Nonsense. Patents make it possible for corporations to create life-saving technology and saves lives. Pharmaceutical companies raise capital from the marketplace for research and development and regulatory testing, not because shareholders are happy to volunteer funds for R&D, but because they hope the company will make a profit. If the company could not make a profit, the R&D and development wouldn't get done, and the products would be brought to market. If the company didn't have patents, competitors would simply free-ride on the R&D and compete with them using their own work. No profits, no product, no life saving drugs.
Life saving drugs, such as tetracycline and a host of antibiotics, leukemia fighting drugs, and lifestyle preserving drugs such as Prozac and many others are the product of, not deterred by, the patent system.
Of course you're right, so far as life-saving drugs are really developed solely by privately-financed R&D. The reality, however, is very different.
Indeed, a recent study found that, for the top 5 best-selling drugs currently on the market, fully 80% of the money which funded their development was put up not by the pharmacutical companies which own the patents, not by private investors, but by the federal government in the form of research grants. More generally (and for which I can find a link to back me up), between 70 and 90 percent of important drugs are developed with significant government help, and a whopping 38% of all health-care related R&D is financed by the federal government. (Government grants are heavily skewed towards basic research; thus we can expect that this displaces drug discovery research much more than eg. engineering type R&D for new technology in hospitals.) All the government gets back for their tremendous investment (other than a healthier society, which, of course, is their main goal), is a $50 patent fee.
Obviously pharmacuticals still spend a tremendous amount of capital and incur large risks to take the final steps to bring a drug to market and test its safety and efficacy. (The government grants go more to the basic research end of things.) Indeed, you are right in suggesting that the current "free-market" drug development system would completely collapse if pharmacutical companies did not have the monopoly profits of patents to cover their capital investments. Nor could the system survive without government grants at their current, tremendous levels; while the pharmacuticals are certainly not struggling to keep afloat at the moment, their profit rewards are generally commensurate to the risks they incur from the share of development they actually do finance.
What you should realize, however, is that the current system is not a free-market at all. It is so heavily subsidized as to transcend mere "corporate welfare"; instead it is really a huge socialist enterprise with a quasi-capitalist front-end tacked on. The solution, as impossible as it is obvious, is to remove the privatized delivery system and let the entire drug development pipeline be financed, and controlled, by government and academia. In other words, let science for the public good be run by scientists and the public, and not by businessmen.
Thing is, as every developed country in the world except the US has realized, our ethical conception of medicine inherently clashes with capitalist motives. There are only two ways for an entity to profit from offering health care:
1) by killing poor people.
2) by being a broad enough entity that it can reap the benefits of providing health care without charging for it.
#1 is obvious if you think about it for a while: if you charge the rate which the market will bear for live-saving treatments, then obviously some people will be unable to pay. If you think this does not go on in America today then you are very badly deluded.
#2 refers to the fact that having a healthy population is essential for economic growth and a stable society. However, hospitals and pharmacutical companies are not broad enough to benefit from the fact that healthy people can provide a net economic positive while sick or dead people cannot. Our current system has a cobbled-together kludge to fix this: most people's health costs are borne by their employer, who *does* reap (some of) the economic and social benefit of them being healthy.
The problem with this is that it only works for people who are currently employed in a job good enough to pay benefits. The 50 million uninsured in America are mainly young people--children, students, and those with entry level jobs. The economic and societal benefit they will provide later in their lives is often contingent on their remaining healthy today, but the current system can't recognize this.
This is without even getting into the problems of the very poor: of the one-in-five children under 5 years old who lives beneath the povery line; of the mentally ill homeless who could provide a positive benefit to society if they could only recieve treatment. (Less than 50% of those below the poverty line recieve Medicaid, and it rarely provides more than emergency room care; a full 36% are completely uninsured, and thus obviously unable to pay for any medical care whatsoever. Uninsured In America, pg. 22, very large pdf.)
The current system is completely broken, but it will take more than just patent reform to fix it
It's astonishing how an article could spend that long talking about Intel suing VIA over a chipset which introduces a new DRAM type to an Intel CPU and not mention Intel's PC133 fiasco of two years ago.
For those who don't know, the only reason PC133 exists (as a PC standard DRAM type) is because of VIA. Flashback to early 1999: Intel had the market for chipsets (for Intel processors) almost completely to itself, riding on the enormously successful 440BX chipset, which used PC100. However, P3 speeds were ramping up while memory speeds had been stuck at PC100 for a couple years. The obvious thing to do was to update the BX to support a 133MHz FSB. After all, it was a dead-simple engineering trick (every BX mobo at the time could easily overclock to 133; many were stable up to 150), and the memory makers were already making SDRAM which could safely run at 133 but clocking at 100 because that was the highest official speed.
But instead--and unbeknownst to most of the techie world at that point--Intel had a contract with Rambus which offered them many goodies like the ability to make RDRAM controllers royalty-free (others paid up to 5%) and lots and lots of stock options. However, the contract was contingent on, among other things, Intel agreeing to do everything reasonably in their power to prevent "next-generation DRAM" types other than RDRAM from being paired with Intel processors for the consumer desktop. "Next-generation" was defined as > 1GB/s bandwidth.
PC133 has a bandwidth of 1.066 GB/s.
Moreover, Intel *thought* it was putting the finishing touches on the ill-fated RDRAM-only (at that point) i820 (Camino) chipset, with which they were going to introduce new and badly needed 133MHz FSB P3s. Instead, engineering delays involving the difficulties of getting RDRAM working (eventually they had to settle for only 2 RIMM slots instead of the original 3, a per-channel limitation which remains to this day), and the difficulties of getting a memory translator hub which allowed PC100 to be used on the i820 (a last minute addition when they realized people weren't exactly going to pay $500 for 128MB of RAM) working, pushed the release date back 6 months or so, until November.
Just to reiterate: Intel put off releasing 133MHz FSB P3s, and then when they did release them said that consumers could only use them with a buggy chipset, limited to 2 RAM slots, which offered one's choice of an extra-slow translated implementation of PC100 or of RDRAM which cost 10 times as much per bit as SDRAM. Meanwhile, tests with BX chipsets overclocked to 133 MHz FSB showed that this solution was significantly *faster* than the i820 + RDRAM chipset!
Into this world stepped VIA offering the Apollo133 chipset, the first P3 chipset explicitly designed to use PC133. Nevermind that it was probably *less* stable than an Intel BX overclocked to 133 MHZ FSB. Nevermind that it underperformed the BX@133 as well. And nevermind that then, as now, Intel sued VIA with all their might, among other things requesting injunctions forbidding all VIA products from leaving Taiwan. (The pretext then was that VIA was abusing Intel IP by using the P3 bus with a DRAM type Intel had not sanctioned.)
VIA quickly gained > 50% of the P3 chipset market.
Indeed, the only reason you see ALi, SiS, and soon-to-be nvidia and others getting into the 3rd-party chipset market is because VIA paved the way a couple years ago.
Intel tried every FUD tactic in the book, from suing in multiple jurisdictions to claiming that PC133 SDRAM was not stable (the DRAM itself! And this from the company which had spent the past year patching bugs with RDRAM!). Intel got their ass handed to them in court, and by in the summer of 2000 introduced the i815, essentially the BX@133 product they should have introduced in late 1998.
Intel doesn't like getting humiliated, though, and they've had a seemingly personal vandetta against VIA ever since. In retaliation, they denied VIA the chance to license the P4 bus, as ALi and SiS and (interesting) ATi have done. (This is the basis for the current *threatened* suits. However, it's interesting to note that the P4X266 is currently shipping and no suits have yet been filed, meaning this is probably just a bluff on Intel's part.)
Intel reps were even seen at the recent Comdex show threatening mobo makers who had VIA promotional balloons flying at their booths. All the balloons were taken by the Intel people.
However, Intel's case this time is as flimsy as last. Disregarding potential antitrust concerns, the fact remains that NatSemi, whom VIA recently purchased *did* have a license for the P4 bus, and thus so does VIA.
So does this mean VIA will have similar success as last time? Well, I think they'll easily prevail in court if it comes to that, although it appears that Intel may be playing this one all FUD and no bite: warning mobo manufacturers not to use the P4X266 rather than actually filing any lawsuits. While of course not stated in the article, the well-documented fact is that Intel is telling the mobo makers that if they use the VIA chipset they will have their allocation of Intel's SDRAM (and soon-to-be DDR) P4 chipset, the i845, curtailed or dropped altogether. The result will likely be that only the third-tier mobo makers, who probably wouldn't have gotten a Brookdale allotment anyways, will be using the P4X266.
But another reason VIA won't snap up the P4 chipset market is much more hopeful. SiS' DDR Athlon chipset, the 735, has earned rave reviews, significantly beating every other chipset around. Their upcoming 635 chipset for the P4 will offer all that and more, including support for 333MHz DDR (PC 2700) which is coming down the pipeline now.
This seems to be the general opensource response to what I posted (and posts like mine). But how many VB viruses have you actually recieved? VBscript viruses just don't spread, Outlook warns you that you are about to run something potentially very damaging and asks whether you're sure you want to continue (very scarey stuff for not-very-computer-literate people) before running the script, and virus checkers can spot them all a mile off without even needing a footprint. I don't think I've ever been sent a vbs based virus but I've been sent a lot of exe's and screen savers.
Um...the I Love You worm, the most destructive (in estimated $ costs) computer infection in history, was a.vbs attachment. So were Bubble Boy and Anna Kournekova. (The first required no user intervention as it exploited a serious Outlook security flaw; the second enjoyed a wide spread due to some simple social engineering.)
That's first of all. And second of all, Outlook's idea of attachment security is to pop up the same "this is an attachment are you sure you want to open it?" dialog box for every attachment, whether.txt,.exe or ".jpg.vbs".
A simple list of things MS could do to improve email attachment security:
1) Run any executable attachments opened directly from Outlook in a sandbox; require user confirmation for any changes to existing files, for creating any new files, or for sending out any email.
2) Turn macro protection in Word on by default, and run Word macros in a similar sandbox.
3) Disable any scripting elements in HTML email; no java, javascript, ActiveX or VB script, just plain HTML.
4) Only pop up a warning when opening an attachment which might actually be dangerous, i.e..vbs,.doc with macros,.exe,.bat,.com,.scr, etc. Popping up a warning every time a user opens any attachment just makes the user learn to click through the warning without thinking.
That's 4 changes which would be neither too difficult to impliment nor too annoying or confusing to users. Yes, buggy permissions and buffer overflows happen in most all software, and requiring MS to audit code ala OpenBSD would be impossible. But they're certainly not doing anywhere near what they should to make viruses more difficult to spread.
That said, I have to wonder if I can be part of a community whose most popular searches include "lolita", "preteen", "rape", and "incest".
Among many other possible responses to this comment I'm going to take the angle of statistical bias. Thing is, while searches for "abnormal" porn acts do make it into the top 20 list, they still add up to a very small percentage of all Gnutella searches, generally < 1%. The thing to remember here is that these search statistics are skewed because if you're looking for porn you tend to use one of a few generic search terms.
Just as a first approximation, I'd guess that 80% of porn searches go out under only about 20 search topics: a few very generic ones, like "porn" and "xxx"; about 10 or so specific fetishes or sex acts including the ones you're so concerned about, and another 5 or so for the very small number of porn stars who might be searched for by name. On the other hand, non-porn searches tend to be very specific: searches for a particular music band, or more likely for a particular song or movie. These searches are much more common on Gnutella, but because they are spread across thousands of different search topics they don't make it into the top 20 list.
Thing is, when you're looking for music or a movie, you know exactly what you want; when you're looking for porn, you're usually just looking for anything to get off. If people used search terms like "music" or "sound" or "movie", or even "guitar" or "rock and roll" or "drama", then those would move all the porn stuff out of the top 20. But because porn occupies a more generic role than most other entertainment, this is reflected in both how people search for it and how they name their porn files.
Did anyone else do a doubletake on this? Or did I just miss a motherboard chipset in the 8xx series that happened to have the same number as Intel's old 32-bit mil-spec CPU line?
You may have missed it because it's not out yet--the i860 (codename "Colusa") is the chipset for the upcoming 1-2 proc P4 Xeon (codename "Foster"; actually, in an effort to be hugely confusing, the official name is now simply "Xeon") systems which should be released in a couple months or so. FYI, the 4+ proc chipset will be designated the i870.
And yes, it is a bit odd that Intel is recycling this rather inauspicious brand number. I suppose not many in the industry have a long memory.
(For more info on the first i860, Paul DeMone had an interesting article at RWT comparing its ambitious but flawed design to Itanium and its potential pitfalls.)
1) Saturn failed because it was hard to program games quickly (which is required in the console market). Otherwise it truly was much better in performance than other systems at the time (N64 & PS1).
Exactly. Which is why I said that the PS2's shot at a monopoly is far from assured--because it is very similar to Saturn in these regards. It has tremendous theoretical power, but it's proving very difficult for developers to come anywhere close to that in their games. The main reason is that, just like the Saturn, programming for the PS2 requires carefully spreading computation across no less than 3 processing units (the CPU plus 2 independent, powerful, and slightly different-from-each-other vector units), plus the GPU. Moreover, just like the Saturn (and unlike the PS1), there is a huge lack of high-level programming tools to help developers do this. Thus almost all the first-round PS2 games lack anti-aliasing, something which should be just as simple as calling a vendor-supplied library. The problem is the library doesn't exist yet. (Or didn't; I believe Sony has provided a standard anti-aliasing solution by now.)
Remember, when the 32-bit wars were starting it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that Saturn would run away with it. Nintendo was late to the party, and Sony? Offering some modification of their cast-off reject bid for a SNES CD-ROM? (Check into the history of the PS if you don't know the story.) They don't know anything about the games market!! (Of course, similar things were said about Nintendo before the NES, and Sega before the Genesis. The fact is, true domination in the console has never lasted for more than one generation.)
How did Sony succeed? 1) Developer-friendly licensing terms. 2) Easy-to-use high level APIs. 3) Focus on games above all else. These are exactly the steps MS is taking with XBox (I mean, DX8 is so so much higher level than anything ever seen before in the console space it's astonishing), and I think they have a very good shot.
2) Sony currently owns the set top console market. Completely. Utterly. Yes it does. more than 90% of the people I talk to believe Sony is their god (aparently) & cannot make a mistake... The Dreamcast has been out longer than the PS2 & looks just as good or better (depending on game), but people will look at the dreamcast & say "this looks liek crap!" then turn to the PS2 & say "Wow! this just looks so cool! I need one of these because Sony makes it!". Which leads me to the conclusion most people are brain dead slugs feed thoughts by marketers...
The same was once true of Atari and Nintendo. While Sega never truly owned the console market, it was widely assumed following the 16-bit generation that they were the ascendent company while Nintendo was slow-moving, mired in the past, and headed for decline. Nintendo was--and still is--a couple years late to each new generation, despite sewing up the 8-bit generation by virtue of arriving when no one else was there. Nintendo was--and still is--stuck marketing to 8-14 year old boys at a time when Genesis was showing that video games could now appeal to a much wider demographic. Sega was hip and edgy; Nintendo was dead in the water. Sony was an absolute joke. The results were the opposite of what anyone predicted. Sony's current position is even more precarious because despite the wealth of good games for PS1, absolutely *none* are 1st party. This means there is no guarantee whatsoever that they will be only available for PS2, or even that they will be available for PS2 at all. The Oddworld series has already become XBox only. Every single major developer I can think of (except Square) is already committed to XBox. Let's put it this way: MGS2 and Crash Bandicoot are already announced for XBox. Nintendo and Sega both lost their market domination *despite* the attraction of strong 1st party series; Sony doesn't even have that.
In the large historical view, consoles are gradually heading *away* from monopoly.
While there were a decent number of consoles in the 70's back when the games "industry" was only a small step away from the concurrent hobbyist PC market (or at least it seems that way to me, who wasn't around at the time much less following the video game market), the late 70's/early 80's were essentially monopolized by Atari, especially the 2600. ColecoVision and Intellivision were around as well (I think they were competing against a later Atari, perhaps the 7600?), but Atari had a large, long run as the controlling power in console games. That they had a monopoly is unquestionable.
Especially because when they tanked, the entire industry tanked with them. Indeed, the console market collapse of...1983 or so?...had many writing off the console market for good. And it would have stayed that way too, were it not for giant monopoly #2, the NES.
The NES came out in late 1985 at a time when no one in their right mind was thinking of bringing out a video game console. Its only competition, the SMS, didn't even go on sale until 1988 I believe. In any case, it wasn't a competition at all; the NES sold something like 80 million units in the US, more than any other console ever. Pretty much every household with children had one. The 16-bit generation (SNES and Genesis) barely sold half that *combined*. Meanwhile, the Master system sold like 6 or 8 million of the things, mainly to people who already had Nintendos. That was a monopoly, plain and simple. Nothing like that is likely to occur in the video game market again, for the simple reason that the situation that led to it (i.e. only one company actually believed the console market was big business) will likely never occur again.
Ever since then, there has always been at least 2 large competitors for each generation of hardware. The Genesis and SNES were roughly evenly matched in sales. The PS1 eventually won a decisive victory over the N64 and Saturn, but by the time that was brutally clear, Dreamcast was already around; in other words, while the PS1 was a spectacular success, it never held the sort of monopoly position that the NES did for something like 5 years (until Genesis).
The PS2 has beaten the DC (mainly on the basis of hype, which in an industry where cross-platform compatibility is unimaginable, is just as powerful and dangerous as FUD in the computer industry), but will still suffer competition from it until XBox and GameCube arrive. While I don't think Indreema has a chance in hell, the open source idea is powerful enough that an open console might actually make it a few years from now. (As has been pointed out, the fact that consoles are a loss leader which the parent company tries to make up by licensing games presents a large problem to this business model, though...)
At this point, it is certain that the PS2 will face serious competition for sales from at least 2 other consoles at every step of its life. (Now: DC, N64 and PS1; 2002 and later: XBox and GameCube.) It is by *no* means clear that PS2 will be the eventual winner, either; in my view, MS has taken all the tactics that made the PS1 such a surprise success (good developer relations, easy to program, just concentrate on games) while Sony has strangely decided to try to emulate the tremendous failures of the Sega Saturn (launch with low volumes and bad games, put theoretical performance above ease of programming, overhype) and crap like the CDi and 3D0 (be the digital-convergance-set-top-information-highway-bu zzword of the future. It'll be like a stereo component! Honest!).
Perhaps your Gnutella client doesn't filter properly. If you're using Win32, check out bearshare (which, besides filtering out this trojan properly, generally kicks ass all-around).
Then how would it count how many were bought? Sure, ot could measure signal strength, but I presume that this would be affected by position too. Hard to distinguish two cartons far away from the sensor from a single one closeby.
If you read the article, you'd notice that, unlike bar codes, the plan with this thing is to assign a unique ID to every single transmitter; if you bought two packages of Oreos, they'd each have their own unique ID. Indeed, the scheme being talked about uses a 96-bit number--an 8-bit header, 24 bits for the manufacturer ID (that's enough for 16.7 million companies); 24 bits for the product ID (with up to 16.7 million products/manufacturer); and a 40-bit serial number (enough for over 1 trillion different packages of Oreos). That's plenty sufficient to track every single thing manufactured in the world for quite some time.
"IV" is "initialization vector" and is the same as what is elsewhere called a "salt". The IV is 24 bits; in a previous paragraph the authors had calculated that for a access point an IV is likely to get reused after about five hours. From this we're apparently supposed to conclude that it's a trivial matter to store every packet until an IV collision occurs, and then use the contents of both packets to recover plaintext. They even seem to be aware that two packets often won't be enough, but fail to mention that you need to save and search another five hours' worth of peak-bandwidth traffic to get anywhere in that case.
Well, assuming the numbers they do (i.e. 1500 byte packets), it takes only 11 Mbps * 18000 seconds = 198 Gb = 24.75 GB of storage space to get a collision in a worst case scenario. But more important, there's no reason to save everything as you go along.
Instead, you just do something like the following. Assume it takes 10 IV collisions to be reasonably assured of computing plaintexts by statistical analysis (this may be generous, considering the redundancies in most of the packets--TCP headers, easily guessed content, etc.). Then you can just build a table for the IV space one portion at a time: say one-eighth at a time. In other words, first you just store all the packets with IVs in the range 0-1x2^22 until you can statistically analyse them and build an IV->cipherstream table for all those IVs. Assuming 10 messages for each IV, this takes about 31 GB. When you're done with that, throw out all those old packets and start on IV range 1-2x2^22, and so on. As they pointed out in their summary, it only takes 15 GB to store the entire IV->cipherstream table. Thus we have total expected storage requirements of ~45 GB, and a total running time of 400 hours to decrypt all future traffic on the network. Moreover, we can start decrypting all the packets with IVs we've already "solved" as soon as we solve them.
This is entirely feasible, but it isn't even the half of it. As they suggest, a much better solution to this problem is to use an active, chosen plaintext attack. That is, the attacker can send a known packet from the outside to a machine on the wireless network; the network will encrypt the packet and send it to that machine, along with its IV in plaintext. The attacker merely needs to intercept that packet (a problem, of course, is knowing which packet it is, although this is solvable with unusual choice of destination machine, etc.) and suddenly he has solved that IV, with no statistical analysis necessary. With this method, we only need 15 GB of storage space (for the table) and enough time to send messages which will be encrypting with every different IV. The latter requirement is going to take a real long time, of course, but as a way to attack, say, 95% of the IVs this is very efficient.
we have been able to successfully intercept WEP-encrypted transmissions by changing the configuration of the drivers. We were able to confuse the firmware enough that the ciphertext (encrypted form) of unrecognized packets was returned to us
I would say that this is likely to be well beyond the capabilities of most script kiddies, and is probably pretty easy for 802.11b equipment vendors to address.
Do you understand the term "script kiddie" at all?? The point of a script kiddie is that he doesn't have to know how to write modified drivers, only how to download them and install them. Hence "script"; they're running someone else's program. And in any case, modifying drivers and even modifying hardware ought not to be beyond the skills or resources of lots of corporate espionage outfits.
Your hope that equipment manufacturers address this problem is probably misgiven; doing so would seem to require them to replace software drivers with hardcoded ones, or at least insert another layer of encryption both inside the hardware and in their drivrs. I submit that both possibilities are very unlikely, and that in any case anyone with deep pockets can build their own 2.4 GHz reciever without too much trouble.
Yeah, like there have never been any problems discovered in crypto products from the self-appointed experts. Uh huh.
Of course there have been, though rarely such softball errors as these. The recently reported vulnerability with the extra decryption keys in PGP, while quite significant, was an implementation error, not an error in the spec itself. And the vulnerabilities found in crypto protocols by the real experts tend to be rather esoteric and impractical ones, and then mainly on entirely new ciphers, not on a spec for piecing together old ones.
In any case, the point is that they are (ideally) found *before* any products using the protocol are put into place. It's called "peer review", perhaps you've heard of it.
."During the design process, the crypto community wasn't invited to participate," says Goldberg, now chief scientist at Zero Knowledge Systems Inc., a privacy-software firm in Montreal.
That's a pretty inflammatory statement, and apparently not far from being an outright lie. It was irresponsible (or possibly venal) of Ian Goldberg to make such a statement, and doubly so for WSJ's Jared Sandberg. As I said before, there is a matter for serious concern here, but the scaremongering from these people is not helping.
I don't know the history here, so I can't comment. However, I do know that if this protocol was indeed opened up to peer review as you seem to suggest (without any evidence), then something went horribly wrong; for some reason, either everyone missed these rather obvious flaws, or, more likely, no one showed up to review it. The point is, offering something for "peer review" and then assuming it's secure after no one shows up to review it is obviously not good practice. Frankly, I can't believe that any serious peer review wouldn't flag the problems inherent in using RC4 with a linear checksum algorithm, or with layering an encryption scheme on such a tiny (24 bit!) IV space.
The right thing to do would have been to alert the equipment manufacturers, discreetly, and let them decide how they want to alert their customers.
This is so beyond ludicrous I'm not even going to touch it. The rest of your post seems to indicate that you're not a troll, but this makes one wonder.
I'm not saying Apple shouldn't offer the possiblity of higher resolution on their 15.2" display, but have you ever used a laptop display at 1280x960 or 1400x1050? Unless you have a magnifying glass handy, all I can say is 'why'?
I run my 17" monitor at 1280x1024; the 15.2" screen on the Powerbook is actually bigger than my screen (because desktop monitor sizes count the edges and LCD sizes don't), and likely crisper too. Moreover, one tends to sit closer to a laptop screen than a desktop monitor. But the Powerbook doesn't offer the option of more than 768 lines of vertical resolution. I'm quite sure I would miss it, personally; of course this doesn't speak for everyone but I'd guess it does speak for many.
No option on the iMac, but then it's a stripper model. iMac users will probably be doing some light gaming, but I don't see 3d rendering in their daily activities.
The point is that the iMac is Apple's "consumer" computer, yet it doesn't offer the option of respectible gaming--a "consumer" use of the PC if ever I heard one. Of course, neither do many PCs in the under $1000 range (under $1500 is pushing it, though); still, the point is that if you want to buy a Mac for a decent price this is the only way you can go. In other words, no gaming for you!
Frankly, in order to do professional 3d rendering one could really use a professional 3d card, like nvidia's Quadro at the very least, if not a Diamond FireGL. Needless to say these will be a long time coming on the Mac, although that's not such a big deal since this is almost as much of a niche market as professional Photoshop users.
I'm pretty sure the Radeon (last I checked it performed respectably in tests (both 2d and 3d) and was considered a "real" competitive 3d video card -- a quote from the Sharky Extreme review: "Despite no longer boasting the fastest 3D on the market, the RADEON should not be scoffed at. Its superior video acceleration, crisp 2D quality, and an aggressively competitive price further add to a sweet slice of 3D gaming pie. " -- see here the aforementioned review: http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/reviews/vide o/ati_radeon_32mb/ )
Yeah, but that review is 4 months old. That's 2/3 of a product generation in the 3d card world. Frankly, both the Radeon and the MX are good cards; I'd be more than happy to have either one (TNT1 at the moment). Neither is a top-of-the-line product, however; at the moment that description only applies to the really-quite-mainstream GeForce2 GTS, and its more rarified bretheren, the GF2 GTS Pro and Ultra. When nvidia's and ATi's new generation of top-of-the-line cards comes out (in just a couple months now) how long will it be before they're on the Mac? (I dunno, but it's certainly not yet clear that it will be anywhere near immediate.) Moreover, while of course their OpenGL support will be outstanding (awesome Quake support is what really propelled nvidia to the top), these cards are both really designed around the very impressive new features of DX8, which of course won't be available on the Mac.
[The Radeon] is offered as an option in cubes.
Good point; I'd forgotten that. Still, the iMac is Apple's self proclaimed "consumer" line, and I for one think that the fact that it cannot support anything but the lightest 3d gaming is a serious strike against such an appelation. (As is the lack of internal CD-RW, but apparently that will be fixed soon...)
Don't get me wrong -- i agree with a lot of what you say. It's not hard to see that most Macs are overpriced for what they're offering under the hood. You could make the same argument for most "luxury items".
"Even if there were a good way to compare performance across the two platforms" pretty much kills the idea of straight performance comparisons. There are plenty more reasons but i'm sure we don't have to elaborate on that.
You're entirely right, of course. The thing is, this thread started with someone postulating that Macs were more or less on parity with PCs in terms of potential performance--which simply isn't true. Nor is it true--and this was my original point--that the only reason for this is that the Mac uses slower clocked CPUs; the Mac platform has generally been behind the PC in all sorts of performance-related categories, most notably in terms of cache hierarchy and memory bandwidth, but also in adopting mainstream PC standards as they improve.
Thus--from a performance standpoint--the Mac market is overpriced and underpowered compared to the PC market. As you point out, this discussion completely ignores the "luxuriousness" or even the simple usability experience of using a Mac vs. using a PC. That's entirely true and I completely admit that; but on the topic that the thread was discussing, I'm right.
It's not really fair to compare street pricing of a PC notebook to retail pricing of a yet unreleased product. Try it again when the PB has been out for a month or two (though by my guess it will take a while for the price to drop).
Both prices were taken as configured in the respective OEMs online store. Indeed, I would bet that the street pricing for the Z505 might indeed be lower than the price at sony.com (although since it is apparently on back order this might not be the case with this particular model), but that wasn't what I was comparing. And if recent history is a guide, Apple tends to adjust their prices far far less often than PC OEMs; I'd be willing to bet that this price comparison will have changed more in the Z505's favor in, say, 3 months time.
Also, as another poster pointed out, LCDs are very expensive, so the 12.1" vs 15.2" difference is not a small one in manufacturing costs, nor is usability (at least in my experience using notebook screens).
Very true, although apparently Apple has significantly lowered the cost on this huge LCD by keeping the resolution at a rather unimpressive 1152x768. (Dell's 14.1" screens are 1400x1050 by way of comparison.) The fact that the Sony's puny 12.1" screen has the same vertical resolution as Apple's brings the matter of LCD quality a lot closer than "15.2 vs. 12.1" would seem to indicate.
Still, you're right in that there is no PC laptop which is as thin and as large-screened as the Powerbook, and that therefore Apple is much to be commended on their new laptop. So yes, the Powerbook is very impressive and quite compelling. Still, the poster I was responding to claimed that you couldn't find a PC notebook that would even come close to the Powerbook in price/performance, and I think I did a decent job of not only refuting that, but refuting it using the actual facts on the very laptop which Apple used to "prove" the amazing value of the Powerbook!
As for the mobile Duron, unfortunately it's based on the current (Spitfire) Duron core, which uses a rather large amount of power; thus it is unlikely to find its way into the sub-notebook category very soon, since it would tend to require a large and therefore heavy battery. When the next version of the Duron core (Morgan) *finally* comes out (looking like at least 3 months, unfortunately), it will offer a much more compelling notebook processor, due to an extensive relayout to reduce power consumption and also support PowerNow!, which is AMD's very advanced version of dynamic voltage/speed regulation. (In particular, it's a whole lot better than Intel's SpeedStep.) So yes, AMD is finally making a move on the medium-to-high end notebook market, but it will be a little while yet before they really have the goods.
BTW, the current video card in all but the base G4s is a 32mb GeForce2 w/ an optional Radeon.
I know, I talked about that in my first post in this thread. Unfortunately, you have to spend $2200 before you get a Mac which has a real video card in the default configuration. "All but the base G4" probably includes 80% of the desktop Macs sold (number pulled from my ass; but remember, a real video card isn't even an *option* on any iMac model, nor on the Cube). To offer a $1700 computer (without monitor) with a Rage Pro is simply a travesty in this day and age.
The most expensive Dell I could find that offered a Rage Pro was $1290 without monitor. Of course the configurations aren't identical; for one thing, as usual, the Dell wouldn't come without Office, a $460 option on the Mac. Adjusting to make them as equally equipped as possible (eg. adding ethernet and Firewire to the Dell, cheap speakers to the Mac, upgrading the Dell from Office Small Business to Office Professional even though Mac Office is somewhere inbetween, 3 year support for both, etc.) I get $2566 for the Mac and $1885 for the Dell. And this is comparing a 1 GHz P3 against a 466 MHz G4. The idea that any PC OEM would sell a $1500 computer which doesn't even have the option of a real video card is unthinkable.
Moreover, you still can't get a top-of-the-line 3d card for the Mac; only the budget GeForce2MX has been released in a Mac model, not the high-performance GeForce2 GTS. Yes, the MX is a great card for all but the most hardcore gamers, but there's still a rather large consumer market which the Mac simply can't compete in, at least until nvidia releases Mac versions of all their cards, which they most likely will do eventually.
What? First to *use* USB (not just put it on the board).
That's an argument about their choice of peripherals, not about their support of i/o standards. It's marketing, not engineering. (Not that marketing is not important, just a different discussion.)
First to use Firewire. Using 32bit Nubus when PCs where using ISA slots.
Still using Nubus years after the PC had moved to PCI. Indeed, I'd count Nubus along with SCSI--in both cases Apple went with a clearly superior solution early on, but ended up being held back as the mainstream PC standards, driven by the much larger marketplace, managed to improve much faster and yet be much cheaper than what Apple used.
The "laughably inferior video card" may be so for FPS, but actually performs quite well for graphic artists. Makes me wonder why they specced it.
"The Macintosh does not have any decent 3d support, so therefore we can pretend that 3d support is not important." Any $9 graphics card is just fine for 2d, although I seriously doubt that 16 MB and a 230 MHz RAMDAC are really good enough for any serious graphic artists. The simple fact is that the Mac does not do 3d well, and that that is simply pitiful in this day and age. And no, 3d is not just used for games; you may be shocked, but there are actually graphics artists that work in three dimensions too! (They use PCs and Unix workstations.)
BTW, the only decent 802.11 system out there that can hold a candle to the AirPort system is the Lucent Orinoco system, which is slightly more expensive and a lot harder to set up.
I don't know how hard it is to set up, but IIRC for what you admit is only a slightly higher price it has a much greater wireless range.
How many makers right now are putting out machines with DDR RAM? Last I checked, not many. Sure they're ramping up, but Apple would be stupid (and possibly insane) to be on the top of the curve for every trend. Their machines would be even more overpriced and they could end up with a Rambus/Intel fiasco on their hands if they made the wrong choice. Better to let someone like Intel make that mistake and fight the battles worth fighting (i.e the ones pretty much won already like USB, firewire)
As this thread was initially about system *performance* (as opposed to capabilities), let me tell you that DDR is MUCH more "a battle worth fighting" on this metric. But you have a very valid point--indeed, I agree with you completely. The thing is, what you're saying assumes that Apple will be designing and validating its own chipsets, incompatible with the real world, every time they want to add a feature. In such an environment, it is indeed not worth it to come out with a DDR chipset now. Moreover, while it would have been worth it to come out with a PC133 chispet a year ago and a DDR chipset in around 3 months time, the fact that Apple is the one designing and validating every new chipset is the reason these chipsets are always a year behind the times--it's a very complicated process and Apple's engineers are understandably stretched thin to try to replicate the work of dozens of companies in the PC world.
That's the problem with having a vertical monopoly; there's not enough room for differentiated product lines and innovation. In the PC world, there are 2 or 3 major chipset manufacturers competing to come out with the fastest chipsets with the most new features, and another couple players who drop in to keep competition high. There are about a dozen major motherboard manufacturers, who compete to best implement these chipsets with the most features at the lowest price. Because the PC RAM market is so large, you have all the DRAM manufacturers in the world driving chipset innovation as well. Finally, because PCs are used for general purpose tasks and because there's an independent benchmarking industry in the PC marketplace, all these people know that they won't be able to get away with a single toy SIMD benchmark as an overall measure of "performance"--thus they all feel pressure to create components which actually work fast over a wide variety of circumstances. Hence the PC market is moving into 2.1 and 3.2 GB/s FSBs while the Mac is finally hitting 1.1 GB/s. Oh, and while we're on the subject, it turns out I was wrong: you won't be able to buy a G4 with on-die L2 cache until the G4+ is released in March. Only then will the G4 finally be approaching clock-for-clock parity with x86 chips (according to SPECcpu, i.e. a real benchmark suite).
Now, I'm not saying there aren't some important tangible benefits to Apple's vertical monopoly. I just don't think they're worth the drawback: machines which cost twice as much as the equivalent PC did when it was released 9 months ago.
One final word re: price/performance -- find a notebook that can compete in that area with the new powerbook. Good luck.
Here you finally have a point: the new powerbook is very impressive and indeed competitive with PCs in price/performance. One important reason why is that AMD has not yet had a viable notebook CPU for the mainstream and performance ends of the market, so therefore Intel has a monopoly over that segment and thus performance notebooks tend to cost as much as powerbooks. Conversely, Apple has seen itself frozen out of the market it practically invented with the first powerbooks, as the portable market becomes more and more dominated by corporate consumers. Thus you have a reversal of the situation in the desktop PC market: Intel is getting away with monopoly pricing, while Apple is heavily discounting to try to break back into a market they've nearly lost.
Still, no matter how I might try to talk bad about it, there's no doubt the new powerbooks are very competitive. On the other hand, the situation is decidedly *not* as Apple has presented it. Here's what Apple has to say on the matter:
Sony Vaio Z505...........PowerBook G4
12.1-inch display........15.2-inch wide-screen display
Magnesium alloy..........99.5% pure grade CP1 titanium
650MHz Pentium III.......400 MHz PowerPC G4
No optical drive.........Slot-loading DVD-ROM
2 hours battery life.....5 hours battery life
Not wireless ready.......AirPort antenna built-in
1.15 inches thick........1 inch thick
$2549*...................$2599*
Now let's look at what the actual facts on that Sony Z505 really are.
First off, let's take note of the fact that contrary to Apple's blatant misrepresentation, the Z505 with a P3-650 actually costs $2250, not "$2549". But what's $300 among friends? Well, we can use some of that money to buy the Z505 a 6-hour battery, so hahaha on you. The cost is now $2450, or $150 less than the Mac. Also while the powerbook may be a miraculous 3.8 mm thinner than the Z505, the important measure is of course weight; the powerbook, at 5.3 pounds, is 41% heavier than the 3.75 pound Z505--which makes sense, as they really serve different purposes. Indeed, the low weight (and its huge popularity) is the reason the Z505 is so underpowered for its price (for a PC that is), but we'll disregard that for now.
Unfortunately, there's no way to buy the Vaio as unloaded as those powerbooks: in particular, no way to buy it without at least Word 2000. Nor is there any way to purchase Word 2001 with our brand new powerbook at the Apple Store. We could buy it from MS for $400 but that doesn't seem quite fair. Instead we'll upgrade both machines to Office.
Where does that put us now?
Sony Vaio Z505...........PowerBook G4
12.1-inch display........15.2-inch wide-screen display
Magnesium alloy..........99.5% pure grade CP1 titanium
650MHz Pentium III.......400 MHz PowerPC G4
No optical drive.........Slot-loading DVD-ROM
6 hours battery life.....5 hours battery life
Not wireless ready.......AirPort antenna built-in
1.15 inches thick........1 inch thick
12 GB HD.................10 GB HD
3.75 pounds*.............5.3 pounds
$2650....................$3060
*Longer battery adds weight from this original measurement, but I couldn't find out how much.
What's missing? Well, the DVD player, for one thing. An external one adds $400 to the Z505's cost, making it just a hair cheaper than the powerbook. The 650 MHz P3 is in reality a good deal faster than the 400 MHz G4, but by using the right programs an argument can be made that the G4 comes close. "AirPort antenna built-in" is a red-herring, since you still need to spend $100 for the AirPort card. I looked it up, and the first place I checked had an Orinoco card for $160. Again, I'm almost positive this card has much better range than AirPort. Eh, let's look it up, shall we? Well, AirPort only goes a measely up to 150 feet. Orinoco goes...let's see...up to 1750 feet. Hmm. Guess the "built-in antenna" isn't working too well, is it??
So what do we end up with? The new powerbook is almost exactly the same price as a similarly configured Z505, except that the Z505 has a tad more HD space, has an extra hour on the battery, and, sorry to say, is the faster machine. Alternatively, you can get the Z505 without a DVD player and save $400.
Meanwhile, the powerbook has a luscious 15.2" screen, while the Z505 is stuck with a 12.1" which, while quite small, at least manages to almost hit the resolution of the powerbook (1024x768 vs. 1152x768). The benefit of giving up the nice screen and the internal DVD is up to 1.55 pounds of heft and of course that extra hour.
In other words, it's arguably a tossup. Of course it's a bad comparison because one is a sub-notebook and the other a full-sizer, but Apple chose it, not me. Still, it's worth noting that the Z505 is perhaps the most overpriced laptop around, so it's not such a surprise that Apple chose it when making a comparison.
Well phew! Aren't we enlightened? Did I pass? (It wasn't that tough, I let Apple "find a notebook that can compete in [price/performance] with the new powerbook" for me!)
Now it's my turn: find a desktop Mac that can compete in (price/1.5)/performance with a similarly equipped desktop PC--and I mean in a wide variety of benchmarks, not just Photoshop and RC5. (Indeed, it would be tough to do that even with Photoshop, assuming one actually used a complete Photoshop benchmark like PSbench.)
Good luck. Unfortunately, there are very few good cross-platform benchmarks to consult; the most well-respected cross-platform benchmark in the world, SPECcpu, shows the G4 in a rather unflattering light--indeed, because of this Motorola hasn't even released official scores for the G4, making it the only current general-purpose CPU family I can think of for which SPEC scores are not available. Oh wait, I lied: there's no SPEC scores for Cyrix chips either. However, there are SPEC scores for the P3, P4, the AMD K7, for Sun's UltraSparc II and III, for IBM's POWER3 chip which is sorta related to the G3 kinda sorta, for the Alpha EV67, and the MIPS R12000 and the HP PA-RISC 8600-just in the past year. The point is, every real chip releases SPEC scores, usually early and often. The best we have for the brand-spanking-new G4+ is an *estimate* for the outdated (in fact retired) SPEC95 suite, and man it's not too pretty. Of course, Motorola can always complain that they don't have a very good Fortran compiler, which is key to a good SPECfp score (their SPECint score sucks too, though); still, this is no one's fault but their own, unless of course they never meant the G4 or G4+ to be a high-performance general-purpose chip (oh that's right, they didn't; they built it for the embedded market).
Other cross-platform benchmarks are invariably much less trustworthy, because they are almost always binary only and are never of the breadth or depth of the SPEC suite. Picking Photoshop, for example, is just plain dumb, as Photoshop is simply better optimized on the Mac than on the PC (alternatively, we could benchmark Word and see which runs it faster). There's a nice collection of published cross-platform Mac vs. x86 results here; it's worth perusing, even though most of these programs make *very* poor overall benchmarks, taken as a whole they at least provide some semblence of a big picture. Needless to say, I think your task will be pretty difficult, even if there were a good way to compare performance across the two platforms.
BTW, on what do you base your assumption that current apple hardware is "second rate" other than processor speed?
Processor performance and memory subsystem performance. Before last week, buying an Apple meant PC100 and off-die half-speed L2 cache. The move to PC133 might be ok, if it didn't signal that Macs won't have DDR for at least a year and, judging by their past behavior, probably longer.
While we're at it, Apple has constantly been behind the times in I/O standards (ever since they abandoned SCSI that is) as well: late to PCI, late to AGP, late to AGP4x, late to ATA/33, late to ATA/66 and currently late to ATA/100. These things actually don't matter nearly as much as the first two, but as they form the only part of the hardware performance equation that's missing I thought it's worth pointing out that Apple's constantly behind the times here too.
Finally, beyond all the stuff mentioned above--which is stuff you can't/couldn't get on a Mac--there's all the hardware insufficiencies of the Mac Apple will try to sell you. Just 6 months ago if you bought a Mac it meant no removable media, and a barely usable mouse and keyboard. It still means no floppy and a very cool but not very useful mouse. Until a week ago it meant no CD-R.
Also until this week it meant shelling out mucho $$ for a computer with a laughably inferior video card--which is arguably the most important component in a consumer PC today. Even now the best Mac you can get comes with a cut-rate budget video card--albeit a decent one--and Apple would have you pay as much as $2200 for a computer to get even that! Of course, it's probably fine that the Mac remains 6 months to a year behind in 3D capabilities, as the top-of-the-line games (with the sole exception of Quake3) come out on Mac 6 months to a year late anyways.
So let's review: the Mac platform is generally about a year behind PC platform mainstream in terms of processor performance (yes that's performance, not clock speed), memory subsystem, and video performance. Indeed this is not much of a new trend (although processor performance has fallen further and further behind the last couple years), as the Mac has been approximately a year behind in adopting most mainstream PC standards.
The only cases in which Apple can be accused of having "innovative hardware" are in fact cases of innovative marketing: just like "Airport" (i.e. IEEE 802.11) cards, which appeared for PC notebooks at exactly the same time they were launched and trumpeted as "only on the Mac", the "all new only on the Mac Superdrives" (i.e. DVD-R drives) will be available for PC exactly the same day they are available for Mac. Yes, Apple may do a good service in picking neat new hardware standards to showcase and bring to the masses, but Mac hardware doesn't offer anything a PC can't match for less money, and never has.
(A possible exception is if you use the G4 or G4+ for the applications it was actually designed and intended for--i.e. embedded signal processing. And yes, the majority of Motorola's G4 revenue comes from embedded systems, not Apple, which is *why* they designed an embedded processor not a PC CPU. What, don't tell me you actually thought AltiVec was so useful for mainstream PC apps that it's worth almost doubling the size of the CPU die and cutting peak frequency by 30%!?)
Not to mention that if you actually read the Vorbis site, the guy's been doing it since way before MP3 became popular.
Well, yeah; there are open-source projects implementing just about everything. The point is, they don't get anywhere until they get a critical mass of developers. And, no matter how cool the idea, they rarely get a critical mass of developers until the idea has already become popular out in the closed-source world and is suddenly now something everybody "needs".
I agree with a lot of your post; the DC is definitely in much better position than the article gave it credit for, especially compared to the PS2--which, while it has some damned powerful components, is IMO the most over-hyped, worst engineered, poorly planned console in...well, I dunno, but I think it's gonna be a large disappointment for Sony and has next to no chance of PS1-like success much less the monopoly many have predicted.
However, it is a matter of record that Sega is doing very poorly financially right now, and that they are and have been entertaining takeover proposals. An invigorated US Dreamcast market will help buy them time and leverage, but they've already said they don't see themselves coming out with another hardware platform after the technical fumble of Saturn and marketing failure of Dreamcast. I think Sega would rather be a "second-party" developer ala Rare than a straight third-party software house, and thus I can see them agreeing to a Nintendo or MS buyout that will keep their franchise titles well managed and well promoted.
From Nintendo's point of view I think this makes a ton of sense. They are suddenly outgunned in the coming generation, by two consoles which suddenly have the full weight of their corporate giants behind them. The thing is, while Nintendo has the under-12 market pretty sown up, console gaming appears finally poised to become a much more mainstream phenomenon. (Indeed, it's been going in this direction since the Genesis, and the PS1 helped a great deal.) Nintendo is holding the same size piece as always, but the pie is suddenly much larger.
And the thing is, the console business is all based on economies of scale; unless GameCube has a large enough audience to match PS2 and XBox, the good developers won't make games for it...and unless the good developers are making games for it, its audience will be too small. One of the best ways to solve this catch-22 is to buy a few developers so that you are guaranteed a wide range of enticing titles. Nintendo has a few, but they will only attract a narrow demographic; Nintendo's sports games in particular are very weak. Furthermore, by buying a Sega, Nintendo has a good chance of hanging on to today's Mario and Zelda fans when they become the NFL2K1 and Jet Grind Radio etc. fans of tomorrow. They'll stay with Nintendo if Nintendo can supply them with games that keep up with them as they grow up. Otherwise, they'll go to Sony and MS.
The FPU on the P4 is already quite large, much larger than the ALUs anyway. The original design would have indeed been very large, with twice that area.
I couldn't get a real picture of the P4 die; best I could manage is the cutesy little colored rectangles on page 6 of this Intel PDF. Point is, assuming an overall colored rectangle size of 217mm^2, the "Enhanced Floating Point/Multi Media" section comes out to under 17mm^2 by my crude measurements. And I frankly doubt that when they say that adding another FPU would "double the floating point size", they actually mean double everything in that little teal box. Even assuming I'm wrong, 16.5mm^2, while certainly bigger than the ALUs (and don't forget, this "floating point" box includes integer SIMD execution as well) is a mere 7% of total die size. While this is somewhat significant, if they really wanted it in they certainly could have made room for it. As a percentage of overall die space it's much smaller than the P3's FPU.
What I saw instead was the admission that adding the extra FPU would have added an extra stage to the pipeline (extra decoding step). It may be that the pipeline was not well balanced with this extra stage, or that it was still in the critical path even with its own pipeline stage, or just that they thought 19 (not including those outside the trace cache) was enough.
In any case, I'm not at all convinced that this decision had to do with die size at all, but rather with rampability and overall IPC. Indeed, as I said, with properly compiled code, the P4's "crippled" FPU is able to scream along, keeping up just fine with its 3.2 GB/s memory bus. Considering most P4s will have higher clock speeds and less memory bandwidth, why add extra FPU units? About all its extra 2 FPUs do for the Athlon is help it in cache-constrained toy benchmarks. In the real world, FPU work increasingly means data sets too large to fit in on-chip cache, and a single FPU becomes more than adequate to keep up.
All true, but the point is that the fact that the 3rd party Linux drivers that ATi couldn't be bothered to write are better than the Windows drivers developed by the company that actually designed the chip doesn't speak well of the Linux drivers so much as it speaks very poorly of the Windows ones. The question (as I understood it) wasn't, "how good are ATi's Linux drivers", but rather, "are ATi's bad drivers going to hurt it in its role as the only high-end competition to nvidia." While it's by no means conclusive, I'd say this piece of evidence points very strongly to a yes on the latter question.
ATI has long had a reputation of putting out awful drivers. If they manage to put out decent drivers and improve their technical support, then they might be a worthy contender.
Bzzt! Thanks for playing! As of two weeks ago, Rage 128 and Rage 128 Pros running OpenGL under Linux Quake 3 [as an example] now generally outperform Windows, thanks to drivers ATI commissioned from Precision Insight. Download them from ATIs site.
Exactly. ATi's drivers are so bad that some 3rd party drivers can beat them! The fact of the matter is, while we'd all like good Linux drivers from everyone, what's going to determine whether there is any competition in the high-end 3D market is ATi's Windows performance and hence their Windows drivers. If their Windows drivers are so bad that some other company can make better drivers for Linux, then that doesn't bode well for competition in the 3D market.
On the other hand, it was my impression that the Radeon drivers, while not up to nvidia's standards, were actually not half bad. Now that Matrox, S3 and 3Dfx are out of the consumer 3D market, and now that nvidia is moving into ATi's traditional monopoly market of 3D chipsets for laptops, there is little doubt that ATi is going to make a stronger move towards the high-end consumer 3D space (mainly retail and DIY). Indeed, they began that move with the Radeon, a product ATi took much more seriously than their previous high-end 3D cards. Unlike the cheap-chip-on-a-motherboard space which ATi has traditionally dominated, drivers are important here, and ATi knows it. I would be shocked if bringing their drivers up to nvidia quality is not one of ATi's major goals going forward, and I bet they'll do a decent job at it too.
This has been said often enough for so many different processors that it has become trite. From experience, extra bits of compiler optimization rarely pay off in a big way. Quite often, it is impossible to tell the difference between minimal and full optimization settings. I suspect that contrived examples are being used for benchmarks, such as an image filter that takes 10 seconds to run and spends all its time inside of a 16 instruction loop. Sure, one tweak to the scheduler will make it run in 8 minutes instead, but how realistic is this? It isn't a win in the general case.
That's why I was talking about SPEC_CPU, the most comprehensive and well balanced CPU benchmark suite on the planet, and not some crappy toy benchmark. Indeed, the P4 does very well on recompiled toy benchmarks as well, but I didn't mention them because they don't tell us anything useful.
FYI, SPEC_CPU is about as far from some "image filter that takes 10 seconds to run and spends all its time inside of a 16 instruction loop" as one can get. Indeed, it is a suite consisting of no less than 28 benchmarks, each designed to stress different algorithmic and data set size combinations, and each very non-trivial. It is the industry's only truly cross-platform benchmark, and it is designed and revised every few years by a committee consisting of some of the foremost experts on high-performance and scientific computing, and advised by every significant MPU vendor to assure fairness. It does not, as you imply, allow any hand-tweaking of assembly code, nor--like most benchmarks--does it come in the form of precompiled binaries which may favor one platform over another. Instead, it comes completely as source code, to be compiled by a vendor supplied compiler--which must be publicly available within a certain time frame--under very specific regulations. The "base" and "peak" categories refer to different levels of allowable customization in the compiler settings, and indeed all compiler flags used must be revealed along with the results. And rather than taking 10 seconds, a full SPEC_CPU run takes a couple hours even on a P4 or high-end Alpha; on the reference machine (i.e. a SPEC_CPU2000 score of 100) it would take something like 12 hours!
So, nice try. But trust me, the only way to beat SPEC_CPU is to built a really fast CPU. It also helps to have an amazing compiler--which Intel does with its VTune 5.0 compilers--but that allows nowhere near the potential for unfair binaries that precompiled benchmarks do. Also, being aimed at the high-performance market rather than the PC market, SPECfp2000 has been criticized by some as "unfairly" rewarding the very large memory bandwidth of the P4 compared to the P3 and SDR SDRAM Athlon. For an IMO interesting technical discussion of this issue, you might want to see this thread over at Ace's Hardware. (See if you can guess who I am.:)
On what am I basing this apparently heretical statement? On SPEC_CPU2000, the most demanding, well balanced, most respected cross-platform CPU benchmark in the world. As you can see if you peruse these lists, the P4/1500 has the highest scores of any shipped CPU in the world, both in SPECint (base and peak) and in SPECfp (base only).
Before any of you reply and think you've caught a mistake, the Alpha EV67/833 is *not* publicly available, and won't be until January, at which point it will take back leadership in SPECfp_base and SPECint_peak. Of course, the P4/1700 will probably take back the lead when it's released in March or so. Indeed, the P4 and Alpha will likely trade the top SPEC spot back and forth at least until the EV68 (EV67 moved to.18 um process and with on-die L2 cache) makes an appearance (Q2?), if not all the way until the EV7 (EV68 with integrated on-chip *8-channel* RDRAM controller) is released (Q4?).
This is why all this banal talk about the P4 being a crappy chip or (in the wake of this article) a "crippled" chip is ignorant drivel. SPEC_CPU is an exceptionally well designed, balanced, and comprehensive benchmark stressing a CPU to its limits in all sorts of ways. Why then the P4's disappointing performance on all those other benchmarks? They are all on "legacy" code--code compiled with the P6 core in mind. Because the P4 represents the first chip with a new core architecture (the horribly misnamed "NetBurst" core) from Intel in 5 years, it has a lot of pretty radical design features which don't take well to code compiled for the P6 core. While this means the P4 is pretty a useless (or at least very overpriced) solution to running today's code--and indeed, most code released for at least the next year or so--it has nothing to do with how good a *design* it has, which is ostensibly the point of this discussion. Indeed, the PPro--the first P6 core chip--posted very "disappointing" benchmarks on legacy code when *it* was released 5 years ago; many observers wrote it and the P6 core off as underperforming overdesigned wackiness from Intel. It was arguably the most successful and innovative CPU core ever. Not so incidentally, this was strongly forshadowed by its brief theft of the SPECint95 performance crown from the top Alpha of the time...
Now to dispense with the most repeated "points" we've seen thus far.
1) "This just goes to show that x86 is a dead ISA with no headroom to grow." Not the most unexpected statement to be found on/., but let's just say that the other 99.99% of the world that enjoys backwards compatability will make sure x86 stays alive for quite a long time to come thank you. On a technical (rather than marketing level), though, this is ridiculous bunk as well, as the fact that the P4 beats every released 64-bit 10-times-as-expensive RISC chip with 30-times-as-expensive platforms, on SPEC_CPU--a benchmark specifically designed to stress exactly those high-performance situations demanded of professional level workstation and server machines--demonstrates quite nicely.
Yes, x86 is a bad ISA, and yes it presents a problem to be overcome by chip engineers. But it has been overcome and will continue to be overcome--today by taking on a decoding stage to x86 processors that turns x86 instructions to RISC-like instructions for internal operations (taken out of the critical path by the P4's trace cache), and tomorrow perhaps by dynamic recompilation software ala Transmeta, IBM's DAISY, and HP's Dynamo, techniques which are still in their infancy and *may* end up providing better-than-compiled performance even without the benefit of converting to a more optimal ISA. The other negative of the x86 ISA, namely the paucity of compiler-visable registers, is indeed a problem, although one partially aleviated by rename registers and partially by evolutionary extensions to the x86 ISA, such as SSE2, which will eventually replace much of the god-awful stack-based x87 FPU ISA.
The real question is, does the performance hit generated by sticking with x86 exceed the performance gain generated by having a much larger target market, and thus more money to spend keeping up with the latest process technology and thus getting faster clocked CPUs? The answer thus far has been a rather resounding "no"--that is, the economies of scale granted by staying x86 have meant processors which are outright faster and cost much much less.
After all, there is no doubt that were the Alpha not around 18 months behind Intel in terms of process technology, the EV67 would be much faster than the P4. On the other hand, the EV67 gets to take advantage of resources that Intel could never dream of in a mainstream chip--like a 300+mm^2 die size, extra wide memory buses, and 4-8MB L2 caches--because of the tremendous added cost. And even with all that plus what is widely acknowledged as the best CPU design team on the planet, the Alpha only manages to keep up with the P4.
Moreover, the rest of the 64-bit world--despite the same advantages as the Alpha (well, except their design team)--can barely keep up with the P3, and that's a 5 year old design. They may be available in multi-chip boxes scaling to kingdom come, but on the level of individual chips, the best that Sun, IBM, HP or MIPS has to offer is pretty lame, despite all the advantages of a RISC ISA. Of course, the same old folks will be claiming that x86 is an inherent dead end when the P4 (or whatever Intel is calling its current NetBurst core by then) scales past 4 GHz two years from now, well ahead of anyone in the RISC world. And we'll hear it again in 4 or 5 years, when Intel releases another all-new x86 core.
2. "The P4 should have left in all those features this article talks about." Uhhuh. Sure. Um...now, who would know more about this? Would that be you, having read some article on the Internet? Or would that be Intel's engineers who maybe understand the P4 core and the issues involed with these features a bit better than you, and who had the benefit of cycle-perfect simulations on dozens if not hundreds of possible P4 variants running every concievable type of code??
If there's a feature which doesn't make it into a finished CPU, it's because of one of two reasons:
1) The designers didn't think of it;
2) The designers couldn't figure a way to implement it and make it work with the rest of their design in such a way that it raised performance/cost.
Needless to say, "The designers thought of it, implemented it (which they did in this case), and it was a good feature (i.e. improved performance/cost on a majority of code), but then made a boneheaded decision not to use it," is *not* on the list.
IMO, the features listed here are all better off gone from the current P4. The only really intriguing one--another FPU--was *not* left off for die size considerations (i.e. cost): FPU's are not very big. It was left off for performance issues. You see, while "more is better" sounds like a nice philosophy, adding an extra FPU would have meant extra decoding and routing logic in the FP section of the chip. Considering Intel actually went to the considerable trouble of implementing this feature and then decided against it, it is very likely that this extra logic was in the P4's critical path. Thus while including the extra FPU would have meant extra performance/clock, it would have meant lower overall clock speeds. Obviously Intel felt the tradeoff worked better without the extra FPU than with it.
If you "disagree" with their decision, please refer to the cycle-perfect simulators which Intel has and you don't, and the P4/1500's SPECfp2000 score which is a mere, oh, 68% better than the fastest P3. Also you might note that the P4 is scaling quite well with clock speed on SPECfp, that it will spend most of its life at speeds well above 2 GHz, and that it will likely sell most (at least for the next 2 years) in combination with a memory subsystem providing *less* bandwidth than the current dual-RDRAM i850 chipset--all of which point to this being a very smart decision on Intel's part. (The reasoning is this: if the P4's FPU can already keep up quite nicely with a larger memory bandwidth, then why increase FPU power/clock when most P4's will have higher clocks and lower bandwidth to keep them fed?)
As for the features I'd like to see added to the P4 when it moves to its.13 um Northwood variant next summer: one of them was on the list, i.e. a 16kb L1 data cache. The reason it was left off was clearly not die size but clock scalability--Intel decided having a 2-cycle latency L1 was more important than having a bigger one, and I totally agree. After the move to.13, though, perhaps a 16kb 2-cycle L1 will no longer limit clock scalability, just as the PPro's 8kb L1's were expanded to 16kb each with the PII. The other, a 512kb L2, would take up much too much die space at.18um to be feasible; it too, may make it to Northwood, depending on Intel's target die size. Needless to say, whatever they decide, it will be a much better informed decision than I or anyone here could presume to make.
There is a new version of Opera, and this time it's free--although with a banner ad.
Being an IE guy myself I'm quite impressed with Opera 5. I haven't found any Java or JS that it hasn't been able to handle, and damn is it fast. (I though IE 5 was fast. But no.) It's not quite as aesthetic as IE, but it's very feature filled and while it probably won't replace IE as my primary browser it's definitely in contention.
I heard a rumour, which is probably all it is but it sounds technically possible, which was that Sony were going to put the psx onto a chip/small board and include them, built in, with some/most/all of their standard domestic audio cd players. Dunno how many audio cd players sony sell, but i imagine its 100`s of millions per year, so even if people were effectively getting a psx for free, it`d mean a big instant user base for the ps2 (with is backwards compatibility).
Think this through a bit. The chip which forms the brains of the PS1 is indeed quite cheap these days; so cheap, in fact, that the PS2 uses it just to manage its I/O. (The reason they do this is for the pleasant side benefit of full backwards compatability in hardware--the PS1 CPU is already there!) But a chip does not a console make.
Think about all the stuff a console has which an audio CD player doesn't. Two controller ports. A digital-to-analog video out converter. Video out ports. These are the sorts of things that don't go down in cost with Moore's Law, and they represent very real costs.
These sorts of things are the reason why consoles rarely go below $89 list price, no matter how old they are--not because Sony or Nintendo would rather make a $10 profit than lower the price $10 and break even (and make up the $10 in licensing fees with each and every game sale), but because there are enough relatively-fixed-price components involved that it never gets dirt cheap to manufacture a system. The amount the manufacturer is willing to lose per system goes down as the system gets older, because the number of games sold per system gets lower as more casual gamers buy the system and as the system has a diminishing viable lifetime ahead.
Hmm...now that I think about it, I believe the rumor you're referring to is actually this story at the Register, which discusses how Acer (not Sony) is testing including a CPU in some of *their* future *DVD* players (DVD players are a much better fit than CD players, because they already have all the expensive video out capabilities--and because, unlike CD players, they always go near a TV). The chip has been demonstrated running Bleem!--or some other such PS1 emulation software--and this may turn out to be one of its primary marketing points, especially since Sony has already lost two emulation lawsuits against Bleem! and Connectix.
In any case, it's not at all intended to get people to buy a PS2, which is a good thing because your argument makes no sense. The only reasons why backwards compatability gets people to buy a new system are 1) it allows people who never owned a PS1 (or PS1 capable device) to buy PS1 games; 2) it allows people to keep playing their PS1 games without needing to have their old PS1 still hooked up to the TV and taking up space and cables and stuff. 1) clearly doesn't apply here as these people would all already have a PS1-playing device--that Acer DVD player they just bought 5 minutes ago. Nor does 2), because there's no reason for them to stick their perfectly good brand-new Acer DVD player in the closet just because they don't need it to play PS1 games anymore. So, nope.
In their settlement with the evil copyright-powers-that-be, the ILS agreed to implement this funny Java-based scheme such that when you look up the lyrics to a song, they pop up--one verse at a time (picture karaoke)--in this funny applet window from which you cannot copy-and-paste them. Lord knows why this better protects songwriters' ability to put their kids through college, but apparently it does.
In any case, the idea behind it is, I suppose, that one can read the information once but not copy it for later use--something which I was guessing might be a potential aim of this ridiculous system of Yahoo!'s. I'm not sure why such a capability is of much use in either case, but it's certainly easy to defeat in both--through a comprimised JVM, taking screenshots, taking photographs of the screen, writing the text down, etc. My coining of the terms "copy-and-paste attack" and "screenshot attack" was just my sarcastic way of pointing out how useless an access control on text to be displayed on an insecure computer is.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. Patents make it possible for corporations to create life-saving technology and saves lives. Pharmaceutical companies raise capital from the marketplace for research and development and regulatory testing, not because shareholders are happy to volunteer funds for R&D, but because they hope the company will make a profit. If the company could not make a profit, the R&D and development wouldn't get done, and the products would be brought to market. If the company didn't have patents, competitors would simply free-ride on the R&D and compete with them using their own work. No profits, no product, no life saving drugs.
Life saving drugs, such as tetracycline and a host of antibiotics, leukemia fighting drugs, and lifestyle preserving drugs such as Prozac and many others are the product of, not deterred by, the patent system.
Of course you're right, so far as life-saving drugs are really developed solely by privately-financed R&D. The reality, however, is very different.
Indeed, a recent study found that, for the top 5 best-selling drugs currently on the market, fully 80% of the money which funded their development was put up not by the pharmacutical companies which own the patents, not by private investors, but by the federal government in the form of research grants. More generally (and for which I can find a link to back me up), between 70 and 90 percent of important drugs are developed with significant government help, and a whopping 38% of all health-care related R&D is financed by the federal government. (Government grants are heavily skewed towards basic research; thus we can expect that this displaces drug discovery research much more than eg. engineering type R&D for new technology in hospitals.) All the government gets back for their tremendous investment (other than a healthier society, which, of course, is their main goal), is a $50 patent fee.
Obviously pharmacuticals still spend a tremendous amount of capital and incur large risks to take the final steps to bring a drug to market and test its safety and efficacy. (The government grants go more to the basic research end of things.) Indeed, you are right in suggesting that the current "free-market" drug development system would completely collapse if pharmacutical companies did not have the monopoly profits of patents to cover their capital investments. Nor could the system survive without government grants at their current, tremendous levels; while the pharmacuticals are certainly not struggling to keep afloat at the moment, their profit rewards are generally commensurate to the risks they incur from the share of development they actually do finance.
What you should realize, however, is that the current system is not a free-market at all. It is so heavily subsidized as to transcend mere "corporate welfare"; instead it is really a huge socialist enterprise with a quasi-capitalist front-end tacked on. The solution, as impossible as it is obvious, is to remove the privatized delivery system and let the entire drug development pipeline be financed, and controlled, by government and academia. In other words, let science for the public good be run by scientists and the public, and not by businessmen.
Thing is, as every developed country in the world except the US has realized, our ethical conception of medicine inherently clashes with capitalist motives. There are only two ways for an entity to profit from offering health care:
1) by killing poor people.
2) by being a broad enough entity that it can reap the benefits of providing health care without charging for it.
#1 is obvious if you think about it for a while: if you charge the rate which the market will bear for live-saving treatments, then obviously some people will be unable to pay. If you think this does not go on in America today then you are very badly deluded.
#2 refers to the fact that having a healthy population is essential for economic growth and a stable society. However, hospitals and pharmacutical companies are not broad enough to benefit from the fact that healthy people can provide a net economic positive while sick or dead people cannot. Our current system has a cobbled-together kludge to fix this: most people's health costs are borne by their employer, who *does* reap (some of) the economic and social benefit of them being healthy.
The problem with this is that it only works for people who are currently employed in a job good enough to pay benefits. The 50 million uninsured in America are mainly young people--children, students, and those with entry level jobs. The economic and societal benefit they will provide later in their lives is often contingent on their remaining healthy today, but the current system can't recognize this.
This is without even getting into the problems of the very poor: of the one-in-five children under 5 years old who lives beneath the povery line; of the mentally ill homeless who could provide a positive benefit to society if they could only recieve treatment. (Less than 50% of those below the poverty line recieve Medicaid, and it rarely provides more than emergency room care; a full 36% are completely uninsured, and thus obviously unable to pay for any medical care whatsoever. Uninsured In America, pg. 22, very large pdf.)
The current system is completely broken, but it will take more than just patent reform to fix it
It's astonishing how an article could spend that long talking about Intel suing VIA over a chipset which introduces a new DRAM type to an Intel CPU and not mention Intel's PC133 fiasco of two years ago.
For those who don't know, the only reason PC133 exists (as a PC standard DRAM type) is because of VIA. Flashback to early 1999: Intel had the market for chipsets (for Intel processors) almost completely to itself, riding on the enormously successful 440BX chipset, which used PC100. However, P3 speeds were ramping up while memory speeds had been stuck at PC100 for a couple years. The obvious thing to do was to update the BX to support a 133MHz FSB. After all, it was a dead-simple engineering trick (every BX mobo at the time could easily overclock to 133; many were stable up to 150), and the memory makers were already making SDRAM which could safely run at 133 but clocking at 100 because that was the highest official speed.
But instead--and unbeknownst to most of the techie world at that point--Intel had a contract with Rambus which offered them many goodies like the ability to make RDRAM controllers royalty-free (others paid up to 5%) and lots and lots of stock options. However, the contract was contingent on, among other things, Intel agreeing to do everything reasonably in their power to prevent "next-generation DRAM" types other than RDRAM from being paired with Intel processors for the consumer desktop. "Next-generation" was defined as > 1GB/s bandwidth.
PC133 has a bandwidth of 1.066 GB/s.
Moreover, Intel *thought* it was putting the finishing touches on the ill-fated RDRAM-only (at that point) i820 (Camino) chipset, with which they were going to introduce new and badly needed 133MHz FSB P3s. Instead, engineering delays involving the difficulties of getting RDRAM working (eventually they had to settle for only 2 RIMM slots instead of the original 3, a per-channel limitation which remains to this day), and the difficulties of getting a memory translator hub which allowed PC100 to be used on the i820 (a last minute addition when they realized people weren't exactly going to pay $500 for 128MB of RAM) working, pushed the release date back 6 months or so, until November.
Just to reiterate: Intel put off releasing 133MHz FSB P3s, and then when they did release them said that consumers could only use them with a buggy chipset, limited to 2 RAM slots, which offered one's choice of an extra-slow translated implementation of PC100 or of RDRAM which cost 10 times as much per bit as SDRAM. Meanwhile, tests with BX chipsets overclocked to 133 MHz FSB showed that this solution was significantly *faster* than the i820 + RDRAM chipset!
Into this world stepped VIA offering the Apollo133 chipset, the first P3 chipset explicitly designed to use PC133. Nevermind that it was probably *less* stable than an Intel BX overclocked to 133 MHZ FSB. Nevermind that it underperformed the BX@133 as well. And nevermind that then, as now, Intel sued VIA with all their might, among other things requesting injunctions forbidding all VIA products from leaving Taiwan. (The pretext then was that VIA was abusing Intel IP by using the P3 bus with a DRAM type Intel had not sanctioned.)
VIA quickly gained > 50% of the P3 chipset market.
Indeed, the only reason you see ALi, SiS, and soon-to-be nvidia and others getting into the 3rd-party chipset market is because VIA paved the way a couple years ago.
Intel tried every FUD tactic in the book, from suing in multiple jurisdictions to claiming that PC133 SDRAM was not stable (the DRAM itself! And this from the company which had spent the past year patching bugs with RDRAM!). Intel got their ass handed to them in court, and by in the summer of 2000 introduced the i815, essentially the BX@133 product they should have introduced in late 1998.
Intel doesn't like getting humiliated, though, and they've had a seemingly personal vandetta against VIA ever since. In retaliation, they denied VIA the chance to license the P4 bus, as ALi and SiS and (interesting) ATi have done. (This is the basis for the current *threatened* suits. However, it's interesting to note that the P4X266 is currently shipping and no suits have yet been filed, meaning this is probably just a bluff on Intel's part.)
Intel reps were even seen at the recent Comdex show threatening mobo makers who had VIA promotional balloons flying at their booths. All the balloons were taken by the Intel people.
However, Intel's case this time is as flimsy as last. Disregarding potential antitrust concerns, the fact remains that NatSemi, whom VIA recently purchased *did* have a license for the P4 bus, and thus so does VIA.
So does this mean VIA will have similar success as last time? Well, I think they'll easily prevail in court if it comes to that, although it appears that Intel may be playing this one all FUD and no bite: warning mobo manufacturers not to use the P4X266 rather than actually filing any lawsuits. While of course not stated in the article, the well-documented fact is that Intel is telling the mobo makers that if they use the VIA chipset they will have their allocation of Intel's SDRAM (and soon-to-be DDR) P4 chipset, the i845, curtailed or dropped altogether. The result will likely be that only the third-tier mobo makers, who probably wouldn't have gotten a Brookdale allotment anyways, will be using the P4X266.
But another reason VIA won't snap up the P4 chipset market is much more hopeful. SiS' DDR Athlon chipset, the 735, has earned rave reviews, significantly beating every other chipset around. Their upcoming 635 chipset for the P4 will offer all that and more, including support for 333MHz DDR (PC 2700) which is coming down the pipeline now.
And they *do* have a P4 license.
This seems to be the general opensource response to what I posted (and posts like mine). But how many VB viruses have you actually recieved? VBscript viruses just don't spread, Outlook warns you that you are about to run something potentially very damaging and asks whether you're sure you want to continue (very scarey stuff for not-very-computer-literate people) before running the script, and virus checkers can spot them all a mile off without even needing a footprint. I don't think I've ever been sent a vbs based virus but I've been sent a lot of exe's and screen savers.
.vbs attachment. So were Bubble Boy and Anna Kournekova. (The first required no user intervention as it exploited a serious Outlook security flaw; the second enjoyed a wide spread due to some simple social engineering.)
.txt, .exe or ".jpg.vbs".
.vbs, .doc with macros, .exe, .bat, .com, .scr, etc. Popping up a warning every time a user opens any attachment just makes the user learn to click through the warning without thinking.
Um...the I Love You worm, the most destructive (in estimated $ costs) computer infection in history, was a
That's first of all. And second of all, Outlook's idea of attachment security is to pop up the same "this is an attachment are you sure you want to open it?" dialog box for every attachment, whether
A simple list of things MS could do to improve email attachment security:
1) Run any executable attachments opened directly from Outlook in a sandbox; require user confirmation for any changes to existing files, for creating any new files, or for sending out any email.
2) Turn macro protection in Word on by default, and run Word macros in a similar sandbox.
3) Disable any scripting elements in HTML email; no java, javascript, ActiveX or VB script, just plain HTML.
4) Only pop up a warning when opening an attachment which might actually be dangerous, i.e.
That's 4 changes which would be neither too difficult to impliment nor too annoying or confusing to users. Yes, buggy permissions and buffer overflows happen in most all software, and requiring MS to audit code ala OpenBSD would be impossible. But they're certainly not doing anywhere near what they should to make viruses more difficult to spread.
That said, I have to wonder if I can be part of a community whose most popular searches include "lolita", "preteen", "rape", and "incest".
Among many other possible responses to this comment I'm going to take the angle of statistical bias. Thing is, while searches for "abnormal" porn acts do make it into the top 20 list, they still add up to a very small percentage of all Gnutella searches, generally < 1%. The thing to remember here is that these search statistics are skewed because if you're looking for porn you tend to use one of a few generic search terms.
Just as a first approximation, I'd guess that 80% of porn searches go out under only about 20 search topics: a few very generic ones, like "porn" and "xxx"; about 10 or so specific fetishes or sex acts including the ones you're so concerned about, and another 5 or so for the very small number of porn stars who might be searched for by name. On the other hand, non-porn searches tend to be very specific: searches for a particular music band, or more likely for a particular song or movie. These searches are much more common on Gnutella, but because they are spread across thousands of different search topics they don't make it into the top 20 list.
Thing is, when you're looking for music or a movie, you know exactly what you want; when you're looking for porn, you're usually just looking for anything to get off. If people used search terms like "music" or "sound" or "movie", or even "guitar" or "rock and roll" or "drama", then those would move all the porn stuff out of the top 20. But because porn occupies a more generic role than most other entertainment, this is reflected in both how people search for it and how they name their porn files.
Did anyone else do a doubletake on this? Or did I just miss a motherboard chipset in the 8xx series that happened to have the same number as Intel's old 32-bit mil-spec CPU line?
You may have missed it because it's not out yet--the i860 (codename "Colusa") is the chipset for the upcoming 1-2 proc P4 Xeon (codename "Foster"; actually, in an effort to be hugely confusing, the official name is now simply "Xeon") systems which should be released in a couple months or so. FYI, the 4+ proc chipset will be designated the i870.
And yes, it is a bit odd that Intel is recycling this rather inauspicious brand number. I suppose not many in the industry have a long memory.
(For more info on the first i860, Paul DeMone had an interesting article at RWT comparing its ambitious but flawed design to Itanium and its potential pitfalls.)
1) Saturn failed because it was hard to program games quickly (which is required in the console market). Otherwise it truly was much better in performance than other systems at the time (N64 & PS1).
Exactly. Which is why I said that the PS2's shot at a monopoly is far from assured--because it is very similar to Saturn in these regards. It has tremendous theoretical power, but it's proving very difficult for developers to come anywhere close to that in their games. The main reason is that, just like the Saturn, programming for the PS2 requires carefully spreading computation across no less than 3 processing units (the CPU plus 2 independent, powerful, and slightly different-from-each-other vector units), plus the GPU. Moreover, just like the Saturn (and unlike the PS1), there is a huge lack of high-level programming tools to help developers do this. Thus almost all the first-round PS2 games lack anti-aliasing, something which should be just as simple as calling a vendor-supplied library. The problem is the library doesn't exist yet. (Or didn't; I believe Sony has provided a standard anti-aliasing solution by now.)
Remember, when the 32-bit wars were starting it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that Saturn would run away with it. Nintendo was late to the party, and Sony? Offering some modification of their cast-off reject bid for a SNES CD-ROM? (Check into the history of the PS if you don't know the story.) They don't know anything about the games market!! (Of course, similar things were said about Nintendo before the NES, and Sega before the Genesis. The fact is, true domination in the console has never lasted for more than one generation.)
How did Sony succeed? 1) Developer-friendly licensing terms. 2) Easy-to-use high level APIs. 3) Focus on games above all else. These are exactly the steps MS is taking with XBox (I mean, DX8 is so so much higher level than anything ever seen before in the console space it's astonishing), and I think they have a very good shot.
2) Sony currently owns the set top console market. Completely. Utterly. Yes it does. more than 90% of the people I talk to believe Sony is their god (aparently) & cannot make a mistake... The Dreamcast has been out longer than the PS2 & looks just as good or better (depending on game), but people will look at the dreamcast & say "this looks liek crap!" then turn to the PS2 & say "Wow! this just looks so cool! I need one of these because Sony makes it!". Which leads me to the conclusion most people are brain dead slugs feed thoughts by marketers...
The same was once true of Atari and Nintendo. While Sega never truly owned the console market, it was widely assumed following the 16-bit generation that they were the ascendent company while Nintendo was slow-moving, mired in the past, and headed for decline. Nintendo was--and still is--a couple years late to each new generation, despite sewing up the 8-bit generation by virtue of arriving when no one else was there. Nintendo was--and still is--stuck marketing to 8-14 year old boys at a time when Genesis was showing that video games could now appeal to a much wider demographic. Sega was hip and edgy; Nintendo was dead in the water. Sony was an absolute joke. The results were the opposite of what anyone predicted. Sony's current position is even more precarious because despite the wealth of good games for PS1, absolutely *none* are 1st party. This means there is no guarantee whatsoever that they will be only available for PS2, or even that they will be available for PS2 at all. The Oddworld series has already become XBox only. Every single major developer I can think of (except Square) is already committed to XBox. Let's put it this way: MGS2 and Crash Bandicoot are already announced for XBox. Nintendo and Sega both lost their market domination *despite* the attraction of strong 1st party series; Sony doesn't even have that.
In the large historical view, consoles are gradually heading *away* from monopoly.
u zzword of the future. It'll be like a stereo component! Honest!).
While there were a decent number of consoles in the 70's back when the games "industry" was only a small step away from the concurrent hobbyist PC market (or at least it seems that way to me, who wasn't around at the time much less following the video game market), the late 70's/early 80's were essentially monopolized by Atari, especially the 2600. ColecoVision and Intellivision were around as well (I think they were competing against a later Atari, perhaps the 7600?), but Atari had a large, long run as the controlling power in console games. That they had a monopoly is unquestionable.
Especially because when they tanked, the entire industry tanked with them. Indeed, the console market collapse of...1983 or so?...had many writing off the console market for good. And it would have stayed that way too, were it not for giant monopoly #2, the NES.
The NES came out in late 1985 at a time when no one in their right mind was thinking of bringing out a video game console. Its only competition, the SMS, didn't even go on sale until 1988 I believe. In any case, it wasn't a competition at all; the NES sold something like 80 million units in the US, more than any other console ever. Pretty much every household with children had one. The 16-bit generation (SNES and Genesis) barely sold half that *combined*. Meanwhile, the Master system sold like 6 or 8 million of the things, mainly to people who already had Nintendos. That was a monopoly, plain and simple. Nothing like that is likely to occur in the video game market again, for the simple reason that the situation that led to it (i.e. only one company actually believed the console market was big business) will likely never occur again.
Ever since then, there has always been at least 2 large competitors for each generation of hardware. The Genesis and SNES were roughly evenly matched in sales. The PS1 eventually won a decisive victory over the N64 and Saturn, but by the time that was brutally clear, Dreamcast was already around; in other words, while the PS1 was a spectacular success, it never held the sort of monopoly position that the NES did for something like 5 years (until Genesis).
The PS2 has beaten the DC (mainly on the basis of hype, which in an industry where cross-platform compatibility is unimaginable, is just as powerful and dangerous as FUD in the computer industry), but will still suffer competition from it until XBox and GameCube arrive. While I don't think Indreema has a chance in hell, the open source idea is powerful enough that an open console might actually make it a few years from now. (As has been pointed out, the fact that consoles are a loss leader which the parent company tries to make up by licensing games presents a large problem to this business model, though...)
At this point, it is certain that the PS2 will face serious competition for sales from at least 2 other consoles at every step of its life. (Now: DC, N64 and PS1; 2002 and later: XBox and GameCube.) It is by *no* means clear that PS2 will be the eventual winner, either; in my view, MS has taken all the tactics that made the PS1 such a surprise success (good developer relations, easy to program, just concentrate on games) while Sony has strangely decided to try to emulate the tremendous failures of the Sega Saturn (launch with low volumes and bad games, put theoretical performance above ease of programming, overhype) and crap like the CDi and 3D0 (be the digital-convergance-set-top-information-highway-b
Perhaps your Gnutella client doesn't filter properly. If you're using Win32, check out bearshare (which, besides filtering out this trojan properly, generally kicks ass all-around).
My apologies. The pitfalls of reading at +2...
You could have quoted the original poster in your reply, of course. Eh, whatever.
Then how would it count how many were bought? Sure, ot could measure signal strength, but I presume that this would be affected by position too. Hard to distinguish two cartons far away from the sensor from a single one closeby.
If you read the article, you'd notice that, unlike bar codes, the plan with this thing is to assign a unique ID to every single transmitter; if you bought two packages of Oreos, they'd each have their own unique ID. Indeed, the scheme being talked about uses a 96-bit number--an 8-bit header, 24 bits for the manufacturer ID (that's enough for 16.7 million companies); 24 bits for the product ID (with up to 16.7 million products/manufacturer); and a 40-bit serial number (enough for over 1 trillion different packages of Oreos). That's plenty sufficient to track every single thing manufactured in the world for quite some time.
Well, assuming the numbers they do (i.e. 1500 byte packets), it takes only 11 Mbps * 18000 seconds = 198 Gb = 24.75 GB of storage space to get a collision in a worst case scenario. But more important, there's no reason to save everything as you go along.
Instead, you just do something like the following. Assume it takes 10 IV collisions to be reasonably assured of computing plaintexts by statistical analysis (this may be generous, considering the redundancies in most of the packets--TCP headers, easily guessed content, etc.). Then you can just build a table for the IV space one portion at a time: say one-eighth at a time. In other words, first you just store all the packets with IVs in the range 0-1x2^22 until you can statistically analyse them and build an IV->cipherstream table for all those IVs. Assuming 10 messages for each IV, this takes about 31 GB. When you're done with that, throw out all those old packets and start on IV range 1-2x2^22, and so on. As they pointed out in their summary, it only takes 15 GB to store the entire IV->cipherstream table. Thus we have total expected storage requirements of ~45 GB, and a total running time of 400 hours to decrypt all future traffic on the network. Moreover, we can start decrypting all the packets with IVs we've already "solved" as soon as we solve them.
This is entirely feasible, but it isn't even the half of it. As they suggest, a much better solution to this problem is to use an active, chosen plaintext attack. That is, the attacker can send a known packet from the outside to a machine on the wireless network; the network will encrypt the packet and send it to that machine, along with its IV in plaintext. The attacker merely needs to intercept that packet (a problem, of course, is knowing which packet it is, although this is solvable with unusual choice of destination machine, etc.) and suddenly he has solved that IV, with no statistical analysis necessary. With this method, we only need 15 GB of storage space (for the table) and enough time to send messages which will be encrypting with every different IV. The latter requirement is going to take a real long time, of course, but as a way to attack, say, 95% of the IVs this is very efficient.
I would say that this is likely to be well beyond the capabilities of most script kiddies, and is probably pretty easy for 802.11b equipment vendors to address.
Do you understand the term "script kiddie" at all?? The point of a script kiddie is that he doesn't have to know how to write modified drivers, only how to download them and install them. Hence "script"; they're running someone else's program. And in any case, modifying drivers and even modifying hardware ought not to be beyond the skills or resources of lots of corporate espionage outfits.
Your hope that equipment manufacturers address this problem is probably misgiven; doing so would seem to require them to replace software drivers with hardcoded ones, or at least insert another layer of encryption both inside the hardware and in their drivrs. I submit that both possibilities are very unlikely, and that in any case anyone with deep pockets can build their own 2.4 GHz reciever without too much trouble.
Yeah, like there have never been any problems discovered in crypto products from the self-appointed experts. Uh huh.
Of course there have been, though rarely such softball errors as these. The recently reported vulnerability with the extra decryption keys in PGP, while quite significant, was an implementation error, not an error in the spec itself. And the vulnerabilities found in crypto protocols by the real experts tend to be rather esoteric and impractical ones, and then mainly on entirely new ciphers, not on a spec for piecing together old ones.
In any case, the point is that they are (ideally) found *before* any products using the protocol are put into place. It's called "peer review", perhaps you've heard of it.
That's a pretty inflammatory statement, and apparently not far from being an outright lie. It was irresponsible (or possibly venal) of Ian Goldberg to make such a statement, and doubly so for WSJ's Jared Sandberg. As I said before, there is a matter for serious concern here, but the scaremongering from these people is not helping.
I don't know the history here, so I can't comment. However, I do know that if this protocol was indeed opened up to peer review as you seem to suggest (without any evidence), then something went horribly wrong; for some reason, either everyone missed these rather obvious flaws, or, more likely, no one showed up to review it. The point is, offering something for "peer review" and then assuming it's secure after no one shows up to review it is obviously not good practice. Frankly, I can't believe that any serious peer review wouldn't flag the problems inherent in using RC4 with a linear checksum algorithm, or with layering an encryption scheme on such a tiny (24 bit!) IV space.
The right thing to do would have been to alert the equipment manufacturers, discreetly, and let them decide how they want to alert their customers.
This is so beyond ludicrous I'm not even going to touch it. The rest of your post seems to indicate that you're not a troll, but this makes one wonder.
I'm not saying Apple shouldn't offer the possiblity of higher resolution on their 15.2" display, but have you ever used a laptop display at 1280x960 or 1400x1050? Unless you have a magnifying glass handy, all I can say is 'why'?
e o/ati_radeon_32mb/ )
I run my 17" monitor at 1280x1024; the 15.2" screen on the Powerbook is actually bigger than my screen (because desktop monitor sizes count the edges and LCD sizes don't), and likely crisper too. Moreover, one tends to sit closer to a laptop screen than a desktop monitor. But the Powerbook doesn't offer the option of more than 768 lines of vertical resolution. I'm quite sure I would miss it, personally; of course this doesn't speak for everyone but I'd guess it does speak for many.
No option on the iMac, but then it's a stripper model. iMac users will probably be doing some light gaming, but I don't see 3d rendering in their daily activities.
The point is that the iMac is Apple's "consumer" computer, yet it doesn't offer the option of respectible gaming--a "consumer" use of the PC if ever I heard one. Of course, neither do many PCs in the under $1000 range (under $1500 is pushing it, though); still, the point is that if you want to buy a Mac for a decent price this is the only way you can go. In other words, no gaming for you!
Frankly, in order to do professional 3d rendering one could really use a professional 3d card, like nvidia's Quadro at the very least, if not a Diamond FireGL. Needless to say these will be a long time coming on the Mac, although that's not such a big deal since this is almost as much of a niche market as professional Photoshop users.
I'm pretty sure the Radeon (last I checked it performed respectably in tests (both 2d and 3d) and was considered a "real" competitive 3d video card -- a quote from the Sharky Extreme review: "Despite no longer boasting the fastest 3D on the market, the RADEON should not be scoffed at. Its superior video acceleration, crisp 2D quality, and an aggressively competitive price further add to a sweet slice of 3D gaming pie. " -- see here the aforementioned review: http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/reviews/vid
Yeah, but that review is 4 months old. That's 2/3 of a product generation in the 3d card world. Frankly, both the Radeon and the MX are good cards; I'd be more than happy to have either one (TNT1 at the moment). Neither is a top-of-the-line product, however; at the moment that description only applies to the really-quite-mainstream GeForce2 GTS, and its more rarified bretheren, the GF2 GTS Pro and Ultra. When nvidia's and ATi's new generation of top-of-the-line cards comes out (in just a couple months now) how long will it be before they're on the Mac? (I dunno, but it's certainly not yet clear that it will be anywhere near immediate.) Moreover, while of course their OpenGL support will be outstanding (awesome Quake support is what really propelled nvidia to the top), these cards are both really designed around the very impressive new features of DX8, which of course won't be available on the Mac.
[The Radeon] is offered as an option in cubes.
Good point; I'd forgotten that. Still, the iMac is Apple's self proclaimed "consumer" line, and I for one think that the fact that it cannot support anything but the lightest 3d gaming is a serious strike against such an appelation. (As is the lack of internal CD-RW, but apparently that will be fixed soon...)
Don't get me wrong -- i agree with a lot of what you say. It's not hard to see that most Macs are overpriced for what they're offering under the hood. You could make the same argument for most "luxury items".
"Even if there were a good way to compare performance across the two platforms" pretty much kills the idea of straight performance comparisons. There are plenty more reasons but i'm sure we don't have to elaborate on that.
You're entirely right, of course. The thing is, this thread started with someone postulating that Macs were more or less on parity with PCs in terms of potential performance--which simply isn't true. Nor is it true--and this was my original point--that the only reason for this is that the Mac uses slower clocked CPUs; the Mac platform has generally been behind the PC in all sorts of performance-related categories, most notably in terms of cache hierarchy and memory bandwidth, but also in adopting mainstream PC standards as they improve.
Thus--from a performance standpoint--the Mac market is overpriced and underpowered compared to the PC market. As you point out, this discussion completely ignores the "luxuriousness" or even the simple usability experience of using a Mac vs. using a PC. That's entirely true and I completely admit that; but on the topic that the thread was discussing, I'm right.
It's not really fair to compare street pricing of a PC notebook to retail pricing of a yet unreleased product. Try it again when the PB has been out for a month or two (though by my guess it will take a while for the price to drop).
Both prices were taken as configured in the respective OEMs online store. Indeed, I would bet that the street pricing for the Z505 might indeed be lower than the price at sony.com (although since it is apparently on back order this might not be the case with this particular model), but that wasn't what I was comparing. And if recent history is a guide, Apple tends to adjust their prices far far less often than PC OEMs; I'd be willing to bet that this price comparison will have changed more in the Z505's favor in, say, 3 months time.
Also, as another poster pointed out, LCDs are very expensive, so the 12.1" vs 15.2" difference is not a small one in manufacturing costs, nor is usability (at least in my experience using notebook screens).
Very true, although apparently Apple has significantly lowered the cost on this huge LCD by keeping the resolution at a rather unimpressive 1152x768. (Dell's 14.1" screens are 1400x1050 by way of comparison.) The fact that the Sony's puny 12.1" screen has the same vertical resolution as Apple's brings the matter of LCD quality a lot closer than "15.2 vs. 12.1" would seem to indicate.
Still, you're right in that there is no PC laptop which is as thin and as large-screened as the Powerbook, and that therefore Apple is much to be commended on their new laptop. So yes, the Powerbook is very impressive and quite compelling. Still, the poster I was responding to claimed that you couldn't find a PC notebook that would even come close to the Powerbook in price/performance, and I think I did a decent job of not only refuting that, but refuting it using the actual facts on the very laptop which Apple used to "prove" the amazing value of the Powerbook!
As for the mobile Duron, unfortunately it's based on the current (Spitfire) Duron core, which uses a rather large amount of power; thus it is unlikely to find its way into the sub-notebook category very soon, since it would tend to require a large and therefore heavy battery. When the next version of the Duron core (Morgan) *finally* comes out (looking like at least 3 months, unfortunately), it will offer a much more compelling notebook processor, due to an extensive relayout to reduce power consumption and also support PowerNow!, which is AMD's very advanced version of dynamic voltage/speed regulation. (In particular, it's a whole lot better than Intel's SpeedStep.) So yes, AMD is finally making a move on the medium-to-high end notebook market, but it will be a little while yet before they really have the goods.
BTW, the current video card in all but the base G4s is a 32mb GeForce2 w/ an optional Radeon.
I know, I talked about that in my first post in this thread. Unfortunately, you have to spend $2200 before you get a Mac which has a real video card in the default configuration. "All but the base G4" probably includes 80% of the desktop Macs sold (number pulled from my ass; but remember, a real video card isn't even an *option* on any iMac model, nor on the Cube). To offer a $1700 computer (without monitor) with a Rage Pro is simply a travesty in this day and age.
The most expensive Dell I could find that offered a Rage Pro was $1290 without monitor. Of course the configurations aren't identical; for one thing, as usual, the Dell wouldn't come without Office, a $460 option on the Mac. Adjusting to make them as equally equipped as possible (eg. adding ethernet and Firewire to the Dell, cheap speakers to the Mac, upgrading the Dell from Office Small Business to Office Professional even though Mac Office is somewhere inbetween, 3 year support for both, etc.) I get $2566 for the Mac and $1885 for the Dell. And this is comparing a 1 GHz P3 against a 466 MHz G4. The idea that any PC OEM would sell a $1500 computer which doesn't even have the option of a real video card is unthinkable.
Moreover, you still can't get a top-of-the-line 3d card for the Mac; only the budget GeForce2MX has been released in a Mac model, not the high-performance GeForce2 GTS. Yes, the MX is a great card for all but the most hardcore gamers, but there's still a rather large consumer market which the Mac simply can't compete in, at least until nvidia releases Mac versions of all their cards, which they most likely will do eventually.
What? First to *use* USB (not just put it on the board).
That's an argument about their choice of peripherals, not about their support of i/o standards. It's marketing, not engineering. (Not that marketing is not important, just a different discussion.)
First to use Firewire. Using 32bit Nubus when PCs where using ISA slots.
Still using Nubus years after the PC had moved to PCI. Indeed, I'd count Nubus along with SCSI--in both cases Apple went with a clearly superior solution early on, but ended up being held back as the mainstream PC standards, driven by the much larger marketplace, managed to improve much faster and yet be much cheaper than what Apple used.
The "laughably inferior video card" may be so for FPS, but actually performs quite well for graphic artists. Makes me wonder why they specced it.
"The Macintosh does not have any decent 3d support, so therefore we can pretend that 3d support is not important." Any $9 graphics card is just fine for 2d, although I seriously doubt that 16 MB and a 230 MHz RAMDAC are really good enough for any serious graphic artists. The simple fact is that the Mac does not do 3d well, and that that is simply pitiful in this day and age. And no, 3d is not just used for games; you may be shocked, but there are actually graphics artists that work in three dimensions too! (They use PCs and Unix workstations.)
BTW, the only decent 802.11 system out there that can hold a candle to the AirPort system is the Lucent Orinoco system, which is slightly more expensive and a lot harder to set up.
I don't know how hard it is to set up, but IIRC for what you admit is only a slightly higher price it has a much greater wireless range.
How many makers right now are putting out machines with DDR RAM? Last I checked, not many. Sure they're ramping up, but Apple would be stupid (and possibly insane) to be on the top of the curve for every trend. Their machines would be even more overpriced and they could end up with a Rambus/Intel fiasco on their hands if they made the wrong choice. Better to let someone like Intel make that mistake and fight the battles worth fighting (i.e the ones pretty much won already like USB, firewire)
As this thread was initially about system *performance* (as opposed to capabilities), let me tell you that DDR is MUCH more "a battle worth fighting" on this metric. But you have a very valid point--indeed, I agree with you completely. The thing is, what you're saying assumes that Apple will be designing and validating its own chipsets, incompatible with the real world, every time they want to add a feature. In such an environment, it is indeed not worth it to come out with a DDR chipset now. Moreover, while it would have been worth it to come out with a PC133 chispet a year ago and a DDR chipset in around 3 months time, the fact that Apple is the one designing and validating every new chipset is the reason these chipsets are always a year behind the times--it's a very complicated process and Apple's engineers are understandably stretched thin to try to replicate the work of dozens of companies in the PC world.
That's the problem with having a vertical monopoly; there's not enough room for differentiated product lines and innovation. In the PC world, there are 2 or 3 major chipset manufacturers competing to come out with the fastest chipsets with the most new features, and another couple players who drop in to keep competition high. There are about a dozen major motherboard manufacturers, who compete to best implement these chipsets with the most features at the lowest price. Because the PC RAM market is so large, you have all the DRAM manufacturers in the world driving chipset innovation as well. Finally, because PCs are used for general purpose tasks and because there's an independent benchmarking industry in the PC marketplace, all these people know that they won't be able to get away with a single toy SIMD benchmark as an overall measure of "performance"--thus they all feel pressure to create components which actually work fast over a wide variety of circumstances. Hence the PC market is moving into 2.1 and 3.2 GB/s FSBs while the Mac is finally hitting 1.1 GB/s. Oh, and while we're on the subject, it turns out I was wrong: you won't be able to buy a G4 with on-die L2 cache until the G4+ is released in March. Only then will the G4 finally be approaching clock-for-clock parity with x86 chips (according to SPECcpu, i.e. a real benchmark suite).
Now, I'm not saying there aren't some important tangible benefits to Apple's vertical monopoly. I just don't think they're worth the drawback: machines which cost twice as much as the equivalent PC did when it was released 9 months ago.
One final word re: price/performance -- find a notebook that can compete in that area with the new powerbook. Good luck.
Here you finally have a point: the new powerbook is very impressive and indeed competitive with PCs in price/performance. One important reason why is that AMD has not yet had a viable notebook CPU for the mainstream and performance ends of the market, so therefore Intel has a monopoly over that segment and thus performance notebooks tend to cost as much as powerbooks. Conversely, Apple has seen itself frozen out of the market it practically invented with the first powerbooks, as the portable market becomes more and more dominated by corporate consumers. Thus you have a reversal of the situation in the desktop PC market: Intel is getting away with monopoly pricing, while Apple is heavily discounting to try to break back into a market they've nearly lost.
Still, no matter how I might try to talk bad about it, there's no doubt the new powerbooks are very competitive. On the other hand, the situation is decidedly *not* as Apple has presented it. Here's what Apple has to say on the matter:
Sony Vaio Z505...........PowerBook G4
12.1-inch display........15.2-inch wide-screen display
Magnesium alloy..........99.5% pure grade CP1 titanium
650MHz Pentium III.......400 MHz PowerPC G4
No optical drive.........Slot-loading DVD-ROM
2 hours battery life.....5 hours battery life
Not wireless ready.......AirPort antenna built-in
1.15 inches thick........1 inch thick
$2549*...................$2599*
(Taken from here.)
Now let's look at what the actual facts on that Sony Z505 really are.
First off, let's take note of the fact that contrary to Apple's blatant misrepresentation, the Z505 with a P3-650 actually costs $2250, not "$2549". But what's $300 among friends? Well, we can use some of that money to buy the Z505 a 6-hour battery, so hahaha on you. The cost is now $2450, or $150 less than the Mac. Also while the powerbook may be a miraculous 3.8 mm thinner than the Z505, the important measure is of course weight; the powerbook, at 5.3 pounds, is 41% heavier than the 3.75 pound Z505--which makes sense, as they really serve different purposes. Indeed, the low weight (and its huge popularity) is the reason the Z505 is so underpowered for its price (for a PC that is), but we'll disregard that for now.
Unfortunately, there's no way to buy the Vaio as unloaded as those powerbooks: in particular, no way to buy it without at least Word 2000. Nor is there any way to purchase Word 2001 with our brand new powerbook at the Apple Store. We could buy it from MS for $400 but that doesn't seem quite fair. Instead we'll upgrade both machines to Office.
Where does that put us now?
Sony Vaio Z505...........PowerBook G4
12.1-inch display........15.2-inch wide-screen display
Magnesium alloy..........99.5% pure grade CP1 titanium
650MHz Pentium III.......400 MHz PowerPC G4
No optical drive.........Slot-loading DVD-ROM
6 hours battery life.....5 hours battery life
Not wireless ready.......AirPort antenna built-in
1.15 inches thick........1 inch thick
12 GB HD.................10 GB HD
3.75 pounds*.............5.3 pounds
$2650....................$3060
*Longer battery adds weight from this original measurement, but I couldn't find out how much.
What's missing? Well, the DVD player, for one thing. An external one adds $400 to the Z505's cost, making it just a hair cheaper than the powerbook. The 650 MHz P3 is in reality a good deal faster than the 400 MHz G4, but by using the right programs an argument can be made that the G4 comes close. "AirPort antenna built-in" is a red-herring, since you still need to spend $100 for the AirPort card. I looked it up, and the first place I checked had an Orinoco card for $160. Again, I'm almost positive this card has much better range than AirPort. Eh, let's look it up, shall we? Well, AirPort only goes a measely up to 150 feet. Orinoco goes...let's see...up to 1750 feet. Hmm. Guess the "built-in antenna" isn't working too well, is it??
So what do we end up with? The new powerbook is almost exactly the same price as a similarly configured Z505, except that the Z505 has a tad more HD space, has an extra hour on the battery, and, sorry to say, is the faster machine. Alternatively, you can get the Z505 without a DVD player and save $400.
Meanwhile, the powerbook has a luscious 15.2" screen, while the Z505 is stuck with a 12.1" which, while quite small, at least manages to almost hit the resolution of the powerbook (1024x768 vs. 1152x768). The benefit of giving up the nice screen and the internal DVD is up to 1.55 pounds of heft and of course that extra hour.
In other words, it's arguably a tossup. Of course it's a bad comparison because one is a sub-notebook and the other a full-sizer, but Apple chose it, not me. Still, it's worth noting that the Z505 is perhaps the most overpriced laptop around, so it's not such a surprise that Apple chose it when making a comparison.
Well phew! Aren't we enlightened? Did I pass? (It wasn't that tough, I let Apple "find a notebook that can compete in [price/performance] with the new powerbook" for me!)
Now it's my turn: find a desktop Mac that can compete in (price/1.5)/performance with a similarly equipped desktop PC--and I mean in a wide variety of benchmarks, not just Photoshop and RC5. (Indeed, it would be tough to do that even with Photoshop, assuming one actually used a complete Photoshop benchmark like PSbench.)
Good luck. Unfortunately, there are very few good cross-platform benchmarks to consult; the most well-respected cross-platform benchmark in the world, SPECcpu, shows the G4 in a rather unflattering light--indeed, because of this Motorola hasn't even released official scores for the G4, making it the only current general-purpose CPU family I can think of for which SPEC scores are not available. Oh wait, I lied: there's no SPEC scores for Cyrix chips either. However, there are SPEC scores for the P3, P4, the AMD K7, for Sun's UltraSparc II and III, for IBM's POWER3 chip which is sorta related to the G3 kinda sorta, for the Alpha EV67, and the MIPS R12000 and the HP PA-RISC 8600-just in the past year. The point is, every real chip releases SPEC scores, usually early and often. The best we have for the brand-spanking-new G4+ is an *estimate* for the outdated (in fact retired) SPEC95 suite, and man it's not too pretty. Of course, Motorola can always complain that they don't have a very good Fortran compiler, which is key to a good SPECfp score (their SPECint score sucks too, though); still, this is no one's fault but their own, unless of course they never meant the G4 or G4+ to be a high-performance general-purpose chip (oh that's right, they didn't; they built it for the embedded market).
Other cross-platform benchmarks are invariably much less trustworthy, because they are almost always binary only and are never of the breadth or depth of the SPEC suite. Picking Photoshop, for example, is just plain dumb, as Photoshop is simply better optimized on the Mac than on the PC (alternatively, we could benchmark Word and see which runs it faster). There's a nice collection of published cross-platform Mac vs. x86 results here; it's worth perusing, even though most of these programs make *very* poor overall benchmarks, taken as a whole they at least provide some semblence of a big picture. Needless to say, I think your task will be pretty difficult, even if there were a good way to compare performance across the two platforms.
BTW, on what do you base your assumption that current apple hardware is "second rate" other than processor speed?
Processor performance and memory subsystem performance. Before last week, buying an Apple meant PC100 and off-die half-speed L2 cache. The move to PC133 might be ok, if it didn't signal that Macs won't have DDR for at least a year and, judging by their past behavior, probably longer.
While we're at it, Apple has constantly been behind the times in I/O standards (ever since they abandoned SCSI that is) as well: late to PCI, late to AGP, late to AGP4x, late to ATA/33, late to ATA/66 and currently late to ATA/100. These things actually don't matter nearly as much as the first two, but as they form the only part of the hardware performance equation that's missing I thought it's worth pointing out that Apple's constantly behind the times here too.
Finally, beyond all the stuff mentioned above--which is stuff you can't/couldn't get on a Mac--there's all the hardware insufficiencies of the Mac Apple will try to sell you. Just 6 months ago if you bought a Mac it meant no removable media, and a barely usable mouse and keyboard. It still means no floppy and a very cool but not very useful mouse. Until a week ago it meant no CD-R.
Also until this week it meant shelling out mucho $$ for a computer with a laughably inferior video card--which is arguably the most important component in a consumer PC today. Even now the best Mac you can get comes with a cut-rate budget video card--albeit a decent one--and Apple would have you pay as much as $2200 for a computer to get even that! Of course, it's probably fine that the Mac remains 6 months to a year behind in 3D capabilities, as the top-of-the-line games (with the sole exception of Quake3) come out on Mac 6 months to a year late anyways.
So let's review: the Mac platform is generally about a year behind PC platform mainstream in terms of processor performance (yes that's performance, not clock speed), memory subsystem, and video performance. Indeed this is not much of a new trend (although processor performance has fallen further and further behind the last couple years), as the Mac has been approximately a year behind in adopting most mainstream PC standards.
The only cases in which Apple can be accused of having "innovative hardware" are in fact cases of innovative marketing: just like "Airport" (i.e. IEEE 802.11) cards, which appeared for PC notebooks at exactly the same time they were launched and trumpeted as "only on the Mac", the "all new only on the Mac Superdrives" (i.e. DVD-R drives) will be available for PC exactly the same day they are available for Mac. Yes, Apple may do a good service in picking neat new hardware standards to showcase and bring to the masses, but Mac hardware doesn't offer anything a PC can't match for less money, and never has.
(A possible exception is if you use the G4 or G4+ for the applications it was actually designed and intended for--i.e. embedded signal processing. And yes, the majority of Motorola's G4 revenue comes from embedded systems, not Apple, which is *why* they designed an embedded processor not a PC CPU. What, don't tell me you actually thought AltiVec was so useful for mainstream PC apps that it's worth almost doubling the size of the CPU die and cutting peak frequency by 30%!?)
Not to mention that if you actually read the Vorbis site, the guy's been doing it since way before MP3 became popular.
Well, yeah; there are open-source projects implementing just about everything. The point is, they don't get anywhere until they get a critical mass of developers. And, no matter how cool the idea, they rarely get a critical mass of developers until the idea has already become popular out in the closed-source world and is suddenly now something everybody "needs".
I agree with a lot of your post; the DC is definitely in much better position than the article gave it credit for, especially compared to the PS2--which, while it has some damned powerful components, is IMO the most over-hyped, worst engineered, poorly planned console in...well, I dunno, but I think it's gonna be a large disappointment for Sony and has next to no chance of PS1-like success much less the monopoly many have predicted.
However, it is a matter of record that Sega is doing very poorly financially right now, and that they are and have been entertaining takeover proposals. An invigorated US Dreamcast market will help buy them time and leverage, but they've already said they don't see themselves coming out with another hardware platform after the technical fumble of Saturn and marketing failure of Dreamcast. I think Sega would rather be a "second-party" developer ala Rare than a straight third-party software house, and thus I can see them agreeing to a Nintendo or MS buyout that will keep their franchise titles well managed and well promoted.
From Nintendo's point of view I think this makes a ton of sense. They are suddenly outgunned in the coming generation, by two consoles which suddenly have the full weight of their corporate giants behind them. The thing is, while Nintendo has the under-12 market pretty sown up, console gaming appears finally poised to become a much more mainstream phenomenon. (Indeed, it's been going in this direction since the Genesis, and the PS1 helped a great deal.) Nintendo is holding the same size piece as always, but the pie is suddenly much larger.
And the thing is, the console business is all based on economies of scale; unless GameCube has a large enough audience to match PS2 and XBox, the good developers won't make games for it...and unless the good developers are making games for it, its audience will be too small. One of the best ways to solve this catch-22 is to buy a few developers so that you are guaranteed a wide range of enticing titles. Nintendo has a few, but they will only attract a narrow demographic; Nintendo's sports games in particular are very weak. Furthermore, by buying a Sega, Nintendo has a good chance of hanging on to today's Mario and Zelda fans when they become the NFL2K1 and Jet Grind Radio etc. fans of tomorrow. They'll stay with Nintendo if Nintendo can supply them with games that keep up with them as they grow up. Otherwise, they'll go to Sony and MS.
The FPU on the P4 is already quite large, much larger than the ALUs anyway. The original design would have indeed been very large, with twice that area.
I couldn't get a real picture of the P4 die; best I could manage is the cutesy little colored rectangles on page 6 of this Intel PDF. Point is, assuming an overall colored rectangle size of 217mm^2, the "Enhanced Floating Point/Multi Media" section comes out to under 17mm^2 by my crude measurements. And I frankly doubt that when they say that adding another FPU would "double the floating point size", they actually mean double everything in that little teal box. Even assuming I'm wrong, 16.5mm^2, while certainly bigger than the ALUs (and don't forget, this "floating point" box includes integer SIMD execution as well) is a mere 7% of total die size. While this is somewhat significant, if they really wanted it in they certainly could have made room for it. As a percentage of overall die space it's much smaller than the P3's FPU.
What I saw instead was the admission that adding the extra FPU would have added an extra stage to the pipeline (extra decoding step). It may be that the pipeline was not well balanced with this extra stage, or that it was still in the critical path even with its own pipeline stage, or just that they thought 19 (not including those outside the trace cache) was enough.
In any case, I'm not at all convinced that this decision had to do with die size at all, but rather with rampability and overall IPC. Indeed, as I said, with properly compiled code, the P4's "crippled" FPU is able to scream along, keeping up just fine with its 3.2 GB/s memory bus. Considering most P4s will have higher clock speeds and less memory bandwidth, why add extra FPU units? About all its extra 2 FPUs do for the Athlon is help it in cache-constrained toy benchmarks. In the real world, FPU work increasingly means data sets too large to fit in on-chip cache, and a single FPU becomes more than adequate to keep up.
All true, but the point is that the fact that the 3rd party Linux drivers that ATi couldn't be bothered to write are better than the Windows drivers developed by the company that actually designed the chip doesn't speak well of the Linux drivers so much as it speaks very poorly of the Windows ones. The question (as I understood it) wasn't, "how good are ATi's Linux drivers", but rather, "are ATi's bad drivers going to hurt it in its role as the only high-end competition to nvidia." While it's by no means conclusive, I'd say this piece of evidence points very strongly to a yes on the latter question.
Exactly. ATi's drivers are so bad that some 3rd party drivers can beat them! The fact of the matter is, while we'd all like good Linux drivers from everyone, what's going to determine whether there is any competition in the high-end 3D market is ATi's Windows performance and hence their Windows drivers. If their Windows drivers are so bad that some other company can make better drivers for Linux, then that doesn't bode well for competition in the 3D market.
On the other hand, it was my impression that the Radeon drivers, while not up to nvidia's standards, were actually not half bad. Now that Matrox, S3 and 3Dfx are out of the consumer 3D market, and now that nvidia is moving into ATi's traditional monopoly market of 3D chipsets for laptops, there is little doubt that ATi is going to make a stronger move towards the high-end consumer 3D space (mainly retail and DIY). Indeed, they began that move with the Radeon, a product ATi took much more seriously than their previous high-end 3D cards. Unlike the cheap-chip-on-a-motherboard space which ATi has traditionally dominated, drivers are important here, and ATi knows it. I would be shocked if bringing their drivers up to nvidia quality is not one of ATi's major goals going forward, and I bet they'll do a decent job at it too.
This has been said often enough for so many different processors that it has become trite. From experience, extra bits of compiler optimization rarely pay off in a big way. Quite often, it is impossible to tell the difference between minimal and full optimization settings. I suspect that contrived examples are being used for benchmarks, such as an image filter that takes 10 seconds to run and spends all its time inside of a 16 instruction loop. Sure, one tweak to the scheduler will make it run in 8 minutes instead, but how realistic is this? It isn't a win in the general case.
:)
That's why I was talking about SPEC_CPU, the most comprehensive and well balanced CPU benchmark suite on the planet, and not some crappy toy benchmark. Indeed, the P4 does very well on recompiled toy benchmarks as well, but I didn't mention them because they don't tell us anything useful.
FYI, SPEC_CPU is about as far from some "image filter that takes 10 seconds to run and spends all its time inside of a 16 instruction loop" as one can get. Indeed, it is a suite consisting of no less than 28 benchmarks, each designed to stress different algorithmic and data set size combinations, and each very non-trivial. It is the industry's only truly cross-platform benchmark, and it is designed and revised every few years by a committee consisting of some of the foremost experts on high-performance and scientific computing, and advised by every significant MPU vendor to assure fairness. It does not, as you imply, allow any hand-tweaking of assembly code, nor--like most benchmarks--does it come in the form of precompiled binaries which may favor one platform over another. Instead, it comes completely as source code, to be compiled by a vendor supplied compiler--which must be publicly available within a certain time frame--under very specific regulations. The "base" and "peak" categories refer to different levels of allowable customization in the compiler settings, and indeed all compiler flags used must be revealed along with the results. And rather than taking 10 seconds, a full SPEC_CPU run takes a couple hours even on a P4 or high-end Alpha; on the reference machine (i.e. a SPEC_CPU2000 score of 100) it would take something like 12 hours!
So, nice try. But trust me, the only way to beat SPEC_CPU is to built a really fast CPU. It also helps to have an amazing compiler--which Intel does with its VTune 5.0 compilers--but that allows nowhere near the potential for unfair binaries that precompiled benchmarks do. Also, being aimed at the high-performance market rather than the PC market, SPECfp2000 has been criticized by some as "unfairly" rewarding the very large memory bandwidth of the P4 compared to the P3 and SDR SDRAM Athlon. For an IMO interesting technical discussion of this issue, you might want to see this thread over at Ace's Hardware. (See if you can guess who I am.
It merely needs recompiled code to perform well.
.18 um process and with on-die L2 cache) makes an appearance (Q2?), if not all the way until the EV7 (EV68 with integrated on-chip *8-channel* RDRAM controller) is released (Q4?).
/., but let's just say that the other 99.99% of the world that enjoys backwards compatability will make sure x86 stays alive for quite a long time to come thank you. On a technical (rather than marketing level), though, this is ridiculous bunk as well, as the fact that the P4 beats every released 64-bit 10-times-as-expensive RISC chip with 30-times-as-expensive platforms, on SPEC_CPU--a benchmark specifically designed to stress exactly those high-performance situations demanded of professional level workstation and server machines--demonstrates quite nicely.
.13 um Northwood variant next summer: one of them was on the list, i.e. a 16kb L1 data cache. The reason it was left off was clearly not die size but clock scalability--Intel decided having a 2-cycle latency L1 was more important than having a bigger one, and I totally agree. After the move to .13, though, perhaps a 16kb 2-cycle L1 will no longer limit clock scalability, just as the PPro's 8kb L1's were expanded to 16kb each with the PII. The other, a 512kb L2, would take up much too much die space at .18um to be feasible; it too, may make it to Northwood, depending on Intel's target die size. Needless to say, whatever they decide, it will be a much better informed decision than I or anyone here could presume to make.
On what am I basing this apparently heretical statement? On SPEC_CPU2000, the most demanding, well balanced, most respected cross-platform CPU benchmark in the world. As you can see if you peruse these lists, the P4/1500 has the highest scores of any shipped CPU in the world, both in SPECint (base and peak) and in SPECfp (base only).
Before any of you reply and think you've caught a mistake, the Alpha EV67/833 is *not* publicly available, and won't be until January, at which point it will take back leadership in SPECfp_base and SPECint_peak. Of course, the P4/1700 will probably take back the lead when it's released in March or so. Indeed, the P4 and Alpha will likely trade the top SPEC spot back and forth at least until the EV68 (EV67 moved to
This is why all this banal talk about the P4 being a crappy chip or (in the wake of this article) a "crippled" chip is ignorant drivel. SPEC_CPU is an exceptionally well designed, balanced, and comprehensive benchmark stressing a CPU to its limits in all sorts of ways. Why then the P4's disappointing performance on all those other benchmarks? They are all on "legacy" code--code compiled with the P6 core in mind. Because the P4 represents the first chip with a new core architecture (the horribly misnamed "NetBurst" core) from Intel in 5 years, it has a lot of pretty radical design features which don't take well to code compiled for the P6 core. While this means the P4 is pretty a useless (or at least very overpriced) solution to running today's code--and indeed, most code released for at least the next year or so--it has nothing to do with how good a *design* it has, which is ostensibly the point of this discussion. Indeed, the PPro--the first P6 core chip--posted very "disappointing" benchmarks on legacy code when *it* was released 5 years ago; many observers wrote it and the P6 core off as underperforming overdesigned wackiness from Intel. It was arguably the most successful and innovative CPU core ever. Not so incidentally, this was strongly forshadowed by its brief theft of the SPECint95 performance crown from the top Alpha of the time...
Now to dispense with the most repeated "points" we've seen thus far.
1) "This just goes to show that x86 is a dead ISA with no headroom to grow." Not the most unexpected statement to be found on
Yes, x86 is a bad ISA, and yes it presents a problem to be overcome by chip engineers. But it has been overcome and will continue to be overcome--today by taking on a decoding stage to x86 processors that turns x86 instructions to RISC-like instructions for internal operations (taken out of the critical path by the P4's trace cache), and tomorrow perhaps by dynamic recompilation software ala Transmeta, IBM's DAISY, and HP's Dynamo, techniques which are still in their infancy and *may* end up providing better-than-compiled performance even without the benefit of converting to a more optimal ISA. The other negative of the x86 ISA, namely the paucity of compiler-visable registers, is indeed a problem, although one partially aleviated by rename registers and partially by evolutionary extensions to the x86 ISA, such as SSE2, which will eventually replace much of the god-awful stack-based x87 FPU ISA.
The real question is, does the performance hit generated by sticking with x86 exceed the performance gain generated by having a much larger target market, and thus more money to spend keeping up with the latest process technology and thus getting faster clocked CPUs? The answer thus far has been a rather resounding "no"--that is, the economies of scale granted by staying x86 have meant processors which are outright faster and cost much much less.
After all, there is no doubt that were the Alpha not around 18 months behind Intel in terms of process technology, the EV67 would be much faster than the P4. On the other hand, the EV67 gets to take advantage of resources that Intel could never dream of in a mainstream chip--like a 300+mm^2 die size, extra wide memory buses, and 4-8MB L2 caches--because of the tremendous added cost. And even with all that plus what is widely acknowledged as the best CPU design team on the planet, the Alpha only manages to keep up with the P4.
Moreover, the rest of the 64-bit world--despite the same advantages as the Alpha (well, except their design team)--can barely keep up with the P3, and that's a 5 year old design. They may be available in multi-chip boxes scaling to kingdom come, but on the level of individual chips, the best that Sun, IBM, HP or MIPS has to offer is pretty lame, despite all the advantages of a RISC ISA. Of course, the same old folks will be claiming that x86 is an inherent dead end when the P4 (or whatever Intel is calling its current NetBurst core by then) scales past 4 GHz two years from now, well ahead of anyone in the RISC world. And we'll hear it again in 4 or 5 years, when Intel releases another all-new x86 core.
2. "The P4 should have left in all those features this article talks about." Uhhuh. Sure. Um...now, who would know more about this? Would that be you, having read some article on the Internet? Or would that be Intel's engineers who maybe understand the P4 core and the issues involed with these features a bit better than you, and who had the benefit of cycle-perfect simulations on dozens if not hundreds of possible P4 variants running every concievable type of code??
If there's a feature which doesn't make it into a finished CPU, it's because of one of two reasons:
1) The designers didn't think of it;
2) The designers couldn't figure a way to implement it and make it work with the rest of their design in such a way that it raised performance/cost.
Needless to say, "The designers thought of it, implemented it (which they did in this case), and it was a good feature (i.e. improved performance/cost on a majority of code), but then made a boneheaded decision not to use it," is *not* on the list.
IMO, the features listed here are all better off gone from the current P4. The only really intriguing one--another FPU--was *not* left off for die size considerations (i.e. cost): FPU's are not very big. It was left off for performance issues. You see, while "more is better" sounds like a nice philosophy, adding an extra FPU would have meant extra decoding and routing logic in the FP section of the chip. Considering Intel actually went to the considerable trouble of implementing this feature and then decided against it, it is very likely that this extra logic was in the P4's critical path. Thus while including the extra FPU would have meant extra performance/clock, it would have meant lower overall clock speeds. Obviously Intel felt the tradeoff worked better without the extra FPU than with it.
If you "disagree" with their decision, please refer to the cycle-perfect simulators which Intel has and you don't, and the P4/1500's SPECfp2000 score which is a mere, oh, 68% better than the fastest P3. Also you might note that the P4 is scaling quite well with clock speed on SPECfp, that it will spend most of its life at speeds well above 2 GHz, and that it will likely sell most (at least for the next 2 years) in combination with a memory subsystem providing *less* bandwidth than the current dual-RDRAM i850 chipset--all of which point to this being a very smart decision on Intel's part. (The reasoning is this: if the P4's FPU can already keep up quite nicely with a larger memory bandwidth, then why increase FPU power/clock when most P4's will have higher clocks and lower bandwidth to keep them fed?)
As for the features I'd like to see added to the P4 when it moves to its
There is a new version of Opera, and this time it's free--although with a banner ad.
Being an IE guy myself I'm quite impressed with Opera 5. I haven't found any Java or JS that it hasn't been able to handle, and damn is it fast. (I though IE 5 was fast. But no.) It's not quite as aesthetic as IE, but it's very feature filled and while it probably won't replace IE as my primary browser it's definitely in contention.
I heard a rumour, which is probably all it is but it sounds technically possible, which was that Sony were going to put the psx onto a chip/small board and include them, built in, with some/most/all of their standard domestic audio cd players. Dunno how many audio cd players sony sell, but i imagine its 100`s of millions per year, so even if people were effectively getting a psx for free, it`d mean a big instant user base for the ps2 (with is backwards compatibility).
Think this through a bit. The chip which forms the brains of the PS1 is indeed quite cheap these days; so cheap, in fact, that the PS2 uses it just to manage its I/O. (The reason they do this is for the pleasant side benefit of full backwards compatability in hardware--the PS1 CPU is already there!) But a chip does not a console make.
Think about all the stuff a console has which an audio CD player doesn't. Two controller ports. A digital-to-analog video out converter. Video out ports. These are the sorts of things that don't go down in cost with Moore's Law, and they represent very real costs.
These sorts of things are the reason why consoles rarely go below $89 list price, no matter how old they are--not because Sony or Nintendo would rather make a $10 profit than lower the price $10 and break even (and make up the $10 in licensing fees with each and every game sale), but because there are enough relatively-fixed-price components involved that it never gets dirt cheap to manufacture a system. The amount the manufacturer is willing to lose per system goes down as the system gets older, because the number of games sold per system gets lower as more casual gamers buy the system and as the system has a diminishing viable lifetime ahead.
Hmm...now that I think about it, I believe the rumor you're referring to is actually this story at the Register, which discusses how Acer (not Sony) is testing including a CPU in some of *their* future *DVD* players (DVD players are a much better fit than CD players, because they already have all the expensive video out capabilities--and because, unlike CD players, they always go near a TV). The chip has been demonstrated running Bleem!--or some other such PS1 emulation software--and this may turn out to be one of its primary marketing points, especially since Sony has already lost two emulation lawsuits against Bleem! and Connectix.
In any case, it's not at all intended to get people to buy a PS2, which is a good thing because your argument makes no sense. The only reasons why backwards compatability gets people to buy a new system are 1) it allows people who never owned a PS1 (or PS1 capable device) to buy PS1 games; 2) it allows people to keep playing their PS1 games without needing to have their old PS1 still hooked up to the TV and taking up space and cables and stuff. 1) clearly doesn't apply here as these people would all already have a PS1-playing device--that Acer DVD player they just bought 5 minutes ago. Nor does 2), because there's no reason for them to stick their perfectly good brand-new Acer DVD player in the closet just because they don't need it to play PS1 games anymore. So, nope.
In their settlement with the evil copyright-powers-that-be, the ILS agreed to implement this funny Java-based scheme such that when you look up the lyrics to a song, they pop up--one verse at a time (picture karaoke)--in this funny applet window from which you cannot copy-and-paste them. Lord knows why this better protects songwriters' ability to put their kids through college, but apparently it does.
In any case, the idea behind it is, I suppose, that one can read the information once but not copy it for later use--something which I was guessing might be a potential aim of this ridiculous system of Yahoo!'s. I'm not sure why such a capability is of much use in either case, but it's certainly easy to defeat in both--through a comprimised JVM, taking screenshots, taking photographs of the screen, writing the text down, etc. My coining of the terms "copy-and-paste attack" and "screenshot attack" was just my sarcastic way of pointing out how useless an access control on text to be displayed on an insecure computer is.