I agree, the RIAA doesn't know if your downloading of a song is fair dealing (fair use) or not. After reading your post I went up onto Justice Canada's website and checkout out the copyright act. I had a hard time finding specifics about the legalities of backing up CD media music, however I do believe it is also possible to back up music, since it is legal to backup software.
Assuming that, downloading a song to replace one of yours would be fine if you considered downloading was the same as making "a single reproduction of the copy". I'm sure any court would find them to be the same. Of course, you'd have to delete the single backup as soon as you were no longer the owner of the original copy.
There are many fair reasons to download copyrighted material though: criticism/review, research, private study, teaching, and reporting.
I think you could even consider "review" or "private study" to allow the downloading of games and songs on the basis of deciding if you wish to buy them or not! Maybe a stretch...
Keep in mind that's Canadian law - probably the same, but who knows.
I agree with you, but you're probably missing something...
I've had a 1200Mhz Athlon for 2 years, and it is fast enough to run everything I need too. But I play a fair amount of computer games, and while I can handle everything so far (with only an 8500LE) by the end of this year the next-gen first person shooters are going to be out. If I move to any faster video card my CPU is going to bottleneck my frame rate.
So if Apple can put out a computer with a cpu at around 1.6ghz/w Radeon 9700 I think it would handle games like Half-life 2 much better. The only problem then is actually get Half-life 2 to be ported to the Mac...
What's so wrong with that?
Personally, I may meet somebody on a forum or IRC, but after a couple days I can forget who's who easily. A human face is easier for most people to remember, and then people might even have an easier time associating his name with his face with his article.
On that line of thinking, if you really to take credit for your work, put a picture of yourself with it.
This is the argument fallacy of association: because one stupid person uses some benchmark results to make bad conclusions, the whole product is useless.
I hope that wasn't what you meant.
As for 3dMark: many many people still use it for benchmarking, with good reason to. I'm sure the author of that post spends lots of time with the overclocking community. Benchmarks are very important to them.
BTW 3dMark 03 isn't the only benchmark people use, but it IS the general gaming bench.
Personally, who gives a crap about a benchmark? I'd much rather see stats of how well cards hold up in specific games than in a damn benchmark. On that line of thinking, I'd also rather see nVidia putting time and energry into making games, not benchmarks, run better on their cards.
How do you test if a game really performs well, when compared to other products? If you were just playing the games with different hardware and comparing FPS, that might not be accurate because there are still many variables, eg. you looked a couple pixels to the right while testing the ATI card and thus caused it to render some portion of the level (maybe a large portion in some instances, depending on the level).
To keep these variables to the minimum, hardware and drivers, you have to benchmark. How do people compare Q3 performance then? They run benchmarks.
Synthetic benchmarks have many uses too. A game might not be an accurate performance indicator if it still uses DirectX 8. Or even if it uses DX9 it might not use some features. A synthetic benchmark is a good way to test general performance.
I understand where you're coming from about them (minus you're ignorance about the word benchmark), but if a video card performs well on a synthetic benchmark like 3dMark, then what are the odds that it will run most other games better than the other card?
When you say you want nVidia to spend more time optimising games, well even that is a little silly. Performance isn't free. If they produce drivers that are all around better and correct something that was wrong in the past, then they should do it. But what they did in 3dMark 03 was cheat: in almost all cases, the image quality of the "optimised" frames was worse.
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I agree, the RIAA doesn't know if your downloading of a song is fair dealing (fair use) or not. After reading your post I went up onto Justice Canada's website and checkout out the copyright act. I had a hard time finding specifics about the legalities of backing up CD media music, however I do believe it is also possible to back up music, since it is legal to backup software.
Assuming that, downloading a song to replace one of yours would be fine if you considered downloading was the same as making "a single reproduction of the copy". I'm sure any court would find them to be the same. Of course, you'd have to delete the single backup as soon as you were no longer the owner of the original copy.
There are many fair reasons to download copyrighted material though: criticism/review, research, private study, teaching, and reporting.
I think you could even consider "review" or "private study" to allow the downloading of games and songs on the basis of deciding if you wish to buy them or not! Maybe a stretch...
Keep in mind that's Canadian law - probably the same, but who knows.
http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/c-42/38008.html
I agree with you, but you're probably missing something...
/w Radeon 9700 I think it would handle games like Half-life 2 much better. The only problem then is actually get Half-life 2 to be ported to the Mac...
I've had a 1200Mhz Athlon for 2 years, and it is fast enough to run everything I need too. But I play a fair amount of computer games, and while I can handle everything so far (with only an 8500LE) by the end of this year the next-gen first person shooters are going to be out. If I move to any faster video card my CPU is going to bottleneck my frame rate.
So if Apple can put out a computer with a cpu at around 1.6ghz
I can't like Macs without my games! (Halflife2!)
What's so wrong with that?
Personally, I may meet somebody on a forum or IRC, but after a couple days I can forget who's who easily. A human face is easier for most people to remember, and then people might even have an easier time associating his name with his face with his article.
On that line of thinking, if you really to take credit for your work, put a picture of yourself with it.
This is the argument fallacy of association: because one stupid person uses some benchmark results to make bad conclusions, the whole product is useless.
I hope that wasn't what you meant.
As for 3dMark: many many people still use it for benchmarking, with good reason to. I'm sure the author of that post spends lots of time with the overclocking community. Benchmarks are very important to them.
BTW 3dMark 03 isn't the only benchmark people use, but it IS the general gaming bench.
To keep these variables to the minimum, hardware and drivers, you have to benchmark. How do people compare Q3 performance then? They run benchmarks.
Synthetic benchmarks have many uses too. A game might not be an accurate performance indicator if it still uses DirectX 8. Or even if it uses DX9 it might not use some features. A synthetic benchmark is a good way to test general performance.
I understand where you're coming from about them (minus you're ignorance about the word benchmark), but if a video card performs well on a synthetic benchmark like 3dMark, then what are the odds that it will run most other games better than the other card?
When you say you want nVidia to spend more time optimising games, well even that is a little silly. Performance isn't free. If they produce drivers that are all around better and correct something that was wrong in the past, then they should do it. But what they did in 3dMark 03 was cheat: in almost all cases, the image quality of the "optimised" frames was worse.