free Software Guidelines--and GNU's (i.e. RMS's) definition of free software, your two examples of what you do with your Widget2000 source code are probably not as different as you may think. That is, even the GPL allows you to only give source code to people who pay you for your product--it just specifies that you can't stop them from revealing the code to anyone else, or indeed from licensing it to anyone else under anything other than the GPL. Likewise, posting your source code to a public FTP site doesn't make it open source if those who download it aren't allowed to redistribute the code, and use it in derivative works or fork it.
Unless your license allows these things, then the proper term for it is not "open source" but "revealed source". (Or so says the OSS language police.) Companies seeking to capitalize on the open source movement may call actions like the ones you describe "open sourcing", but they are not--as we have understood the terms. Of course, if even those of us on/. don't understand what open source really means, and point out such bastardizations of the term, then pretty soon it won't mean anything anyways.
I know this is going to seem like blasphemy to some people, but let's think a little bit about 'free' phone service...or, for that matter, 'free' anything. We all know bandwidth is never free - SOMEONE is paying for it, and if it's not you, then the person who IS paying for it is probably looking for a way to bill you for it.
Fine. But the same point can be applied to anything on the web. Dialpad is (from what I hear--I've only used it from school, where it is quite intelligible, thank you) optimized to be usable on a 33.6; it does ask you what sort of connection you have, but at worst it's no different from any other streaming audio/video format, like Quicktime or Windows Media Player--and better than RealPlayer G2 which automatically ups its bitrate to meet available bandwidth.
The point is, everything on the internet uses bandwidth, and almost all of it is "free"--that is, supported by ads, like dialpad is. The same argument could be made against slashdot: they're profiting--through ad revenue (well, through IPO, but whatever)--on my viewing for free a service--news--that traditionally costs money, all on the backs of poor Harvard University's limited bandwidth resources. Well, boo hoo. Besides, while it won't hold a candle to Harvard's, I'm sure Clemson's tuition more than covers their "free" internet access. The only possible reason for this ban was a kneejerk attempt to save CMU's phone monopoly.
. In this case, the cost may be minor. But the next time this debate comes around, for some other service, it might not be.
Indeed, I'm not so sure how I feel about the Napster case. Apparently, at Northwestern, Napster usage was taking up to 25% of their bandwidth. Now, IMO, that means they didn't have enough bandwidth to start with, but there at least you might have a reasonable argument to censor a site. (Not one that would convince me, but reasonable.) In this case, no way.
Yeah, but plenty of people would rather play it on a PS 2--cheaper, smaller, and simpler than a PC; crashproof, idiotproof, no long bootup times; all on a nice big TV with a real sound system.
Yeah, computers have better resolution, but that's being solved with HDTV. And yeah, the hardcore spenders...er, gamers who enjoy buying a new video card every 4 months will still be able to push a higher fillrate or transform more polys/sec than the latest consoles.
Only problem is, all the game developers will be making all their hottest games for the consoles first, if not only. Don't believe me? Well, there's hardly any major PC game developers who haven't announced that they're at least strongly considering developing for PS 2. Epic is porting UT, Id is almost certainly on for Q3; Sierra--formerly 100% PC, I think--says they're moving 60% of their development resources to consoles.
Meanwhile, when was the last time you heard a major console-only game developer announce support for the PC? (Square most certainly doesn't count; FF7 and 8 are perhaps the worst ports in history, and show nothing if not complete disregard for the PC market. One example--not upgrading the texture resolution in FF8. What looks ok on a TV's 400x320 just doesn't cut it in 1074x768...)
There seems to be software out there to copy direct to VCD - I've seen it referred to and I once heard someone on another machine in a lab referring to their using it. Can't find a copy to prove it, though.
I found this link in an earlier DeCSS article; it lists no less than 19 programs under the DVD-rippers header. Now, from what I can gather, a few of these programs need to be used in concert, but the fact remains that there are several methods to rip DVDs out there, only one of which is DeCSS. Now, I haven't used any of them, but from what I can gather--especially from looking at some of the quite detailed "how to rip DVD's using blah" articles I found on the above link--it appears to be quite a lot easier to get yourself either a lossless or a reduced-size mpeg of your DVD's using the tools that were already out there than with DeCSS.
What I'm wondering, however, is if DPDF/Quartz can be (efficiently) made network-transparent.
I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that it already will be in OS X, out-of-the-box...although wouldn't you know it I can't fetch up a link now. Still, considering the fact that there's a Unix kernal underneath, and considering the fact that in the increasingly networked world we're heading into, there are plenty of good reasons to include it even for non-techies, I'd be surprised if it wasn't built for network-transparent operation.
But, actually, this is just the problem: the cash that St. Louis just basically gave to the Rams most certainly was economically quantifiable, and the other very pressing needs of St. Louis are also economically quantifiable, so the idea of spending that much cash on something just to "make it exciting to live in" goes way past stupid and borders on the immoral.
There are a whole whole lot of pressing needs in St. Louis, no doubt about it. While most of them can't be solved by throwing money at them, some of them could certainly use more funding, and thus I have to say that you raise a valid point.
However, "making a city exciting to live in," while not easy to quantify economically, does have many potential positive economic benefits. For one thing, the TWA dome is not just a football stadium (and a concert venue), but also a very large--and at the time it was built, very necessary--convention center. Yes, it cost more money to build it as a football stadium than it would have otherwise, but the fact remains that St. Louis will more than get their investment out of the TWA dome/Convention Center on the basis of the huge tax revenues brought in by large conventions. Furthermore, the Rams pay taxes as well; thus, it's pretty doubtful that St. Louis will lose too much money in the long run on bringing the team here.
More importantly, though, having a successful sports team like the Rams brings a lot of people downtown, which helps revitalize the downtown area. Yeah, this sounds like a weak excuse, but in a city like St. Louis, many people from the suburbs haven't been downtown in *years* (except perhaps to attend Cardinals games); having good sports teams thus has a noticable economic effect on the downtown area.
And, it has a noticable economic effect on the metropolitan area as well. Sports teams, especially exciting ones, encourage people to move to St. Louis, and encourage people already here to stay.
But you seem to have read more literature on the subject than I have, because you assert that it's been shown that there is no discernable net economic benefit from publicly funded stadiums. Fine. I'll give you that.
But the question is, is there a net deficit? It doesn't seem that the studies have shown that, either--or else you would have brought it up, since you're so familiar with these studies. So, I ask you: all things being economically equal (and from your comment, it appears that they are), would you rather live in a city with a Super Bowl champion football team, or one with no sports teams at all?
While you may answer that you don't care--and I believe you--the simple fact is that most people do. Hence, it's the duty of any city government to try to get sports teams for their city. It may not citizens any richer, but it definitely improves their quality of life.
Yeah, it's even more amusing when the teams that are playing deserve to burn in hell. Both of them stabbed their hometowns in the back less than 5 years ago. They're the worst thing about modern professional sports. They represent the team owners today who bilk cities for millions of dollars in blackmail tax subsidies, do nothing to hepl the local economies, and have no city loyalty, even though they themselves depend on hometown loyalty to fill stadium seats.
Well, in the case of the Rams, you couldn't be more wrong. The ones without loyalty were the fans in LA--or the prodigious lack of them. Why do you think the nation's second largest TV market lost both of their football teams within a year (the Rams to St. Louis and the Raiders back to Oakland)?? Because nobody in LA cared about football. Sure, the Rams were a mediocre team...but their attendence the last few years was abyssmal. Indeed, no one even lifted a finger to stop either team from moving.
Meanwhile, the Rams sold out nearly every game in St. Louis for the past 5 years--and believe me, they sucked for the first four of them. As for the assertion that neither of these teams has helped the local economies, that's clearly absurd. And even more than that, getting to a Super Bowl unites a city and makes it exciting to live in (if St. Louis can ever be called that...but that's another story) in important if not economically quantifiable games.
Both of these teams played their hearts out all season and in tonight's great game. Don't you have anything better to do than disparage them?
But, deCSS and utils based upon it are available for windows, which provide no other purpose but copying.
Wrong.
DeCSS was written for Windows...so that it could be used to play DVD's under Linux.
Or rather, so that it could be used to play DVD's under WINE under Linux. According to Jon Johansen (the 16-year old member of MoRE who was arrested in Norway for writing deCSS--although he probably didn't), this was a necessary first step because at the time, Linux didn't offer support for the file format used on DVD's. (Can't remember the acronym right now, and can't find the article in which he was quoted as saying this. It was one of the "Jon Johansen gets arrested" articles referenced by a poster in an earlier DeCSS thread...) Thus, at the time, DeCSS on WINE was the only way for those who will only allow free software on their computers--and there are many of them--to play a DVD.
Then, once support for that format was available for Linux (again, this is what Jon was quoted as saying), a program that ran DVD on Linux the right way--CSS-auth--could be written. But DeCSS was a legitimate first step towards that goal; for a short time, DeCSS on WINE was the only way to view DVD's on Linux.
Or, of course, you could have just had one of your Windows using friends rip any DVD to MPEG using one of the many many *many* available rippers that allowed the CSS key already included in any Windows DVD software to break the encryption before capturing the file. This page lists no less than 19 of them. IIRC, only one of those listed (DeCSS) actually breaks CSS itself. That is, there were (I believe) no less than 18 DVD rippers already available before CSS was reverse-engineered.
As for your argument that these rippers were "less perfect" than a DeCSSed copy, I can't say, since I've never seen the output of any of them. However, I do know that CD-to-mp3 rippers are of greatly varying quality, and are always improving; unless there's some technical obstacle I don't know of (and I highly doubt it), there's no good reason why these tools wouldn't become perfect very very soon--especially because what they do is not, as I understand it, any different from the job a CD ripper does.
Except that I'm not as optimistic as he is that OSS will be able to solve this problem.
But before I get to that, lemme try to explain why this is such a big problem, because many of y'all don't seem to get it, judging from some of the posts so far.
But, you might say, we don't want all those Winblows lusers! We don't care how *smart* you have to be to use Linux, cause we only want us l33t genii (hey! We're even l33t l4at3n speakers!) to be able to use it! Because we all know that, once you learn how to use it (and it doesn't even take me that long, cause I'm so smart), OSS is more flexible, powerful, and faster to use than some "end-user tested" crap.
And 10 years ago, you'd have been right. The problem here is that the above argument is no longer true, and most Linux users/coders don't even know it. Now there's no argument that OSS for Unix/Unix-alikes has had some of the best text-based UI's around. (Or, in the case of xemacs, I suppose we should say "primarily keyboard-based" rather than "text-based".) Sure, most of them are abolute hell to learn (the poster above who suggested that you could adequately teach a newbie to use vi by sitting them down in front of it and pressing 'i' notwithstanding), but, once you get used to them, you realize how incredibly intelligently they were designed. Things like vi/vim, emacs, and the various CLI shells; you'd need a dedicated teacher, a book, or a hell of a lot of patience with man pages to figure any of them out, but once you do you find that they're extraordinarily quick to use, ridiculously full featured, and amazingly robust. As my Harley Hahn Unix book says ad nauseum, "hard to learn but easy to use." And if you're any sort of geek--someone who's going to spend most of your time on a computer, such that the steep learning curve isn't too relevant--then it's not such a bad design philosophy.
Thing is, most of us have realized that a GUI has the possibility to make anyone more productive, even Tom Christiansen's proverbial "vi wizard". However, the people making GUI tools/wm's/environments for Linux (note: not that I'm one of them; not that I'm a good enough programmer to contribute a single line; and really truly not to take anything away from their impressive achievements) seem to have figured that we could use a dose of the old paradigms, a huge helping of superficial Windows UI plagarism, and some skinability (neato!) and have a kickass UI.
Not even close.
Again, Gnome and KDE are incredible achievements for what they are, and are constantly getting better. But. As they stand now, their UI is clearly substandard. KDE is like Win9x, but flakier (from a UI perspective, not a stability one, of course), with less consistent (though more extensive) preferences panels, unconsistent app UI's, much less polish, and an awful excuse for perhaps the most important functionality of a GUI--being able to seemlessly share data between different apps. Gnome has the benefit of not being such a slavish copy of Windows, but is otherwise even worse in all of the above categories.
And what do most Linux users do about it? a) Complain about how GUI's are for wimps anyways, or b) Stick on some badass skins and note how, since E has much more functionality than any Windows wm, it is invariably a better UI.
Meanwhile, what do MS and Apple do about it? They spend millions of dollars a year hiring UI experts and, more importantly, empirically testing thousands of potential interfaces on end-users to find which are better.
Notice I didn't say "easier to learn". I said "better". As has been noted elsewhere in this thread, the Windows UI paradigm isn't any more intuitive from first principles than the KDE paradigm (duh; they're nearly identical). But that's not the point. What good UI testing is all about isn't how easy it is for someone who's never seen a computer before to use, but rather, assuming the user already has adequate familiarity with the paradigm, a) how flexible, robust, and powerful is it; b) how intuitive is it to do an action which is part of the paradigm but which the user has never actually done before; and c) how fast, easy, and nonobtrusive is it to do the sorts of tasks that the user does again and again.
By all these criteria, something like the Unix CLI passes with flying colors. And, by all these criteria, Gnome and KDE, and the programs that run on them, in their current states are quite a bit behind Windows, which in turn lags behind MacOS. (Note: I've never been a Mac user, and have always generally disliked them for several reasons: bad under-the-hood technology, horrible overpricing, lack of good, fast software, one damn button, deceitful marketing. However, I'm just beginning to come around to how well designed their UI is (compared to the alternatives), and damn if OS X doesn't look incredible. But I digress.)
But, you all say, that's what's so great about Open Source! If there's anything wrong with Open Source Software, then someone will fix it! The problem is, very few people notice that anything's wrong. That is, you don't notice how unproductive the way you're doing things is until you see a better implementation. And even then you probably won't notice--it might take someone with a stopwatch showing you how much faster you work the new way than the old way. A quick story to perhaps illustrate what I mean: couple days ago I was procrastinating writing a huge (and overdue) paper, by reading that analysis of Aqua by Tog, the guy who essentially led the Mac UI development. And, since I was trying awful hard to procrastinate (and because once you start reading him, Tog's pretty interesting), I decided to click the link to this article on Fitts' Law, where I read Tog's advice to Word for Windows users: switch to full screen mode to get the Fitt's Law advantages of infinite depth behind your menus, and switch to large icons to speed up finding the right one.
Well, never one to miss a chance to not write my paper, I did some informal tests. And, even though the ideas had never occurred to me (not because I didn't know full screen mode and large icons existed, but just because since it *looks* so much more professional in maximized window mode with by big toolbars full of small icons (which, as I run 1280x1074, really are small), it had to be more productive that way), I realized pretty quickly that they actually improved my productivity. Or, would have, except that in full screen mode the menus, while at the top of the screen and thus with infinite depth, don't show up until you mouse over them (Tog doesn't seem to mind this sort of thing; I find it annoying as hell. But in any case, it's worth pointing out that this is proof Tog isn't designing for ignorant first-time users--because you certainly can't expect any first-time users to know about items which are hidden until you mouse over them--but rather for ease of use for people who know what they're doing); and since MS decided *not* to include higher res bitmaps for all the icons in large icon mode, they looked too damn ugly for me to keep them. But it is true that I could find the right one a lot quicker; and that I'd never realized how my tiny icons were slowing me down until I tested it.
Ok, I'm hideously rambling, so lemme try to sum up. Text-based Unix interfaces were everything that today's Linux GUI's aren't: consistent, robust, quick (from a UI standpoint, not a technological one), and intuitive for those who already knew the paradigm. A simple example is pipes--a simple concept which gives the CLI its amazing power and flexibility--and their GUI analogues, object models like COM, CORBA, etc. designed to allow intuitive sharing of information between apps--which, to put it mildly, work much better on mainstream OS's than on Gnome and KDE. A more interesting problem (because we at least agree on the fact that our object models need improvement, and I have no doubt that they'll catch up pretty soon) is inconsistent and just-plain-badly-designed interfaces--a failure to take advantage of principles--like Fitts' Law--that the other guys have learned from psychological research and intensive user-testing. Perhaps the most difficult problem is the lack of consistency across apps.
The question is, how do we fix this. In regards our lack of UI research, I have a good deal of hope. After all, Red Hat has the money to hire some serious UI people and psychologists and testers and whatnot to get Gnome on equal footing with Windows and Macs; Corel or others could do the same for KDE. Hell, they might even come up with some *new* GUI paradigms, instead of just copying the two rather flawed ones out there, often badly.
The problem is that the strength of OSS lies not in the high-name projects which can now afford serious funding, but rather in all the little ones that provide all the little functionalities we know and love. How to get all of those projects to understand, and furthermore, abide by complex UI standards--when at the moment they can't even agree on standard menu shortcut keys--is a huge problem. Furthermore, there's the fact that a different choice of widget toolkits inevitably imposes a different UI paradigm. Finally, we have the fact that Linux geeks rightly love customizing our systems to the fullest extent; as Apple has clearly realized, with their apparent decision not to allow OS X any skins other than Aqua, customization is the enemy of consistency.
Hopefully this absurdity of a long post has convinced y'all that these UI issues are important, because they really affect how productive any user is--but elite users *especially*. I do think that OSS can come up with a better response to the UI issue than poorly understand copies of the existing GUIs. However, I'm not sure exactly how, and our work so far in this area has not been encouraging...
That's what AOL'ers get. I'm against AOL, and I believe their users get what they deserve.
This makes me feel squeamish. No, actually this makes me feel disturbed and yet rather entertained at the same time. You're against...an internet provider? Like, I suppose I can understand this, if they ever did anything to harm you personally, or gave you bad service, or something...although I doubt you'd ever admit to even emailing someone with an AOL address. But wishing harm on their 20 million users?? For their choice of an ISP?? Huh? Did you run that statement by yourself before you wrote it??
I'm not tyring to sound supiror or anything, but why didn't these people do research before they signed up to AOL?
Well you sure as hell don't come off looking too "supiror". Why didn't you do research on the English language before you presumed to write it down?
$21.95? Most of the local ISPs around here are $14.95 or under, and offer everything AOL has.
Erm, no. AOL is still a proprietary network community that allows access to the internet. They have their own dial-up procedure, which is significantly easier to setup than any other ISP's; they have their own integrated interface; they have their own content, searchable by keyword, and their own communities. Now, you and I know that at least 99% of the information available on AOL is available for free on the internet--although much of it can be harder to find reliably, even for someone who knows what he's doing. And we (or, at least I know; you seem mighty ignorant) know that the internet connection AOL provides is technically inferior for some internet activities (read: playing Quake). However, the claim that any other ISP offers "everything AOL has" is patently false.
Now, I'm not afraid to admit that I've been an AOL user. Indeed, my family's used AOL for over 7 years now, and I've been on the whole moderately happy with it. I was definitely happy to have it 7 years ago, on our 486sx with 4 MB RAM and a 2400 baud modem, because that box--and especially that modem; ugh--sure couldn't handle Netscape (1.0 had just come out IIRC), and as a 13 year old I got a lot more use out of AOL's content than I could have with just FTP, telnet, and USENET (which AOL provided me anyways). So I wasn't 133t in my prepubescent days. Sue me.
Of course, now that I'm used to my fat pipe at college, I'll never go back to a narrowband connection, and if for some reason I were to get one for myself, I'd go with another ISP than AOL. Still, I'm still glad my parents have stuck with AOL, because it's frankly the best choice for them. It may be incomprehensible to someone as supiror as you, but for many people who aren't terribly comfortable with computers, it's just easier to find what you're looking for on AOL.
As for AOL's reputation as a god-awful ISP...AOL supported my 56k modem before most all of the local ISPs in my hometown (St. Louis); and over the past 7 years, AOL has provided a much more consistent and reliable connection than my friends' local ISPs as well. (Yes, I just said that. But while I'm sure the whole "busy signal" fiasco may have been truly awful in the rest of the country, in St. Louis it was only a bit annoying for a month or so. Meanwhile, whenever one AOL station is giving me trouble, there's about 50 other local numbers I can dial; when a small-time ISP goes down, it's down.)
As for this ricidulous FUD filled article, I find it outrageous that you or any true/.er would take it at face value. Essentially what it says is that if you check the button that tells your computer to make AOL's software your default browsing software, it (*gasp!*) uses AOL's software, um, as the default when you browse. Also, when you install it...it makes changes to the registry! Unbelievable. Amazingly, this may mean that someone who had a different web browser selected as their default web browser...would no longer have that web browser selected as their default web browser. Certain things that used to work because they depended on that browser being the default may work no longer. The mind boggles.
As pointed out by someone else here, this is exactly the same behavior that just about any program these days that handles a standard that other programs may handle--be it a web browser, a media format player, or whathaveyou--does. Wow. Criminal.
And then they trot out the CTO of Prodigy, and some random Win95 user who suffered conflicts and crashes after installing a large piece of software (that's certainly never happened before!) to spread some FUD. Top it off with some third-hand hearsay from Windows Magazine which amounts to, AOL 5.0 installs a bunch of its own software to handle its internet connection; your computer may already have other files which do analogous things (though they are not the ones AOL is designed to work with); therefore this is...bad. And it potentially may not work, even though, uh, it actually does work. (I can confirm this; I keep a copy of AOL on my computer at school just in case the fancy to log on strikes me; I upgraded to 5.0 with absolutely no problems or interference with my university internet connection.) Oh, and several people emailed me to complain about AOL. And some of them are MSCE's!
Conclusion: this isn't the sort of thing that deserves to be posted on/. But I'm not one to complain about a bad posting, because usually the/. community is able to sniff out the BS in many mainstream media computer stories, instead of falling for it like the "ignorant masses" we too often feel contempt for. Unfortunately, when the article is about some company which many of us "unbiased/. geeks who are just interested in tech news which is honest and intelligent" happen to have a prejudice against...we tend to buy it hook, line and sinker.
Shame on you for being a techno-elitist (or maybe the correct term is "asshole") who wishes ill on people just because their choice of ISP (I mean, of all things! How ridiculous!!) doesn't square with yours. And shame on most of the rest of/. for accepting this drivel without the skepticism we rightly pride ourselves on having.
Erg. My fault; I remembered that a G3 Powerbook was barely able to play through the Austin Powers DVD...I just forgot the part about them playing it through twice...
In any case, the TM chips still consume quite a bit less power than a G3, and even less under normal operating conditions, which will mean more battery life with lighter batteries.
It seems hard to believe that they'll get twice as much battery life as existing laptops. I'm no expert, but I'd say that the screen, HDD, DVD drive, etc waste much more energy than the microprocessor. Anybody that knows this stuff cares to give his opinion?
Actually, if you read their web site, Transmeta gave their "opinion" on this right here. Essentially, the gist of it is that the battery savings are quite significant, even on one of those giant laptops with the 15" screens and the DVD players, and even while playing a DVD in software (which, because it requires a nearly constant (and rather hefty) level of CPU power, can't take much advantage of their technology which dynamically scales down power usage and voltage to meet the current system needs).
Basically, according to the tables on the above page, the worst-case for a Crusoe processor--running soft DVD (2 watts used in CPU + Northbridge) on a bigass notebook (8 watts)--gives 3.2 hours battery life. IIRC, one of those new G3's (and remember, a G3 consumes *way* less power than any (native) x86 chip) can barely manage an hour and a half.
Plus, they're not even taking into account the fact that unlike any other notebook on the planet, these suckers don't need a fan; that should be reflected in the 8 watt system overhead, but isn't. (Not sure how much power a fan takes, but it has to be significant.)
Now...in the normal case, in which the CPU is at full throttle only a little bit of the time, then Crusoe starts to clean up. For one thing, as they point out, traditional notebooks try to conserve power by just shutting off the CPU when it's not being used. The problem with this is it doesn't help the normal case when it's being used only a little bit, and it adds a noticable delay while it gets switched on again, which for most users is a lot more important than its peak speed anyways. The T5400 (the especially badass one that's not coming out until the summer) gets around this by scaling CPU power and voltage to meet current needs--and it shows.
Witness their mobile benchmark report [note: 116k pdf], based on a new benchmarking methodology they invented (read up on it he re [note: 93k pdf]) which:
1) mirrors actual use--i.e. doesn't run full throttle all the time, which almost never happens under normal use, especially for a notebook
2) includes metrics for energy efficiency--that is, it reports not just work/time, but work/WattHour and work/time/WattHour.
For those who don't want to check it out, the result is that across 6 tests (operating system load, system idle, Office 2000, web browsing, mp3 playback, and soft DVD playback) comparing the T5400 to a P3 500, the Crusoe processor was:
95.3% as fast (yeah, this includes the "system idle" test, which is a bit of a cheap freebie in this category) [note--this is just my straight average of the 6 categories, which is absolutely unmathematically correct, but oh well]
409.2% as efficient in terms of work/Watt-hour
395.3% as efficient in terms of work/time/watt-hour.
All in all, pretty damn impressive. And it's worth noting that it's over 6 times as efficient in the system idle test--which is what your system probably does most anyways.
Of course, this only measures the power drained by the CPU+NG, and not the screen, HD, etc. But...I have no trouble believing that a CPU that's 4 times as efficient under normal use will give 2 times the overall battery power.
I gotta go now, but the point of all this rambling is, this chip is pretty damn neat. I'm impressed.
The big thing to remember about this lawsuit is, you don't need DeCSS to copy a DVD to *any* format.
I'll say again, for the slow-witted. You don't need DeCSS to copy a DVD.
To *any* format.
Think about it. All DeCSS does is unencrypt the data on the DVD.
The same thing every DVD player in existence already does before it sends it to your video card drivers.
Before it sends it unencrypted to your video card drivers.
Or alternatively, before it sends it to one of several hacks which have been available for the past two years which sit at the video card driver level and save the damn stream for you. In plain old VCD, exportable to any format you want.
This suit has nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with control over DVD player licensing. Yeah, you may say, maybe that was what the earlier lawsuit, brought by the DVD Consortium, was about. But why does the MPAA care if anyone can make a DVD player without paying silly licensing fees?
Glad you asked. Answer: export zones.
As y'all may or may not know, every DVD player around these days only includes the key to decrypt DVD's made for a certain "export zone"--a geographical region, like North America or Europe. The point being, this way the studios can release a movie on DVD in America before the film has come out in theaters in Europe, and not have to worry about Europeans mail-ordering the DVD from the states and therefore not paying the extra cash to see it in the theaters.
So, if DVD CSS works, then the only way you can make a player is by doing it according to their rules, which means only including the key to one export zone. Of course, now that DeCSS is out there, anyone can come along and play a DVD--a DVD they buy, that they pay good money that goes to the studios and all--encoded for any region, right on their computer.
Furthermore--and this is where my conspiracy theory of the night comes in--any company can look at the source code, copy it to firmware, and make a stand-alone DVD player which will play DVD's for every region. Probably won't make too much of a difference in the States, but over in Europe/Asia, where DVD's will regularly be released up to a year behind their release in the US, lots of people would want such a player.
So, my theory is (this is assuming that the MPAA isn't just stupendously dumb...which is a rather large assumption), the reason they're suing now isn't to get DeCSS taken off the net, because they know that it's quite a bit too late for that. Instead, it's to get a legal precedent, so that any company thinking of making a "universal" DVD player like the one I described above would know that they'd lose in court.
Or maybe not. Best I could come up with, tho...
Anyways, it's been said before, but if you haven't already, make a donation to the EFF. This is important.
I've been thinking about the troll problem for a bit and think I may have come up with a workable plan. What does everyone think about this:
Why not seperate troll moderation from normal moderation completely? After all, trolls are generally very obvious to spot, and nearly everyone can agree on what is and isn't a troll, so it seems silly to require someone to waste moderator points that could be spent expressing an interesting opinion on what should be routine maintenance.
So, my proposal would be to let all (logged in, I suppose) users moderate trolls. I'm thinking just stick a little checkbox marked "Troll" on every comment. To prevent abuses, and people trying to use it to get rid of a comment which is really just off-topic or redundant or "wrong", just require that either a certain percentage of the people who view the comment check "Troll" before it gets marked Troll (I'd say around 50%, although we'd probably need trial and error to figure it out), as well as, say, at least 10 Troll votes, so it doesn't get wiped off by a couple of early votes.
If a comment does get a 50% Troll rating, then you can bet it deserves it, and even people who browse -1 won't want to see it. Still, I'm a strong believer that no one should get censored off/., so I say either make a -2 for Trolls score, or let it be a browsing option (view Trolls or not).
The only issue I can come up with against this is that I take a big memory hit (IE 5) whenever I have moderator status, from all the drop-down lists; I'm not sure if a checkbox on every comment would hurt as much, but it's something to think about.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh, I know it's awful style to reply to my own comment (almost as bad as posting such a long-ass comment in the first place), but I found some mighty interesting X-Box info in this item at firingsquad.
First off, the 64 MB of RAM is shared between the GPU and the motherboard--less than ideal, but it certainly makes sense from cost considerations. Second, the GPU will be running at 300 MHz, which pretty much kicks ass (current GeForces generally run about 150 in their default configs).
Finally, the CPU, while based on the P3 (read, probably no SSE2), *will* have the quad-pumped "400 MHz" bus off the Willamette, as they have its memory bandwidth listed as 6.4 GB/sec. That strongly hints at the inclusion of RDRAM, as it's the only stuff that can really take advantage of that kind of bandwidth.
The have its performance specs listed at 300 million particles/sec, 150 million transformed & lighted polys/sec (no effects). Not bad at all.
Some more corrections/thoughts that seem to have gotten missed in this discussion so far:
1) It's not necessarily an AMD chip
Many of you seem to be under the impression that the X-Box will be using an Athlon variant (presumably a Spitfire), but the name of the CPU vendor was conspiciously left out of today's announcement. Indeed, according to this article at C|Net, MS has decided to go with Intel for the CPU instead of AMD as earlier rumored.
If I had to guess, I'd say this means a 600 MHz Coppermine modified to support Willamette's new SSE2 instructions, which look quite impressive. (Although the most impressive things I've read about them (see this article at Ace's) are in regards to their double-precision SIMD performance, and IIRC games almost always use single-precision floats.)
This makes sense because two of Willamette's other signature features--a 20-stage deep pipeline and a double-pumped ALU--don't make sense here; games don't need much in the way of integer performance, and the deep pipeline is only good for increasing clock speed (indeed, clockspeed being equal, it slows things down)--and is definitely not necessary to reach 600 MHz.
On the other hand, Willamette's "400 MHz" (really quad-pumped 100 MHz) bus might not be such a bad idea for a next-gen console. Indeed, it might be just the thing to keep the NV15 based graphics chip full of data. The problem, of course, is cost, cost, cost. Which leads me to my next point:
2) 600MHz isn't such a bad decision
Yeah, I know that by the time this thing comes out, new PC's will be sporting 2 GHz Willamettes and 1.8 GHz Athlons. However, there's one problem with all y'all going around saying that that means that the X-Box should have a much faster chip too; those 2 GHz chips are going to be selling for something like $800-$1000 a piece.
And then there's the problem of how chips are normally clocked versus how they need to be clocked for a fixed-spec market like a console. You see, when Intel (or AMD, or whoever) makes a chip, they don't stick a clock multiplier on it until it's done. They make the chip, then test it to see how fast it can reliably run (this depends on lots of factors, among them the quality of the particular piece of silicon; there's no way to definitively know this number without actually testing it), and then stick on a multiplier such that it runs at that speed (actually a speed bin or two lower, just to be safe). This means that some (very very very small) percentage of P3's ends up being smacked with a 10x multiplier and being sold as a 1GHz chip; some get an 8x multiplier and are sold at 800MHz; and some--but just a few--can't manage to run reliably at even 600 MHz (or whatever the lowest speed P3's are sold at these days is), and are tossed in the trash).
Now the thing is, all of this probability stuff is built into the price. You see, it costs Intel exactly the same--around $70, IIRC--to make that one chip that ends up being branded at 1 GHz as it does to make the one that gets sold at 600 MHz. The difference is, it takes a whole lot of chips before they make one that's good enough to run at 1 Ghz. And a bunch of them are lost to the trash bin along the way. That's why they charge different amounts for the faster chip--to make up for the fact that they're harder (but *not* more expensive) to make. And that's (partially) why even the cheapest P3's still cost about $200--far more than the cost to fab each particular one.
In the console market, though, that little trick just doesn't work. When you're fabbing CPU's for the X-Box, either it runs at 600MHz, or you throw it away. Furthermore, since the entire thing is only going to cost $300, the CPU better not cost more than, say, $35 or $40; after all, that $300 has to include 64 MB of (possibly Rambus??) RAM, the graphics chip you're buying from NVidia, which itself will have probably 32 MB and possible 64 MB of RAM (possibly DDR RAM); an 8 GB hard drive, a DVD drive, a motherboard, a stylish case, a controller, possibly a keyboard, probably pretty impressive sound support, and I'm sure a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting. Point being, you want to make sure you can make these chips run at 600 MHz with *very high yields* in comparison to the yields that Intel and AMD normally achieve.
Furthermore, with a kickass graphics chip (and especially one that has hardware T&L like the GeForce does and the NV15 will) the speed of the CPU is much less important. Indeed, as Kyle over at HardOCP showed (check here and here), with today's fastest chips, in real-world conditions it is sometimes faster to run with a GeForce's Hardware T&L turned *off* (i.e. so the CPU calculates T&L) than with it on! On the other hand, that same GeForce, when paired with a mediocre CPU, speeds things up tremendously. Of course, the T&L in the NV15 will be considerably improved, such that it will no doubt be a great help when paired with that 600 MHz chip. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's a waste when paired with those 2 GHz Willamettes everyone wants in the X-Box instead.
3) The X-Box will perform identically to a 600 MHz / 64 MB RAM PC of today--i.e. worse than a PS2
Absolutely definitely maybe not.
First the absolutely not: the real guts of the X-Box is not its 600 MHz CPU, but rather its NVidia based graphics chip. Even today, a pretty slow Celeron with a kickass graphics card--i.e. a DDR GeForce--will be pretty competitive with the latest Ghz P3 with a very respectible graphics card, say a Matrox G400, when it comes to running games. Indeed, in many situations (i.e. at high resolutions), it will run just as fast as that Ghz P3 with the same kickass GeForce--and much faster than the P3 with the Matrox--because at high resolutions (i.e. 1280 and 1600), the limiting factor is always the fill-rate of the video card. Course, this doesn't help if you're running at TV resolution, but you get my point: for games, the video card is *more* important than the CPU--and the GPU in the X-Box will be much better than any graphics card on the market today.
Next, the definitely: the X-Box, like all consoles, will only come in one spec. That means game developers can program their games knowing exactly what they'll be running on--and taking full advantage of that as much as possible. This means, amongst other things, that they won't have to design their games to look adequate across a wide range of resolutions and graphical detail levels, but can instead concentrate on making it look good and run fast at the one graphical level it will be run on. Secondly, this means that, like on any other console, developers will be able to dip below the API level and reap the speed benefits that come from being able to program a much lower levels, including hand-tuning important graphical code at the register-level in the GPU. This can only be done when you know that the specs of the machines that will run your game are all identical.
Now for the maybe: one of the major "points" of the X-Box is that it will be nearly compatible with normal PCs, which of course come in all shapes and flavors. The difficulty here is that, in order to maintain this compatibility, developers would need to stay at the API level, and would need to design their games from a hardware-agnostic point of view, which would remove most of the benefits of uniformity I just mentioned. However, I'd guess that what will most likely happen is that developers will keep most of their code at the D3D level, but still optimize the most important routines for the X-Box's GPU. The end result will be that X-Box games *will not* run on PC's (although PC games might run on X-Box??), but that it will still be considerably easier to port PC games to X-Box than to any other console. On the other hand, it's reportedly very easy to port PC games to the PS2, so maybe this advantage isn't as great as MS banked on. In any case, it's important to note that it's this same loss of the benefits of uniformity which has lead to almost no Dreamcast games making use of the Dreamcast's ability to run WinCE and hence pseudo-D3D. Indeed, I believe that MS has officially withdrawn their WinCE support of Dreamcast due to a complete and total lack of interest from Dreamcast developers.
4) It's Windows, and it's a PC, so it will be confusing, take forever to boot, and crash like crazy
This is almost certainly wrong. For one thing, the X-Box will be running a version of what up to now has been called Embedded NT--which should be extremely stipped down and quite reliable, as well as offering very short boot times. (Reportedly the PS2's boot time is quite long for a console--on the order of 5 seconds or so.) Furthermore, probably most Windows crashes come as a result of either bad drivers--which should never happen on a standardized machine like the X-Box--or as a result of problems with memory management of legacy code--again, no problem since there will be none--or with multitasking apps not behaving themselves--which won't be a problem since the X-Box will only run one thing at a time. Furthermore, 64 MB of RAM should be more than adequate, considering the lack of multitasking and the fact that the OS will be much much leaner than normal Windows or NT.
On the other hand, I have to say that the prospect of an 8-gig hard drive scares me a bit, if nothing else than because it offers the possibility of quite a lot more complexity and variations in end-users' actual setups. I doubt MS will allow anything like DLL hell to manifest itself, though; I'm sure the X-Box OS will keep every program's DLLs seperate and well managed, especially since this is a (more like the) feature of MS's upcoming-and-stupidly-named Windows ME.
Phew. So--do I think the X-Box will be phenomenally successful? No, not really, I don't. While I do believe that it will be more powerful that the PS2 on a theoretical level, I don't know if the difference will shine through in the games. Basically, there are two possibilities: most X-Box developers will try to keep their games as trivial ports from their PC counterparts, in which case they won't be able to take advantage of the uniformity of having a single machine to develop for, and thus the PS2 will be more impressive, or X-Box developers will try to "program to the metal", in which case they will be a year behind on the learning curve of low level programming, and thus their games will probably never decisively beat what's coming out for PS2 at the same time.
On the other hand, I think that it just might be successful (depends on if the PS2 actually conquers the world beforehand, as many predict), and I'd give it about equal odds to succeed as, say, Nintendo's Dolphin.
Like we (?) need specs... How different can it be from a standard (whatever that means) x86 machine?...The only thing that I could possibly imagine being different is the BIOS.
Erm...you're forgetting the negligible component called the graphics chip. Yes, it will be *based* on a then-current NVidia card, but it certainly be substantially different enough to require entirely different drivers. (Yes, all of NVidia's current drivers work across their entire line of chips, but that's just because they've specifically been designed to.) Furthermore, assuming this machine is DirectX only, they might tweak their chip quite a bit to run DirectX better. And I would certainly bet that, as part of their contract with NVidia, MS has insisted that this chip be a) incompatible with other NVidia drivers, and b) closed-spec. (The idea that MS couldn't do this because of the antitrust trial is clearly ridiculous, so I won't bother addressing that.)
So now we're stuck reverse-engineering OpenGL drivers for a chip with over 15 million transistors that may have been designed not to run OpenGL very well anyways. Good luck folks.
Course, they got BSD running on a Dreamcast, so what do I know?
I'm not sure I understand what's wrong with lookalike hardware? The PC industry is full of lookalike hardware and it's been a huge success.
Not in terms of games it's not. A PC that can run games that look as good and run as fast as, say, a $200 Dreamcast probably costs about $1000. A PC that runs games as reliably, and with as little aggravation and technical knowledge required as any console in history does not exist.
Yes, a huge part of the reason for this is that PC's are multipurpose, and have the overhead of a real OS, and all of that. But another large part of it is that it's damn hard to program for "lookalike" hardware--because in reality, to the programmer it doesn't look all that much alike. When a game programmer has to support every machine from a P2 200 with some crappy old integrated ATI 3d chip, up to the latest machines of today, and even try to anticipate the capabilities of machines that won't be out for another few months, well, that lowers his ability to take each machine to its full potential. For one thing, he has to program in variable levels of graphic detail, instead of designing a game to look best in one particular resolution/level of graphic detail. (And if you don't think that's a problem, just witness the number of *web pages* out there with notices like "this page looks best in 800 x 600 32-bit color".) For another, he has to deal with all number of different video cards, each of which supports the three major 3D API's--OpenGL, D3D, and Glide--to varying degrees and in varying qualities, or not at all. Not to mention the fact that every video card will have an installed base of probably at least 10 major different driver versions, (each of which supports those API's to differing levels of quality), with new drivers coming out every couple weeks or so.
And it's not just graphics. Take sound--many gamers have 3D positional sound cards, but if you want to make a game that requires a player to use sound cues to tell just where their opponent is then you've just made it a lot less fun for all the people who don't have 3D positional sound. So instead, most new games have 3D sound as an option, but don't take advantage of it to the degree that it really starts to affect gameplay.
Finally, lookalike hardware makes it so a game developer these days absolutely cannot program at any level lower than the API's, because there's just too much hardware to support. That's why a Dreamcast, with its much less powerful hardware, can compete with a decent PC in graphics performance, and why as programmers get more and more comfortable programming to the metal, it, like all consoles, will see graphics quality improve over the life of the console.
Now, this last point might not count in the case of the X-box which, while it will have one ironclad hardware spec, is designed to leverage its compatability with Windows API's. It's interesting to note that almost none of the Dreamcast games have made use of its much-balleyhooed ability to use WinCE and DirectX for sorta quasi Windows compatability--because the overhead involved removes the programmers ability to get more out of the hardware than he could on a PC.
Clearly the monopoly is in the best interest of the company that holds it (ie. Sony) but everybody else loses: the consumer, game manufacturers, and other console manufacturers.
Um...if the consumer loses, can you point me to a PC that offers anywhere near the game experience/price ratio of, say, a $200 Dreamcast and a few $40 games (take Crazi Taxi and Soul Calibur for starters)??? Or anywhere near a $100 Playstation??? In six months, do you think there'll be a PC for $300 that can compete with a PS2 (much less one for $2000)?? Now, of course, if you already have a PC lying around for other stuff, then sure, you can get a similar game experience--I happen to enjoy PC-style games better than console games. But if you have to choose between one or the other just on the basis of its value as a game machine, there is absolutely nowhere close to a comparison.
Furthermore, it ain't so bad for game manufacturers either. A million-selling game for the Playstation isn't such a rare thing--after all, less than 1.5% of the 70 million Playstation owners worldwide have to buy your game. Games that sell 10 million copies are not unheard of, and 5-million sellers are quite common.
In the PC gaming industry, on the other hand, selling 1 million copies is a pretty impressive achievement, and the vast majority of games don't make it. Games that sell 10 million copies are called Myst. Guess that's why nearly every major PC developer is moving resources over to PS2 development. (Sierra has announced that they will devote 60% of their resources to console development; Epic is hyping their PS2 port of the Unreal engine like mad, as is Monolith with their Lithtech 2.0 engine. Even id is porting the Q3 engine, and strongly exploring developing for PS2 themselves.)
As for your contention that the console monopoly is bad for other console manufactureres...well, you got one thing right.
I decided to try this out. Mainly to see if the patch MS posted a few months ago to stop this sort of thing (i.e. ActiveX inserting arbitrary code into your StartUp directory) actually did.
It doesn't. Apparently all it does is stop *unsigned* ActiveX from inserting arbitrary code. Now, while that's certainly an absurdly necessary thing to have done--and it does stop the most major abuses of that ActiveX hole (eg. the Bubbleboy Outlook/OE virus)--I think it's pretty damn ridiculous to assume that any program should be able to stick arbitrary code in my StartUp directory just because it's signed. Or that it should be able to make changes to my registry without asking, as gohip's code does as well. (But don't worry--when you download their program to fix your registry (which does work, BTW), it pops up a cryptic looking dialog box asking if you really truly want to make changes to your registry.)
The sad thing is (flamesuit on) I actually *like* a lot of the ideas behind ActiveX--namely that it might be a good idea to store applets on the client side instead of having to download them every time you visit a web page--and I've seen some pretty nice uses of it. (eg. the dynamic hierarchical news menu on MSNBC. Of course, being ActiveX, don't bother trying to check it out unless you're running IE 4 or 5 on a Windows box--last time I checked, it doesn't even work in IE 4.5 for Mac.)
Unfortunately, its outrageous lack of cross-platform compatability and its moronic-to-criminal lack of safe security privilages have nearly killed off some actually sorta neat technology. Oh well.
Anyways, I hope this incident will point out to some people who've pretended otherwise what a farce "signed" code is. On the web, you don't know who to trust. As anyone who thought about it could have predicted, the danger isn't some 1eet hax0r somehow piggy-backing his trojan onto your connection with some Nice Commercial Website...it's the Verisigned trojan that Nice Commercial Website is asking your permission to install.
Taken from the specs page
Strong CPU of High Performance
Is anyone able to narrow that down a little bit???
If you look on the right side of this pic it appears to have an ARM running at 206 MHz, and 32 MB RAM. Not too shabby.
Course, to me it looks just like a WinCE ripoff but with crappy fonts (i.e. the "START/" button...), but what do I know. At least MP3 and a web browser are nice.
Frankly, we can do our own "code morphing" given an instruction set description and a patent license that goes with the chip. And it's not even clear that we'd need to do code morphing from something like the x86 - I think we'd be much more interested in designing our own instruction sets to work optimally for Linux.
Much as I respect you Bruce, and as impressed as I am with the OSS movement, this is precisely the reason why Transmeta doesn't want to open source their code or their native instruction set description. One of the main benefits of using code-morphing is that Transmeta can change the native VLIW instruction set on their chip very easily, without breaking compatability with any existing programs.
Indeed, the 3120 and the 5400 have completely different native instruction sets, IIRC. Any future Transmeta processors are likely to have their own native instruction sets as well. Even so, you'd better believe that if Transmeta went ahead and released complete specs for their chips, there'd be a bunch of open-source hackers who, desperate for that extra 20% performance fix, would code their own little Linux-TM3120 (which, considering the fact that it would probably require writing a version of gcc optimised for the 3120's VLIW instruction set, would be pretty darn nontrivial). Another bunch would have to do the same amount of work to come out with Linux-TM5400. And meanwhile, by the time either of these projects was finished, Transmeta would be shipping a bunch of new processors with completely different cores.
The point is, Transmeta forsees itself as finally solving the pesky problem of backwards-compatibility--but at the price of a small performance penalty. The important thing here is, they have to act a little bit like benevolent dictators to do this: in order to give us all something we want--freedom from compatibility issues--they have to take away some of our freedom elsewhere, by not releasing their native instruction sets.
The reason why this is so is because of that fundamental bane of OSS--people write OSS to scratch an itch. Now, usually their itch is an itch shared by many others--that's why OSS can have its phenomenal successes. However, in some cases, an one person's itch-scratching may be in conflict with the general software-using community as a whole.
And this is such an example. That is, if I just bought a TM5400-based laptop, and I want to run Linux on it, then I suddenly have an itch--the version of Linux I'm running on it isn't as optimized as it could be, because it's running in emulation through the code-morphing layer. The problem is that by scratching that itch--that is, writing Linux-TM5400--ruins a lot of other people's day. Specifically, it removes the benefit of backwards-compatibility for all.
All in all it's a pretty interesting issue, and maybe in a few years if Transmeta's way of doing things becomes more entrenched I might change my mind, but I figure that for the time being Transmeta's way of doing things is the right one, and I'd bet that Linus supports it all the way. After all, Linus has always said that he picked the GPL as the license for Linux not out of ideology but out of pragmatism--not because he thinks that all software ought to be open-sourced, but because he realized that Linux might be useful to others and become mildly successful if it was. While neither you nor I know exactly what the consequences would be if Transmeta open-sourced all of their (relevent) intellectual property, a much stronger case can be made that the result would be detrimental to the success of the Transmeta chip (I mean in terms of adoption, not Transmeta's financial success) rather than beneficial.
This is awfully cute, but of course doesn't change anything with regards to DeCSS being protected or unprotected speech. For one thing, if, say, Tom Clancey wanted to include in his latest book--all in the name of realism, of course--some illegally obtained blueprints for a neutron bomb, that wouldn't be protected by the 1st Amendment; or rather, his 1st Amendment protections would be overruled by national security concerns. (Indeed, IIRC he was asked to change several of his books because his informed guesses about certain top-secret weaponry were too accurate for the Navy's comfort...)
For another, courts have sometimes drawn the line as to whether code is speech or not by whether it is machine readable. As you point out in your post, your story is--it can be run through a Perl script and then compiled--and thus fails the test. Of course, with scanners and OCR, just about everything is machine readable these days, so that's just yet another corner of the law that technology has made obsolete.
Maybe because they're biased to the point that they don't report negative news about themselves (only about Linux related information).
/. may be a few hours behind on many stories, but they post around 20 or so a day, which is much better variety if you ask me. And while the Ars discussion boards are a lot more intelligent than most on the web, I find I just can't go without the power of /.'s customizable comments pages--I can view threads intelligently, I can browse at any threshold, I can see and respond to responses to my posts very easily: it's nice.
No, I think it's because they're just slow. But then again, their primary mission isn't to provide the fastest news updates, but rather a forum to make their news "coverage"--that is, the article plus the comments--the most in-depth and interesting out there. And I think that, for the most part, they succeed.
Ars Technica seems to be much better at providing computer-related news now, and their site is cleaner too. I'm considering switching permanantly to them.
Don't get me wrong--I love Ars, and I've been a regular reader there for over a year. However, if you're considering switching because you want faster or more complete news coverage, you'll be very disappointed--they only update the site an average of around once a day (sometimes less often), and usually with only 4 or 5 articles. Meanwhile,
What I *do* love Ars for is their occasional original content, especially Hannibal's interesting and excellently written hardware articles. But I don't think they could cut it (for me, at least) as a primary news site.
Just my opinion.
Needless to say, a lot of folks who don't pay attention to status bars and address bars could fall prey to all sorts of exploits based on this that don't require "running" anything on the client machine that a typical security app could catch.
Actually, as the advisory points out, reading your status bar doesn't protect you, as what is written down there can be changed by Javascript. Thus, they advise everyone to type in all their links manually. Ick.
You say you'll get better fill rates with consoles
No. If you read my post, I actually said "gamers who enjoy buying a new video card every 4 months will still be able to push a higher fillrate or transform more polys/sec than the latest consoles"--that the latest PC's will always be technologically more on the cutting edge. I just said that the consoles would be close enough to keep up. (Indeed, the PS 2 looks to match all but the highest end PCs when it is first released. Of course, PC's will continue to improve over the life of the PS 2, but most people only want to buy something new every couple years anyways, and console developers can push their systems harder because they know that everyone will have identical systems.)
And, furthermore, that the newest games will come out on consoles at the same time as PC, if not first, or only on consoles. You speak of Half Life, System Shock 2, and Quake 3: well, Half Life is published by Sierra, who has stated that they'll be moving 60% of their resources to consoles; System Shock 2 is developed by Looking Glass, who I believe have discussed porting Thief 2 to PS 2, and published by EA, who focuses mainly on consoles already; and id is porting Q3 already and apparently considering developing their next title for consoles concurrently with PCs.
As for console versions being less detailed...this was certainly true with cartridge based consoles, which didn't have the storage space of PC games, but the PS 2 uses DVD as their media--when it comes out, DVD's *still* won't be standard enough on PC's for PC games to be developed for DVD only. Thus, it looks like the *console* games will be the more detailed ones, at least at first.
Open Source is very open (forgive the pun) in terms of what it applies to. I can Open Source my new Widget2000 code and only sell it to people who buy Widget2000 and require them to not reveal the source code to anyone else. Or I can Open Source it and post it on a public FTP site.
/. don't understand what open source really means, and point out such bastardizations of the term, then pretty soon it won't mean anything anyways.
As someone else has pointed out, neither of those actions, by itself, meets the Open Source Definition.
Furthermore, as regards both the OSD--which is derived from Bruce Perens' Debian Free Software Guidelines--and GNU's (i.e. RMS's) definition of free software, your two examples of what you do with your Widget2000 source code are probably not as different as you may think. That is, even the GPL allows you to only give source code to people who pay you for your product--it just specifies that you can't stop them from revealing the code to anyone else, or indeed from licensing it to anyone else under anything other than the GPL. Likewise, posting your source code to a public FTP site doesn't make it open source if those who download it aren't allowed to redistribute the code, and use it in derivative works or fork it.
Unless your license allows these things, then the proper term for it is not "open source" but "revealed source". (Or so says the OSS language police.) Companies seeking to capitalize on the open source movement may call actions like the ones you describe "open sourcing", but they are not--as we have understood the terms. Of course, if even those of us on
I know this is going to seem like blasphemy to some people, but let's think a little bit about 'free' phone service...or, for that matter, 'free' anything. We all know bandwidth is never free - SOMEONE is paying for it, and if it's not you, then the person who IS paying for it is probably looking for a way to bill you for it.
Fine. But the same point can be applied to anything on the web. Dialpad is (from what I hear--I've only used it from school, where it is quite intelligible, thank you) optimized to be usable on a 33.6; it does ask you what sort of connection you have, but at worst it's no different from any other streaming audio/video format, like Quicktime or Windows Media Player--and better than RealPlayer G2 which automatically ups its bitrate to meet available bandwidth.
The point is, everything on the internet uses bandwidth, and almost all of it is "free"--that is, supported by ads, like dialpad is. The same argument could be made against slashdot: they're profiting--through ad revenue (well, through IPO, but whatever)--on my viewing for free a service--news--that traditionally costs money, all on the backs of poor Harvard University's limited bandwidth resources. Well, boo hoo. Besides, while it won't hold a candle to Harvard's, I'm sure Clemson's tuition more than covers their "free" internet access. The only possible reason for this ban was a kneejerk attempt to save CMU's phone monopoly.
. In this case, the cost may be minor. But the next time this debate comes around, for some other service, it might not be.
Indeed, I'm not so sure how I feel about the Napster case. Apparently, at Northwestern, Napster usage was taking up to 25% of their bandwidth. Now, IMO, that means they didn't have enough bandwidth to start with, but there at least you might have a reasonable argument to censor a site. (Not one that would convince me, but reasonable.) In this case, no way.
No one wants Q3 on a handheld with a 4" screen.
Yeah, but plenty of people would rather play it on a PS 2--cheaper, smaller, and simpler than a PC; crashproof, idiotproof, no long bootup times; all on a nice big TV with a real sound system.
Yeah, computers have better resolution, but that's being solved with HDTV. And yeah, the hardcore spenders...er, gamers who enjoy buying a new video card every 4 months will still be able to push a higher fillrate or transform more polys/sec than the latest consoles.
Only problem is, all the game developers will be making all their hottest games for the consoles first, if not only. Don't believe me? Well, there's hardly any major PC game developers who haven't announced that they're at least strongly considering developing for PS 2. Epic is porting UT, Id is almost certainly on for Q3; Sierra--formerly 100% PC, I think--says they're moving 60% of their development resources to consoles.
Meanwhile, when was the last time you heard a major console-only game developer announce support for the PC? (Square most certainly doesn't count; FF7 and 8 are perhaps the worst ports in history, and show nothing if not complete disregard for the PC market. One example--not upgrading the texture resolution in FF8. What looks ok on a TV's 400x320 just doesn't cut it in 1074x768...)
There seems to be software out there to copy direct to VCD - I've seen it referred to and I once heard someone on another machine in a lab referring to their using it. Can't find a copy to prove it, though.
I found this link in an earlier DeCSS article; it lists no less than 19 programs under the DVD-rippers header. Now, from what I can gather, a few of these programs need to be used in concert, but the fact remains that there are several methods to rip DVDs out there, only one of which is DeCSS. Now, I haven't used any of them, but from what I can gather--especially from looking at some of the quite detailed "how to rip DVD's using blah" articles I found on the above link--it appears to be quite a lot easier to get yourself either a lossless or a reduced-size mpeg of your DVD's using the tools that were already out there than with DeCSS.
What I'm wondering, however, is if DPDF/Quartz can be (efficiently) made network-transparent.
I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that it already will be in OS X, out-of-the-box...although wouldn't you know it I can't fetch up a link now. Still, considering the fact that there's a Unix kernal underneath, and considering the fact that in the increasingly networked world we're heading into, there are plenty of good reasons to include it even for non-techies, I'd be surprised if it wasn't built for network-transparent operation.
s/games/ways/?
Yep. In a hurry and forgot to preview.
But, actually, this is just the problem: the cash that St. Louis just basically gave to the Rams most certainly was economically quantifiable, and the other very pressing needs of St. Louis are also economically quantifiable, so the idea of spending that much cash on something just to "make it exciting to live in" goes way past stupid and borders on the immoral.
There are a whole whole lot of pressing needs in St. Louis, no doubt about it. While most of them can't be solved by throwing money at them, some of them could certainly use more funding, and thus I have to say that you raise a valid point.
However, "making a city exciting to live in," while not easy to quantify economically, does have many potential positive economic benefits. For one thing, the TWA dome is not just a football stadium (and a concert venue), but also a very large--and at the time it was built, very necessary--convention center. Yes, it cost more money to build it as a football stadium than it would have otherwise, but the fact remains that St. Louis will more than get their investment out of the TWA dome/Convention Center on the basis of the huge tax revenues brought in by large conventions. Furthermore, the Rams pay taxes as well; thus, it's pretty doubtful that St. Louis will lose too much money in the long run on bringing the team here.
More importantly, though, having a successful sports team like the Rams brings a lot of people downtown, which helps revitalize the downtown area. Yeah, this sounds like a weak excuse, but in a city like St. Louis, many people from the suburbs haven't been downtown in *years* (except perhaps to attend Cardinals games); having good sports teams thus has a noticable economic effect on the downtown area.
And, it has a noticable economic effect on the metropolitan area as well. Sports teams, especially exciting ones, encourage people to move to St. Louis, and encourage people already here to stay.
But you seem to have read more literature on the subject than I have, because you assert that it's been shown that there is no discernable net economic benefit from publicly funded stadiums. Fine. I'll give you that.
But the question is, is there a net deficit? It doesn't seem that the studies have shown that, either--or else you would have brought it up, since you're so familiar with these studies. So, I ask you: all things being economically equal (and from your comment, it appears that they are), would you rather live in a city with a Super Bowl champion football team, or one with no sports teams at all?
While you may answer that you don't care--and I believe you--the simple fact is that most people do. Hence, it's the duty of any city government to try to get sports teams for their city. It may not citizens any richer, but it definitely improves their quality of life.
Yeah, it's even more amusing when the teams that are playing deserve to burn in hell. Both of them stabbed their hometowns in the back less than 5 years ago. They're the worst thing about modern professional sports. They represent the team owners today who bilk cities for millions of dollars in blackmail tax subsidies, do nothing to hepl the local economies, and have no city loyalty, even though they themselves depend on hometown loyalty to fill stadium seats.
Well, in the case of the Rams, you couldn't be more wrong. The ones without loyalty were the fans in LA--or the prodigious lack of them. Why do you think the nation's second largest TV market lost both of their football teams within a year (the Rams to St. Louis and the Raiders back to Oakland)?? Because nobody in LA cared about football. Sure, the Rams were a mediocre team...but their attendence the last few years was abyssmal. Indeed, no one even lifted a finger to stop either team from moving.
Meanwhile, the Rams sold out nearly every game in St. Louis for the past 5 years--and believe me, they sucked for the first four of them. As for the assertion that neither of these teams has helped the local economies, that's clearly absurd. And even more than that, getting to a Super Bowl unites a city and makes it exciting to live in (if St. Louis can ever be called that...but that's another story) in important if not economically quantifiable games.
Both of these teams played their hearts out all season and in tonight's great game. Don't you have anything better to do than disparage them?
But, deCSS and utils based upon it are available for windows, which provide no other purpose but copying.
Wrong.
DeCSS was written for Windows...so that it could be used to play DVD's under Linux.
Or rather, so that it could be used to play DVD's under WINE under Linux. According to Jon Johansen (the 16-year old member of MoRE who was arrested in Norway for writing deCSS--although he probably didn't), this was a necessary first step because at the time, Linux didn't offer support for the file format used on DVD's. (Can't remember the acronym right now, and can't find the article in which he was quoted as saying this. It was one of the "Jon Johansen gets arrested" articles referenced by a poster in an earlier DeCSS thread...) Thus, at the time, DeCSS on WINE was the only way for those who will only allow free software on their computers--and there are many of them--to play a DVD.
Then, once support for that format was available for Linux (again, this is what Jon was quoted as saying), a program that ran DVD on Linux the right way--CSS-auth--could be written. But DeCSS was a legitimate first step towards that goal; for a short time, DeCSS on WINE was the only way to view DVD's on Linux.
Or, of course, you could have just had one of your Windows using friends rip any DVD to MPEG using one of the many many *many* available rippers that allowed the CSS key already included in any Windows DVD software to break the encryption before capturing the file. This page lists no less than 19 of them. IIRC, only one of those listed (DeCSS) actually breaks CSS itself. That is, there were (I believe) no less than 18 DVD rippers already available before CSS was reverse-engineered.
As for your argument that these rippers were "less perfect" than a DeCSSed copy, I can't say, since I've never seen the output of any of them. However, I do know that CD-to-mp3 rippers are of greatly varying quality, and are always improving; unless there's some technical obstacle I don't know of (and I highly doubt it), there's no good reason why these tools wouldn't become perfect very very soon--especially because what they do is not, as I understand it, any different from the job a CD ripper does.
Except that I'm not as optimistic as he is that OSS will be able to solve this problem.
But before I get to that, lemme try to explain why this is such a big problem, because many of y'all don't seem to get it, judging from some of the posts so far.
But, you might say, we don't want all those Winblows lusers! We don't care how *smart* you have to be to use Linux, cause we only want us l33t genii (hey! We're even l33t l4at3n speakers!) to be able to use it! Because we all know that, once you learn how to use it (and it doesn't even take me that long, cause I'm so smart), OSS is more flexible, powerful, and faster to use than some "end-user tested" crap.
And 10 years ago, you'd have been right. The problem here is that the above argument is no longer true, and most Linux users/coders don't even know it. Now there's no argument that OSS for Unix/Unix-alikes has had some of the best text-based UI's around. (Or, in the case of xemacs, I suppose we should say "primarily keyboard-based" rather than "text-based".) Sure, most of them are abolute hell to learn (the poster above who suggested that you could adequately teach a newbie to use vi by sitting them down in front of it and pressing 'i' notwithstanding), but, once you get used to them, you realize how incredibly intelligently they were designed. Things like vi/vim, emacs, and the various CLI shells; you'd need a dedicated teacher, a book, or a hell of a lot of patience with man pages to figure any of them out, but once you do you find that they're extraordinarily quick to use, ridiculously full featured, and amazingly robust. As my Harley Hahn Unix book says ad nauseum, "hard to learn but easy to use." And if you're any sort of geek--someone who's going to spend most of your time on a computer, such that the steep learning curve isn't too relevant--then it's not such a bad design philosophy.
Thing is, most of us have realized that a GUI has the possibility to make anyone more productive, even Tom Christiansen's proverbial "vi wizard". However, the people making GUI tools/wm's/environments for Linux (note: not that I'm one of them; not that I'm a good enough programmer to contribute a single line; and really truly not to take anything away from their impressive achievements) seem to have figured that we could use a dose of the old paradigms, a huge helping of superficial Windows UI plagarism, and some skinability (neato!) and have a kickass UI.
Not even close.
Again, Gnome and KDE are incredible achievements for what they are, and are constantly getting better. But. As they stand now, their UI is clearly substandard. KDE is like Win9x, but flakier (from a UI perspective, not a stability one, of course), with less consistent (though more extensive) preferences panels, unconsistent app UI's, much less polish, and an awful excuse for perhaps the most important functionality of a GUI--being able to seemlessly share data between different apps. Gnome has the benefit of not being such a slavish copy of Windows, but is otherwise even worse in all of the above categories.
And what do most Linux users do about it? a) Complain about how GUI's are for wimps anyways, or b) Stick on some badass skins and note how, since E has much more functionality than any Windows wm, it is invariably a better UI.
Meanwhile, what do MS and Apple do about it? They spend millions of dollars a year hiring UI experts and, more importantly, empirically testing thousands of potential interfaces on end-users to find which are better.
Notice I didn't say "easier to learn". I said "better". As has been noted elsewhere in this thread, the Windows UI paradigm isn't any more intuitive from first principles than the KDE paradigm (duh; they're nearly identical). But that's not the point. What good UI testing is all about isn't how easy it is for someone who's never seen a computer before to use, but rather, assuming the user already has adequate familiarity with the paradigm, a) how flexible, robust, and powerful is it; b) how intuitive is it to do an action which is part of the paradigm but which the user has never actually done before; and c) how fast, easy, and nonobtrusive is it to do the sorts of tasks that the user does again and again.
By all these criteria, something like the Unix CLI passes with flying colors. And, by all these criteria, Gnome and KDE, and the programs that run on them, in their current states are quite a bit behind Windows, which in turn lags behind MacOS. (Note: I've never been a Mac user, and have always generally disliked them for several reasons: bad under-the-hood technology, horrible overpricing, lack of good, fast software, one damn button, deceitful marketing. However, I'm just beginning to come around to how well designed their UI is (compared to the alternatives), and damn if OS X doesn't look incredible. But I digress.)
But, you all say, that's what's so great about Open Source! If there's anything wrong with Open Source Software, then someone will fix it! The problem is, very few people notice that anything's wrong. That is, you don't notice how unproductive the way you're doing things is until you see a better implementation. And even then you probably won't notice--it might take someone with a stopwatch showing you how much faster you work the new way than the old way. A quick story to perhaps illustrate what I mean: couple days ago I was procrastinating writing a huge (and overdue) paper, by reading that analysis of Aqua by Tog, the guy who essentially led the Mac UI development. And, since I was trying awful hard to procrastinate (and because once you start reading him, Tog's pretty interesting), I decided to click the link to this article on Fitts' Law, where I read Tog's advice to Word for Windows users: switch to full screen mode to get the Fitt's Law advantages of infinite depth behind your menus, and switch to large icons to speed up finding the right one.
Well, never one to miss a chance to not write my paper, I did some informal tests. And, even though the ideas had never occurred to me (not because I didn't know full screen mode and large icons existed, but just because since it *looks* so much more professional in maximized window mode with by big toolbars full of small icons (which, as I run 1280x1074, really are small), it had to be more productive that way), I realized pretty quickly that they actually improved my productivity. Or, would have, except that in full screen mode the menus, while at the top of the screen and thus with infinite depth, don't show up until you mouse over them (Tog doesn't seem to mind this sort of thing; I find it annoying as hell. But in any case, it's worth pointing out that this is proof Tog isn't designing for ignorant first-time users--because you certainly can't expect any first-time users to know about items which are hidden until you mouse over them--but rather for ease of use for people who know what they're doing); and since MS decided *not* to include higher res bitmaps for all the icons in large icon mode, they looked too damn ugly for me to keep them. But it is true that I could find the right one a lot quicker; and that I'd never realized how my tiny icons were slowing me down until I tested it.
Ok, I'm hideously rambling, so lemme try to sum up. Text-based Unix interfaces were everything that today's Linux GUI's aren't: consistent, robust, quick (from a UI standpoint, not a technological one), and intuitive for those who already knew the paradigm. A simple example is pipes--a simple concept which gives the CLI its amazing power and flexibility--and their GUI analogues, object models like COM, CORBA, etc. designed to allow intuitive sharing of information between apps--which, to put it mildly, work much better on mainstream OS's than on Gnome and KDE. A more interesting problem (because we at least agree on the fact that our object models need improvement, and I have no doubt that they'll catch up pretty soon) is inconsistent and just-plain-badly-designed interfaces--a failure to take advantage of principles--like Fitts' Law--that the other guys have learned from psychological research and intensive user-testing. Perhaps the most difficult problem is the lack of consistency across apps.
The question is, how do we fix this. In regards our lack of UI research, I have a good deal of hope. After all, Red Hat has the money to hire some serious UI people and psychologists and testers and whatnot to get Gnome on equal footing with Windows and Macs; Corel or others could do the same for KDE. Hell, they might even come up with some *new* GUI paradigms, instead of just copying the two rather flawed ones out there, often badly.
The problem is that the strength of OSS lies not in the high-name projects which can now afford serious funding, but rather in all the little ones that provide all the little functionalities we know and love. How to get all of those projects to understand, and furthermore, abide by complex UI standards--when at the moment they can't even agree on standard menu shortcut keys--is a huge problem. Furthermore, there's the fact that a different choice of widget toolkits inevitably imposes a different UI paradigm. Finally, we have the fact that Linux geeks rightly love customizing our systems to the fullest extent; as Apple has clearly realized, with their apparent decision not to allow OS X any skins other than Aqua, customization is the enemy of consistency.
Hopefully this absurdity of a long post has convinced y'all that these UI issues are important, because they really affect how productive any user is--but elite users *especially*. I do think that OSS can come up with a better response to the UI issue than poorly understand copies of the existing GUIs. However, I'm not sure exactly how, and our work so far in this area has not been encouraging...
That's what AOL'ers get. I'm against AOL, and I believe their users get what they deserve.
/.er would take it at face value. Essentially what it says is that if you check the button that tells your computer to make AOL's software your default browsing software, it (*gasp!*) uses AOL's software, um, as the default when you browse. Also, when you install it...it makes changes to the registry! Unbelievable. Amazingly, this may mean that someone who had a different web browser selected as their default web browser...would no longer have that web browser selected as their default web browser. Certain things that used to work because they depended on that browser being the default may work no longer. The mind boggles.
/. But I'm not one to complain about a bad posting, because usually the /. community is able to sniff out the BS in many mainstream media computer stories, instead of falling for it like the "ignorant masses" we too often feel contempt for. Unfortunately, when the article is about some company which many of us "unbiased /. geeks who are just interested in tech news which is honest and intelligent" happen to have a prejudice against...we tend to buy it hook, line and sinker.
/. for accepting this drivel without the skepticism we rightly pride ourselves on having.
This makes me feel squeamish. No, actually this makes me feel disturbed and yet rather entertained at the same time. You're against...an internet provider? Like, I suppose I can understand this, if they ever did anything to harm you personally, or gave you bad service, or something...although I doubt you'd ever admit to even emailing someone with an AOL address. But wishing harm on their 20 million users?? For their choice of an ISP?? Huh? Did you run that statement by yourself before you wrote it??
I'm not tyring to sound supiror or anything, but why didn't these people do research before they signed up to AOL?
Well you sure as hell don't come off looking too "supiror". Why didn't you do research on the English language before you presumed to write it down?
$21.95? Most of the local ISPs around here are $14.95 or under, and offer everything AOL has.
Erm, no. AOL is still a proprietary network community that allows access to the internet. They have their own dial-up procedure, which is significantly easier to setup than any other ISP's; they have their own integrated interface; they have their own content, searchable by keyword, and their own communities. Now, you and I know that at least 99% of the information available on AOL is available for free on the internet--although much of it can be harder to find reliably, even for someone who knows what he's doing. And we (or, at least I know; you seem mighty ignorant) know that the internet connection AOL provides is technically inferior for some internet activities (read: playing Quake). However, the claim that any other ISP offers "everything AOL has" is patently false.
Now, I'm not afraid to admit that I've been an AOL user. Indeed, my family's used AOL for over 7 years now, and I've been on the whole moderately happy with it. I was definitely happy to have it 7 years ago, on our 486sx with 4 MB RAM and a 2400 baud modem, because that box--and especially that modem; ugh--sure couldn't handle Netscape (1.0 had just come out IIRC), and as a 13 year old I got a lot more use out of AOL's content than I could have with just FTP, telnet, and USENET (which AOL provided me anyways). So I wasn't 133t in my prepubescent days. Sue me.
Of course, now that I'm used to my fat pipe at college, I'll never go back to a narrowband connection, and if for some reason I were to get one for myself, I'd go with another ISP than AOL. Still, I'm still glad my parents have stuck with AOL, because it's frankly the best choice for them. It may be incomprehensible to someone as supiror as you, but for many people who aren't terribly comfortable with computers, it's just easier to find what you're looking for on AOL.
As for AOL's reputation as a god-awful ISP...AOL supported my 56k modem before most all of the local ISPs in my hometown (St. Louis); and over the past 7 years, AOL has provided a much more consistent and reliable connection than my friends' local ISPs as well. (Yes, I just said that. But while I'm sure the whole "busy signal" fiasco may have been truly awful in the rest of the country, in St. Louis it was only a bit annoying for a month or so. Meanwhile, whenever one AOL station is giving me trouble, there's about 50 other local numbers I can dial; when a small-time ISP goes down, it's down.)
As for this ricidulous FUD filled article, I find it outrageous that you or any true
As pointed out by someone else here, this is exactly the same behavior that just about any program these days that handles a standard that other programs may handle--be it a web browser, a media format player, or whathaveyou--does. Wow. Criminal.
And then they trot out the CTO of Prodigy, and some random Win95 user who suffered conflicts and crashes after installing a large piece of software (that's certainly never happened before!) to spread some FUD. Top it off with some third-hand hearsay from Windows Magazine which amounts to, AOL 5.0 installs a bunch of its own software to handle its internet connection; your computer may already have other files which do analogous things (though they are not the ones AOL is designed to work with); therefore this is...bad. And it potentially may not work, even though, uh, it actually does work. (I can confirm this; I keep a copy of AOL on my computer at school just in case the fancy to log on strikes me; I upgraded to 5.0 with absolutely no problems or interference with my university internet connection.) Oh, and several people emailed me to complain about AOL. And some of them are MSCE's!
Conclusion: this isn't the sort of thing that deserves to be posted on
Shame on you for being a techno-elitist (or maybe the correct term is "asshole") who wishes ill on people just because their choice of ISP (I mean, of all things! How ridiculous!!) doesn't square with yours. And shame on most of the rest of
Erg. My fault; I remembered that a G3 Powerbook was barely able to play through the Austin Powers DVD...I just forgot the part about them playing it through twice...
In any case, the TM chips still consume quite a bit less power than a G3, and even less under normal operating conditions, which will mean more battery life with lighter batteries.
It seems hard to believe that they'll get twice as much battery life as existing laptops. I'm no expert, but I'd say that the screen, HDD, DVD drive, etc waste much more energy than the microprocessor. Anybody that knows this stuff cares to give his opinion?
Actually, if you read their web site, Transmeta gave their "opinion" on this right here. Essentially, the gist of it is that the battery savings are quite significant, even on one of those giant laptops with the 15" screens and the DVD players, and even while playing a DVD in software (which, because it requires a nearly constant (and rather hefty) level of CPU power, can't take much advantage of their technology which dynamically scales down power usage and voltage to meet the current system needs).
Basically, according to the tables on the above page, the worst-case for a Crusoe processor--running soft DVD (2 watts used in CPU + Northbridge) on a bigass notebook (8 watts)--gives 3.2 hours battery life. IIRC, one of those new G3's (and remember, a G3 consumes *way* less power than any (native) x86 chip) can barely manage an hour and a half.
Plus, they're not even taking into account the fact that unlike any other notebook on the planet, these suckers don't need a fan; that should be reflected in the 8 watt system overhead, but isn't. (Not sure how much power a fan takes, but it has to be significant.)
Now...in the normal case, in which the CPU is at full throttle only a little bit of the time, then Crusoe starts to clean up. For one thing, as they point out, traditional notebooks try to conserve power by just shutting off the CPU when it's not being used. The problem with this is it doesn't help the normal case when it's being used only a little bit, and it adds a noticable delay while it gets switched on again, which for most users is a lot more important than its peak speed anyways. The T5400 (the especially badass one that's not coming out until the summer) gets around this by scaling CPU power and voltage to meet current needs--and it shows.
Witness their mobile benchmark report [note: 116k pdf], based on a new benchmarking methodology they invented (read up on it he re [note: 93k pdf]) which:
1) mirrors actual use--i.e. doesn't run full throttle all the time, which almost never happens under normal use, especially for a notebook
2) includes metrics for energy efficiency--that is, it reports not just work/time, but work/WattHour and work/time/WattHour.
For those who don't want to check it out, the result is that across 6 tests (operating system load, system idle, Office 2000, web browsing, mp3 playback, and soft DVD playback) comparing the T5400 to a P3 500, the Crusoe processor was:
95.3% as fast (yeah, this includes the "system idle" test, which is a bit of a cheap freebie in this category) [note--this is just my straight average of the 6 categories, which is absolutely unmathematically correct, but oh well]
409.2% as efficient in terms of work/Watt-hour
395.3% as efficient in terms of work/time/watt-hour.
All in all, pretty damn impressive. And it's worth noting that it's over 6 times as efficient in the system idle test--which is what your system probably does most anyways.
Of course, this only measures the power drained by the CPU+NG, and not the screen, HD, etc. But...I have no trouble believing that a CPU that's 4 times as efficient under normal use will give 2 times the overall battery power.
I gotta go now, but the point of all this rambling is, this chip is pretty damn neat. I'm impressed.
The big thing to remember about this lawsuit is, you don't need DeCSS to copy a DVD to *any* format.
I'll say again, for the slow-witted. You don't need DeCSS to copy a DVD.
To *any* format.
Think about it. All DeCSS does is unencrypt the data on the DVD.
The same thing every DVD player in existence already does before it sends it to your video card drivers.
Before it sends it unencrypted to your video card drivers.
Or alternatively, before it sends it to one of several hacks which have been available for the past two years which sit at the video card driver level and save the damn stream for you. In plain old VCD, exportable to any format you want.
This suit has nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with control over DVD player licensing. Yeah, you may say, maybe that was what the earlier lawsuit, brought by the DVD Consortium, was about. But why does the MPAA care if anyone can make a DVD player without paying silly licensing fees?
Glad you asked. Answer: export zones.
As y'all may or may not know, every DVD player around these days only includes the key to decrypt DVD's made for a certain "export zone"--a geographical region, like North America or Europe. The point being, this way the studios can release a movie on DVD in America before the film has come out in theaters in Europe, and not have to worry about Europeans mail-ordering the DVD from the states and therefore not paying the extra cash to see it in the theaters.
So, if DVD CSS works, then the only way you can make a player is by doing it according to their rules, which means only including the key to one export zone. Of course, now that DeCSS is out there, anyone can come along and play a DVD--a DVD they buy, that they pay good money that goes to the studios and all--encoded for any region, right on their computer.
Furthermore--and this is where my conspiracy theory of the night comes in--any company can look at the source code, copy it to firmware, and make a stand-alone DVD player which will play DVD's for every region. Probably won't make too much of a difference in the States, but over in Europe/Asia, where DVD's will regularly be released up to a year behind their release in the US, lots of people would want such a player.
So, my theory is (this is assuming that the MPAA isn't just stupendously dumb...which is a rather large assumption), the reason they're suing now isn't to get DeCSS taken off the net, because they know that it's quite a bit too late for that. Instead, it's to get a legal precedent, so that any company thinking of making a "universal" DVD player like the one I described above would know that they'd lose in court.
Or maybe not. Best I could come up with, tho...
Anyways, it's been said before, but if you haven't already, make a donation to the EFF. This is important.
I've been thinking about the troll problem for a bit and think I may have come up with a workable plan. What does everyone think about this:
/., so I say either make a -2 for Trolls score, or let it be a browsing option (view Trolls or not).
Why not seperate troll moderation from normal moderation completely? After all, trolls are generally very obvious to spot, and nearly everyone can agree on what is and isn't a troll, so it seems silly to require someone to waste moderator points that could be spent expressing an interesting opinion on what should be routine maintenance.
So, my proposal would be to let all (logged in, I suppose) users moderate trolls. I'm thinking just stick a little checkbox marked "Troll" on every comment. To prevent abuses, and people trying to use it to get rid of a comment which is really just off-topic or redundant or "wrong", just require that either a certain percentage of the people who view the comment check "Troll" before it gets marked Troll (I'd say around 50%, although we'd probably need trial and error to figure it out), as well as, say, at least 10 Troll votes, so it doesn't get wiped off by a couple of early votes.
If a comment does get a 50% Troll rating, then you can bet it deserves it, and even people who browse -1 won't want to see it. Still, I'm a strong believer that no one should get censored off
The only issue I can come up with against this is that I take a big memory hit (IE 5) whenever I have moderator status, from all the drop-down lists; I'm not sure if a checkbox on every comment would hurt as much, but it's something to think about.
So...what does everyone think?